New Books in Language and Translation

Sign Language Linguistics is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and renowned researcher of sign languages Carol Padden, the Sanford I. Berman Chair in Language and Human Communication at UC San Diego. This extensive conversation covers a wide range of topics related to sign language, such as growing up with ASL, Carol’s early work with Bill Stokoe, the linguistic complexity, structure and properties of ASL and other sign languages, the development of new sign languages throughout the world, the role of gesture and embodiment. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

An Introductory Sanskrit Reader: Improving Reading Fluency (Brill, 2021) aims to help students start reading original Sanskrit literature. When we study ancient languages, there often is quite a gap between introductory, grammar-based classes and independent reading of original texts. This Reader bridges that gap by offering complete grammar and vocabulary notes for 40 entertaining, thought-provoking or simply beautiful passages from Sanskrit narrative and epic, as well as over 130 subhāṣitas (epigrams). These readings are complemented by review sections on syntax, word formation and compounding, a 900-word study vocabulary, complete transliterations and literal translations of all readings, as well as supplementary online resources. The Reader can be used for self-study and in a classroom, both to accompany introductory Sanskrit courses and to succeed them. Listners might also be interested in Sanskrit Flashcards, Sanskrit Posters, the Sanskrit Studies Podcast, and the Sanskrit Dictionary. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

At the turn of the nineteenth century, European philologists were engaged in the study of Semitic languages and Indology, breaking with the past in many ways. To understand this period, Henning Trüper argues for the importance of a broad-ranging investigation into the production of scholarly knowledge, focusing especially on Semitic Orientalism, as a way to understand the deep epistemological crisis facing the field. In Orientalism, Philology, and the Illegibility of the Modern World (Bloomsbury Academic Press 2020), he argues that nineteenth century philologists, in their efforts to establish the explication of linguistic meanings as scientific, prioritized certain semantic language games over others, in particular referential ones. Exploring the tensions which arise between “philology of the real” (Realphilologie) and “philology of words” (Wortphilologie) Trüper uncovers the patchwork of methods which philologists employed in an attempt to construct a universal science—concluding that these practices have reverberating implications for the humanities even in the twentieth century and beyond. Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Professor James Diggle, editor in chief of the Cambridge Greek Lexicon (Cambridge UP, 2021), joins us to explain the background to this extraordinary project. Setting out to provide a standard for students and professional readers of ancient Greek texts, Diggle's lexicon reflects a wider range of usage than Liddell and Scott, and provides translations that move significantly beyond the often modest, even coy, preferences of these Victorian editors. As the fruit of decades of team-work, this landmark publication will become the primary guide for readers of ancient Greek for decades to come. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

When Sarah Nannery got her first job at a small nonprofit, she thought she knew exactly what it would take to advance. But soon she realized that even with hard work and conscientiousness, she was missing key meanings and messages embedded in her colleagues' everyday requests, feedback, and praise. She had long realized her brain operated differently than others, but now she knew for sure: she had Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). With help from her neurotypical partner--now husband--Larry, mostly in frantic IM chats, Sarah rose to Director of Development at one of the world's largest nonprofits. Together they have tackled challenges in how Sarah navigates personal and professional relationships, how they navigate marriage and parenthood, all of which are differently challenging for someone with ASD. But she wonders, at times, how life would be different if she'd had to figure it all out herself. So, in What to Say Next, she offers advice, empathy, and straightforward strategies from her own tool-kit--not only for others who see the world differently, but for their families, partners and colleagues. In What to Say Next: Successful Communication in Work, Life, and Love—with Autism Spectrum Disorder (Simon and Schuster, 2021), Sarah breaks down everyday situations--the chat in the break room, the last-minute meeting, the unexpected run-in--in granular detail, explaining not only how to understand the goals of others, but also how to frame your own. Larry adds his thoughts from a neurotypical perspective, sharing what was going on in his brain and how he learned to listen and enlighten, while supporting and maintaining Sarah's voice. At a time when more and more people are being diagnosed with ASD--especially women and girls--this book tells important truths about what it takes to make it in a neurotypical world, and still be true to yourself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

