I just discovered that my fellow translator at work is a bigger language geek than I am (he's self-studying Romanian and Turkish at the moment, two languages that vaguely fascinated me before but was too distracted at the time to do more than a half-hearted start. I did, however, learn that Dragostea din tei song, otherwise known as the nu ma nu ma iei one. Although I don't know if I should actually be proud of that). Aaanyway, I tried to hold my ground by admitting that I too have tried to self-start on a language, offering a brief summary of my 5-month-long intensive Hebrew learning, in an attempt to quell rising panic because I had just recently graduated and was alarmed (and a little surprised to be honest) to find that I still had no direction in life. Anyway, BLG (bigger language geek) has been kind enough to lend me this book. Yes, it's that picture on the left! It's by a Richard Lederer. I must admit that I have no idea who he is and what he does but I think that he is a good good man. I read the back and I practically squealed, so excited was I about it. Here, you should read the back too! Do it!Welcome to Richard Lederer's beguiling celebration of language -- of our ability to utter, write, and receive words. No purists need stop here. Mr. Lederer is no linguistic sheriff organizing posses to hunt down and string up language offenders. Instead, join him "In Praise of English," and discover why the tongue described in Shakespeare's day as "of small reatch" has become the most widely spoken language in history:
"English never rejects a word because of race, creed, or national origin. Did you know that" jukebox "comes from Gullah and" canoe "from Haitian Creole?" "Many of our greatest writers have invented words and bequeathed new expressions to our eveyday conversations. Can you imagine making up almost ten percent of our written vocabulary? Scholars now know that William Shakespeare did just that!"
He also points out the pitfalls and pratfalls of English. If a man mans a station, what does a woman do? In the "The Department of Redundancy Department," "Is English Prejudiced?" and other essays, Richard Lederer urges us not to abandon that which makes us human: the capacity to distinguish, discriminate, compare, and evaluate.
Well? Don't tell me that that doesn't just tickle your fancy?! Teehee!
6 comments:
Taking linguistics in college was as far as I got, but books like this can be a great read to at least give you a trivial fix on the nature of our language. Cool. -hw
"The Department of Redundancy Department"!!!!!! i love it!!!
Heidi and Jax -- it's really good so far, I love the way he writes...I just found something good: he's written loads of other books on language!
Was Hebrew hard? I bet if you knew Hebrew and/or Arabic, you'd have an extremely thrilling (not to mention dangerous) job by now.
Maybe you can broker peace...
Paula -- well in those 5 months, I did figure out how to read and write the letters and also managed to understand easy and short sentences...it's just time consuming, like any language really. I think it helped that I was crazy-obsessed with it at the time. :) I am actually having a harder time with German and I'm already in a class :)
Jax -- I don't know, loads of people speak both languages...and so far nothing has been settled. But it'd be really cool though if I did know both!
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