rationalskepticism.org

don't get me started wrote:1. Complex Systems and Applied Linguistics – Dianne Larsen-Freeman & Lynne Cameron
2. Around the World in 80 Words: A Journey Through the English language – Paul Anthony Jones
3. Cognitive Linguistic analysis of Visual Perception Verbs in Natural Language- With Special Reference to English Verbs ‘Look’ and See’ - Mika Kubota
4. Reporting Talk: Reported Speech in Interaction - Elizabeth Holt & Rebecca Clift (Eds.)
5. Making Sense: The Glamorous Story of English Grammar – David Crystal
6.Writing Systems - Geoffrey Sampson
7. 世界の中で、愛をさけぶ。片山恭一
8. Writing Systems of the World: Alphabets, Syllabaries, Pictograms – Akira Nakanishi
9. Flashman at the Charge - George MacDonald Fraser
10. On Bullshit - Harry G. Frankfurt
11. Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages - Gaston Dorren
12. Uneasy Rider - Mike Carter
13. Talk on the Wild Side: Why language Can't be Tamed - Lane Greene
14. Military Blunders - Saul David
15. Proxima - Stephen Baxter
16. Aliens: Science Asks: Is there Anyone out There? - Jim Al-Khalili (Ed)
17. American Notes - Charles Dickens
18. Four Words for Friend: Why Using More than One Language Matters Now More Than Ever - Marek Kohn
19. Ultima - Srephen Baxter
20. Fuzzy Grammar: A Reader - Bas Aarts, David Denison, Evelein Keizer & Gergana Popova (Eds)
21. Strange Weather in Tokyo - Hiromi Kawakami (Trans Allison Markin Powell)
22. Linguistics: Why it Matters = Geoffrey Pullum
23. Stalag Luft III: The Secret Story - Arthur A. Durand
24. Bodies and their parts: An NSM approach to semantic typology - Anna Wierzbicka
25. Towards a Cognitive Semantics. Vol II Typology and process in Concept Structuring - Leonard Talmy
26. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth century - Timothy Snyder
27. Common Discourse particles in English Conversation Lawrence C. Schourop
28. The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War - Ben Shephard
29. Another Fine Mess: Across the USA in a Ford Model T - Tim Moore
30. Quotatives: New Trends and Sociolinguistic Implications - Isabelle Buchstaller
31. Count and Mass Across Languages - Diane Massam (ed.)
32. Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis. - Jared Diamond
33. Forgotten Victims: The Abandonment of Americans in Hitler's Camps - Mitchell G Bard
34. Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and their Surprising Rise to Power - Anna Merlan
35. Humans: A Brief History of How We Fucked It All Up - Tom Phillips
36. All Together Now: One Man's Walk in Search of His Father and a Lost England - Mike Carter
37. Meaning and the English Verb - Geoffrey Leech
38. Count us In: How to Make Maths Real for all of Us - Gareth Ffowc Roberts
39. The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World - J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams.
40. Don't Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth about language - David ShariatMadari
41. The Accidental Dictionary: The Remarkable Twists and Turns of English Words - Pail Anthony Jones
42. That's not English: Britishisms, Americanisms and what our English says about US - Erin Moor
43. A Short History of Drunkenness: How, Why, Where and When Humankind Has Got Merry from the Stone Age to the Present - Mark Forsyth
44. The Five Minute Linguist: Bite Sized Essays on Language and Linguistics - Caroline Myrick & Walt Wolfram (Eds).
45. The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue - Merritt Ruhlen
46. Learner English: A Teacher's Guide to Interference and Other Problems - Michael Swan & Bernard Smith (Eds.)
47. Matter - Iain M Banks
48. The Not Terribly Good Book of Heroic Failures - Stephen Pile
49. Spin - Robert Charles Wilson]

50. Rethinking Universals: How Rarities Affect Linguistic Theory - Jan Wohlgemuth and Michael Cysouw (Eds.)

287 pp.

This was an absolutely fascinating book with a wealth of data from a mind boggling variety of languages. The theme of the book is looking for features of languages that only pop up rarely across the world. The first two chapters dealt with various number/counting systems and would have been worth the price of the book alone. There is a general tendency for base five, ten or twenty in counting systems (not surprising, seeing as fingers and toes are the go to resource for counting in humans) but there are languages that use different bases and some languages have a 'one, two, many' counting system.

There is also a chapter on 'negatives without negators.' Some Dravidian languages of South India carry out negation not by having a word for 'not' or such like, but by merely omitting the tense marking that is present in affirmatives.The negative is expressed in simpler terms than the positive in these languages, which seems completely counter intuitive to speakers of languages like English, German or Japanese. In these languages the compound form 'first person singular marker, tacked onto the base form of the verb with no tense marking comes out as a negative. I see = 'I do not/ did/ will not see' because there is no marking for any tense, but 'I saw' and 'I will see' are both to be interpreted as affirmative because of the presence of tense marking. (p.170.) There is no word that indicates 'not' and negation is conveyed by absence of something...which kind of makes sense once you think about it...
Wow.


It doesn't have to be obscure languages of Amazonia that have 'rare' features. English has its own share of peculiarities. The 'th' sounds (voiced and invoiced - 'thick' and 'this') of English are pretty rare phonemes in languages of the world and the counting system has a few oddities: 'Eleven and twelve' not 'Oneteen, twoteen.)

I've got the companion volume to this, by the same editors and am looking forward to getting stuck into Sinhalese plural marking, Georgian consonant clusters and Hungarian colour terms. I'm just fascinated by the sheer variety of ways that languages go about the business of encoding meaning.

This reminds me never to take my own language for granted and never underestimate how challenging learning English is for my students.