At the heart of human intelligence rests a fundamental puzzle: How are we incredibly smart and stupid at the same time? No existing machine can match the power and flexibility of human perception, language, and reasoning. Yet, we routinely commit errors that reveal the failures of our thought processes. What Makes Us Smart: The Computational Logic of Human Cognition (Princeton UP, 2021) makes sense of this paradox by arguing that our cognitive errors are not haphazard. Rather, they are the inevitable consequences of a brain optimized for efficient inference and decision making within the constraints of time, energy, and memory--in other words, data and resource limitations. Framing human intelligence in terms of these constraints, Samuel Gershman shows how a deeper computational logic underpins the "stupid" errors of human cognition. Embarking on a journey across psychology, neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, and economics, Gershman presents unifying principles that govern human intelligence. First, inductive bias: any system that makes inferences based on limited data must constrain its hypotheses in some way before observing data. Second, approximation bias: any system that makes inferences and decisions with limited resources must make approximations. Applying these principles to a range of computational errors made by humans, Gershman demonstrates that intelligent systems designed to meet these constraints yield characteristically human errors. Examining how humans make intelligent and maladaptive decisions, What Makes Us Smart delves into the successes and failures of cognition. Robert Tosswill is a student the Master of Logic (MoL) program at the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation at the University of Amsterdam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Yiddish in Israel: A History (Indiana UP, 2020) challenges the commonly held view that Yiddish was suppressed or even banned by Israeli authorities for ideological reasons, offering instead a radical new interpretation of the interaction between Yiddish and Israeli Hebrew cultures. Author Rachel Rojanski tells the compelling and yet unknown story of how Yiddish, the most widely used Jewish language in the pre-Holocaust world, fared in Zionist Israel, the land of Hebrew. Following Yiddish in Israel from the proclamation of the State until today, Rojanski reveals that although Israeli leadership made promoting Hebrew a high priority, it did not have a definite policy on Yiddish. The language's varying fortune through the years was shaped by social and political developments, and the cultural atmosphere in Israel. Public perception of the language and its culture, the rise of identity politics, and political and financial interests all played a part. Using a wide range of archival sources, newspapers, and Yiddish literature, Rojanski follows the Israeli Yiddish scene through the history of the Yiddish press, Yiddish theater, early Israeli Yiddish literature, and high Yiddish culture. With compassion, she explores the tensions during Israel's early years between Yiddish writers and activists and Israel's leaders, most of whom were themselves Eastern European Jews balancing their love of Yiddish with their desire to promote Hebrew. Finally Rojanski follows Yiddish into the 21st century, telling the story of the revived interest in Yiddish among Israeli-born children of Holocaust survivors as they return to the language of their parents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Pants on Fire: On Lying in Politics is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and renowned intellectual historian Martin Jay, UC Berkeley. A thought-provoking book in dialogue format examining Martin Jay’s extensive research on lying in politics from Plato and St. Augustine to Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss which culminated in his book The Virtues of Mendacity. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

In September-October 2021, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts exploring the role that research plays in understanding and advocating for human rights in Southeast Asia. In the second episode, Dr Thushara Dibley talks with Professor Nick Enfield about how the field of linguistics intersects with human rights. They discuss some of the impacts that major hydro-electric dam projects in Laos have had on local communities, not just in changing day-to-day life, but in decreasing interethnic interactions, thereby eroding multiculturalism and multilingualism. In disrupting local indigenous exchanges, Professor Enfield argues that large development projects risk impeding the transmission of significant cultural knowledge, including traditional knowledge of biodiversity and environmental sustainability. The study of languages thus becomes a tool for understanding a broader set of human rights, from cultural to environmental rights. About Nick Enfield: Nick Enfield is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney and director of the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre, and the Sydney Centre for Language Research. He is head of a Research Excellence Initiative on The Crisis of Post-Truth Discourse. His research on language, culture, cognition and social life is based on long term field work in mainland Southeast Asia, especially Laos. His recent books include The Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Mainland Southeast Asian Languages: A Concise Typological Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Nick has published widely in linguistics, anthropology, and cognitive science venues, and has written for The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, the Wall Street Journal, and Science. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, the Royal Society of New South Wales, and the Australian Academy of the Humanities. For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Hamilton: An American Musical made its record-breaking Broadway debut in 2015—but the musical has reached far beyond typical Broadway audiences to pave a path into political discourse, pop culture, classroom curriculums, and the broader conversation about contemporary American politics. What led to this chain reaction of popularity, and how does it continue to influence these cultural and political dynamics? Jeffery and Sara Mehltretter Drury work to answer these questions using the tools of rhetorical criticism by bringing together a collection of essays in their book, Rhetoric, Politics, and Hamilton: an American Musical (Peter Lang, 2021). This volume is part of the Frontiers in Political Communication series at Peter Lang Publishers—a book series that aims to produce timely scholarship at the very cutting edge of political communication, emphasizing “how citizens, governments, and the media interact is the communication process.” Dr. Sara Mehltretter Drury is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric, and the Director of Democracy & Public Discourse at Wabash College. Dr. Jeffery Mehltretter Drury is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at Wabash College. Their combined expertise has helped to produce an edited volume that invites the reader to join the deep analysis of the musical Hamilton. The book is structured around three major themes in the realm of rhetorical criticism: public memory, rhetoric and social identity, rhetoric of democracy and social change. Each section of the book presents multiple interpretations of the musical in order to present new perspectives in understanding Hamilton’s relevance to politics and culture. Public memory centers on the narrative concepts of Hamilton and how it addresses American myths regarding the American Dream and the foundation of America. Rhetoric and Social Identity approaches race and gender within Hamilton, including the juxtaposition of portraying the nation’s white founders as people of color on stage. This section examines the musical’s accessibility to communities across America to discuss both historical and modern-day political conflicts. Rhetoric of Democracy and Social Change evaluates Hamilton’s influence in contemporary politics in how it normalizes political debate by humanizing historical political figures. By utilizing academic theories and analyzing multifaceted aspects of the musical, Rhetoric, Politics, and Hamilton: An American Musical welcomes a variety of arguments to encourage its readers to engage in the ideas, arguments, and representation of American history in a contemporary context. Shaina Boldt assisted with this podcast. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Language Ungoverned: Indonesia's Chinese Print Entrepreneurs, 1911–1949 (Cornell UP, 2021) explores a fascinating archive of Sino-Malay texts – writings produced by the Chinese community in the Malay language – in Indonesia. It demonstrates the myriad ways in which the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia resorted to the press for their education, legal and medical advice, conflict resolution, and entertainment. Deftly depicting the linguistic choices made by these print entrepreneurs, Tom G. Hoogervorst paints a rich portrait of the social life of this community as well as the articulation of their aspirations, anxieties and concerns that were expressed in creative use of multiple languages. This vernacular press brought Chinese-inflected Malay to the fore as the language of popular culture and everyday life, subverting the official Malay of the Dutch authorities. Through his readings of Sino-Malay print culture published between the 1910s and 1940s, Hoogervorst highlights the inherent value of this vernacular Malay as a language of the people. In this episode, we discuss the joys of reading for its own sake, distinctions between vernacular and standardized Malay, migrant experiences in language use and the importance of asking good questions when tackling corpuses of texts in the digital humanities. Tom G. Hoogervorst is a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV). He is a historical linguist whose interests center on the Indian Ocean World and the author of Southeast Asia in the Ancient Indian Ocean World. Faizah Zakaria is assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. You can find her website at www.faizahzak.com or reach her on Twitter @laurelinarien. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

In Learning a Foreign Language: Understanding the Fundamentals of Linguistics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020), Alex Poole, professor of English at Western Kentucky University helps potential learners to negotiate the vagaries of learning a new language. In each chapter he details issues inherent in the learning process such as motivation, strategic decisions, and error analysis. How does language learning become enjoyable and not just a chore which one has to daily practice is the question he poses to himself and the readers. He emphasizes the need to have realistic expectations and analyses age and the acquisition of a new language. The text focuses on first time learners and its amenable style makes it ideal for high school and college students as well as independent learners. Minni Sawhney is a professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Delhi. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

In Beyond Conversation: Collaboration and the Production of Writing (Utah State UP, 2021), William Duffy revives the topic and connects it to the growing interest in collaboration within digital and materialist rhetoric to demonstrate that not only do the theory, pedagogy, and practice of collaboration need more study but there is also much to be learned from the doing of collaboration. Our conversation focuses on the processes that remain elusive during a collaborative project (and thus are difficult to teach in a classroom or recognized by the academic ecosystem), the risky accounts that live alongside collaborations, and a few ideas to think about and apply the next time you collaborate. Sarah Kearns (@annotated_sci) is an acquisition editor for an open scholarship publishing platform, a freelance science writer, and loves baking bread. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Each summer, tens of thousands of American Jews attend residential camps, where they may see Hebrew signs, sing and dance to Hebrew songs, and hear a camp-specific hybrid language register called Camp Hebraized English, as in: “Let’s hear some ruach (spirit) in this chadar ochel (dining hall)!” Using historical and sociolinguistic methods, Hebrew Infusion: Language and Community at American Jewish Summer Camps, by Sarah Bunin Benor, Jonathan Krasner, and Sharon Avni (Rutgers University Press, 2020), explains how camp directors and staff came to infuse Hebrew in creative ways and how their rationales and practices have evolved from the early 20th century to today. Some Jewish leaders worry that Camp Hebraized English impedes Hebrew acquisition, while others recognize its power to strengthen campers’ bonds with Israel, Judaism, and the Jewish people. Hebrew Infusion explores these conflicting ideologies, showing how hybrid language can serve a formative role in fostering religious, diasporic communities. The insightful analysis and engaging descriptions of camp life will appeal to anyone interested in language, education, or American Jewish culture. Interviewees: Sarah Bunin Benor is Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at Hebrew Union College and courtesy Professor of Linguistics at the University of Southern California. Jonathan Krasner is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Associate Professor of Jewish Education Research at Brandeis University. Sharon Avni is Professor of Literacy and Linguistics at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and a Research Associate at the Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society at the CUNY Graduate Center. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Speaking in tongues, also known as glossolalia, has long been a subject of curiosity as well as vigorous theological debate. A worldwide phenomenon that spans multiple Christian traditions, glossolalia is both celebrated as a supernatural gift and condemned as semiotic alchemy. For some it is mystical speech that exceeds what words can do, and for others it is mere gibberish, empty of meaning. At the heart of these differences is glossolalia’s puzzling relationship to language. Glossolalia and the Problem of Language (U Chicago Press, 2021) investigates speaking in tongues in South Korea, where it is practiced widely across denominations and congregations. Nicholas Harkness shows how the popularity of glossolalia in Korea lies at the intersection of numerous, often competing social forces, interwoven religious legacies, and spiritual desires that have been amplified by Christianity’s massive institutionalization. As evangelicalism continues to spread worldwide, Glossolalia and the Problem of Language analyzes one of its most enigmatic practices while marking a major advancement in our understanding of the power of language and its limits. Amir Lehman is an MA student in linguistics at UCL. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Geographer and writer Joshua Jelly-Schapiro has a sharp appreciation for place, history, and the stories we tell to give meaning to our lives. All of these are present in his new book Names of New York: Discovering the City’s Past, Present and Future Through Its Place Names, published by Pantheon. Place names hold stories, Jelly-Schapiro argues, and Names of New York contains many narratives--from how Europeans garbled Native American place names to the story behind Dead Horse Bay to why New Yorkers give so many streets honorary names. “If landscape is history made visible,” he concludes, “the names we call its places are the words we use to forge maps of meaning in the city.” Before Names of New York, Jelly-Schapiro wrote Island People: The Caribbean and the World and created, with Rebecca Solnit, Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s and is scholar in residence at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. Robert W. Snyder is Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University. He is the author of Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York (Cornell, paperback, 2019) and co-author of All the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants and the Making of New York (Columbia, 2019). He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Speaking and Thinking is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Victor Ferreira, Professor of Psychology and Principal Investigator at the Language Production Lab at the University of California at San Diego. This extensive conversation explores Victor Ferreira’s research which is focused on language production, especially with regard to grammar, lexical structure and speaker-hearer interaction, and his interests to incorporate computational and quantitative modelling of cognitive processing. Topics under discussion include key experimental results that change our view of what is actually going on when two people talk to each other, giving us new insight into the structure of language and also how many aspects of linguistics are related to our current understanding of how the brain and mind function. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

In today’s global commerce and communication, linguistic diversity is in steady decline across the world as speakers of smaller languages adopt dominant forms. While this phenomenon, known as ‘language shift’, is usually regarded as a loss, this book adopts a different angle and addresses the following questions: What difference does using a new language make to the way speakers communicate in everyday life? Can the grammatical and lexical architectures of individual languages influence what speakers express? In other words, to what extent does adopting a new language alter speakers’ day-to-day communication practices, and in turn, perhaps, their social life and world views? To answer these questions, Difference and Repetition in Language Shift to a Creole: The Expression of Emotions (Routledge, 2019) studies the expression of emotions in two languages on each side of a shift: Kriol, an English-based creole spoken in northern Australia, and Dalabon (Gunwinyguan, non-Pama-Nyungan), an Australian Aboriginal language that is being replaced by Kriol. This volume is the first to explore the influence of the formal properties of language on the expression of emotions, as well as the first to describe the linguistic encoding of emotions in a creole language. The cross-disciplinary approach will appeal to linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists. Maïa Ponsonnet is an anthropological linguist currently based at The University of Western Australia in Perth. She holds a PhD in linguistics from the Australian National University (Canberra, 2014), with additional background in philosophy (PhD Université Paris-8, 2005). She has extensive experience working with speakers of Indigenous languages in communities of inland Arnhem Land, in the Top End of Australia. In line with her combined linguistic, philosophical, and anthropological interests, Maïa Ponsonnet’s research concerns the role of language in humans’ lives, and in particular how language may channel or modify people’s experience and management of emotions. Pi e rs Kelly is a linguistic anthropologist at the University of New England, Australia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Helen Sword, writing champion, brings us into the word gym. Or maybe kitchen. Either way, The Writer's Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose (U Chicago Press, 2016) is a short, sharp introduction to great writing based around 5 principles: --use active verbs whenever possible; --favour concrete language over vague abstractions; --avoid long strings of prepositional phrases; --employ adjectives and adverbs only when they contribute something new to the meaning of a sentence; --reduce your dependence on four pernicious “waste words”: it, this, that, and there. There are examples of the good - William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther King Jr., John McPhee, A. S. Byatt, Richard Dawkins, Alison Gopnik, and well, the bad. But you can fix the bad - really Dr Sword's point. Dr Helen Sword received her doctorate in comparative literature from Princeton University and has lived since 2001 in New Zealand, where she is a Professor of Humanities at the University of Auckland and runs a private writing consultancy, WriteSpace Limited. Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

How are peoples' ideas about languages, ways of speaking and expressive styles shaped by their social positions and values? How is difference, in language and in social life, made - and unmade? How and why are some differences persuasive as the basis for action, while other differences are ignored or erased? Written by two recognised authorities on language and culture, Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life (Cambridge UP, 2019) argues that ideological work of all kinds is fundamentally communicative, and that social positions, projects and historical moments influence, and are influenced by, people's ideas about communicative practices. Neither true nor false, ideologies are positioned and partial visions of the world, relying on comparison and perspective; they exploit differences in expressive features - linguistic and otherwise - to construct convincing stereotypes of people, spaces and activities. Using detailed ethnographic, historical and contemporary examples, this outstanding book shows readers how to analyse ideological work semiotically. Amir Lehman is an MA student in linguistics at UCL. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Do newborns think-do they know that 'three' is greater than 'two'? Do they prefer 'right' to 'wrong'? What about emotions--do newborns recognize happiness or anger? If they do, then how are our inborn thoughts and feelings encoded in our bodies? Could they persist after we die? Going all the way back to ancient Greece, human nature and the mind-body link are the topics of age-old scholarly debates. But laypeople also have strong opinions about such matters. Most people believe, for example, that newborn babies don't know the difference between right and wrong-such knowledge, they insist, can only be learned. For emotions, they presume the opposite-that our capacity to feel fear, for example, is both inborn and embodied. These beliefs are stories we tell ourselves about what we know and who we are. They reflect and influence our understanding of ourselves and others and they guide every aspect of our lives. In a twist that could have come out of a Greek tragedy, Berent proposes that our errors are our fate. These mistakes emanate from the very principles that make our minds tick: our blindness to human nature is rooted in human nature itself. An intellectual journey that draws on philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, and Berent's own cutting-edge research, The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason about Human Nature (Oxford UP, 2020) grapples with a host of provocative questions, from why we are so infatuated with our brains to what happens when we die. The end result is a startling new perspective on our humanity. You can find Dr. Berent on Twitter at @berent_iris. Joseph Fridman is a researcher, science communicator, media producer, and educational organizer. He lives in Boston with two ragdoll kittens and a climate scientist.You can follow him on Twitter @joseph_fridman, or reach him at his website, https://www.josephfridman.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner (U Mississippi Press, 2020) is a history of the career of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner (1834–1915), specifically focusing on his work from 1896 to 1915. Drawing on the copious amount of material from Turner’s speeches, editorial, and open and private letters, Dr. Andre E. Johnson tells a story of how Turner provided rhetorical leadership during a period in which America defaulted on many of the rights and privileges gained for African Americans during Reconstruction. Unlike many of his contemporaries during this period, Turner did not opt to proclaim an optimistic view of race relations. Instead, Johnson argues that Turner adopted a prophetic persona of a pessimistic prophet who not only spoke truth to power but, in so doing, also challenged and pushed African Americans to believe in themselves. Learn about the #HMT Project Andre E. Johnson, PhD is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies in the Department of Communication and Film and the Scholar in Residence at the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis. Connect on Twitter @aejohnsonphd Lee M. Pierce, PhD is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of Communication at SUNY Geneseo and host of the RhetoricLee Speaking podcast. Connect on Twitter @rhetoriclee Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

The Psychology of Bilingualism is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Ellen Bialystok, Professor of Psychology at York University. Ellen Bialystok is a world-leading expert on the effects of bilingualism on cognitive processes across our lifespan. This extensive conversation examines how Ellen discovered differences in the development of essential cognitive and language abilities for bilingual children, the use of different brain networks by monolingual and bilingual young adults performing simple conflict tasks, and the postponement of symptoms of dementia in bilingual older adults, and many more fascinating aspects of bilingualism. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Recent protests around the world (such as the Arab Spring uprisings and Occupy Wall Street movements) have drawn renewed interest to the study of social change and, especially, to the manner in which words, images, events, and ideas associated with protestors can "move the social." What Democracy Looks Like: The Rhetoric of Social Movements and Counterpublics (U Alabama Press, 2017) is an attempt to foster a more coherent understanding of social change among scholars of rhetoric and communication studies by juxtaposing the ideas of social movements and counterpublics--historically two key factors significant in the study of social change. Foust, Pason, and Zittlow Rogness's volume compiles the voices of leading and new scholars who are contributing to the history, application, and new directions of these two concepts, all in conversation with a number of acts of resistance or social change. The theories of social movements and counterpublics are related, but distinct. Social movement theories tend to be concerned with enacting policy and legislative changes. Scholars flying this flag have concentrated on the organization and language (for example, rallies and speeches) that are meant to enact social change. Counterpublic theory, on the other hand, focuses less on policy changes and more on the unequal distribution of power and resources among different protest groups, which is sometimes synonymous with subordinated identity groups such as race, gender, sexuality, and class. Nonetheless, contributors argue that in recent years the distinctions between these two methods have become less evident. By putting the literatures of the two theories in conversation with one another, these scholars seek to promote and imagine social change outside the typical binaries. Christina Foust is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Amy Pason is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, and currently spends most of her time as Faculty Senate Chair and most recently, been elected to represent all Faculty Senate Chairs for the Nevada System of Higher Education. Kate Zittlow Rogness, Ph.D., is a faculty member in the Department of Communication at Minneapolis College. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Babbling Barbarians: How Translators Keep Us Civilized is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Princeton University Professor David Bellos, author of the bestselling book, Is That A Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything, many fascinating features of language and translation are explored at length. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

English has borrowed more words from French than from any other modern foreign language. French words and phrases—such as à la mode, ennui, naïveté and caprice—lend English a certain je-ne-sais-quoi that would otherwise elude the language. Richard Scholar examines the continuing history of untranslated French words in English and asks what these words reveal about the fertile but fraught relationship that England and France have long shared and that now entangles English- and French-speaking cultures all over the world. Émigrés: French Words That Turned English (Princeton UP, 2020) demonstrates that French borrowings have, over the centuries, “turned” English in more ways than one. From the seventeenth-century polymath John Evelyn’s complaint that English lacks “words that do so fully express” the French ennui and naïveté, to George W. Bush’s purported claim that “the French don’t have a word for entrepreneur,” this unique history of English argues that French words have offered more than the mere seasoning of the occasional mot juste. They have established themselves as “creolizing keywords” that both connect English speakers to—and separate them from—French. Moving from the realms of opera to ice cream, the book shows how migrant French words are never the same again for having ventured abroad, and how they complete English by reminding us that it is fundamentally incomplete. At a moment of resurgent nationalism in the English-speaking world, Émigrés invites native Anglophone readers to consider how much we owe the French language and why so many of us remain ambivalent about the migrants in our midst. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

In 1928 linguist Yuen Ren Chao had reason to celebrate. The Nationalist government had just recognized his system for writing Chinese, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, so he gleefully wrote (using the system) in his diary: "G.R. yii yu jeou yueh 26 ry gong buh le. Hooray!!!" (G.R. was officially announced on September 26. Hooray!!!). He was not the only one excited about the prospect of scraping Chinese characters either. In the global context of phonocentric dominance both the Nationalists and the Communists waged war on Chinese characters, seeking new, scientific, modern, and entirely phonetic writing system. Ultimately, however, Chao's three exclamation marks were somewhat in vain. China's "script revolution" ended, and the Chinese Communist Party opted to simplify Chinese characters instead — a process and history deftly traced by Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916–1958 (Columbia University Press, 2019). In Chinese Grammatology Yurou Zhong explores the history of the script revolution, tracing where it came from, how it changed over time, and how it was finally contained. Sharply written, beautifully constructed and filled with fascinated case studies, this is a real treat for those interested in modern Chinese history and literature, as well as anyone curious about global script reforms in the twentieth century. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

In his book Jewish Bible Translations: Personalities, Passions, Politics, Progress (Jewish Publication Society, 2020), Leonard Greenspoon is the first to examine thoroughly Jewish Bible translations from the third century BCE to our day. It is an overdue corrective of an important story that has been regularly omitted or downgraded in other histories of Bible translation. Examining a wide range of translations over twenty-four centuries, Greenspoon delves into the historical, cultural, linguistic, and religious contexts of versions in eleven languages: Arabic, Aramaic, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish. He profiles many Jewish translators, among them Buber, Hirsch, Kaplan, Leeser, Luzzatto, Mendelssohn, Orlinsky, and Saadiah Gaon, framing their aspirations within the Jewish and larger milieus in which they worked. Greenspoon differentiates their principles, styles, and techniques—for example, their choice to emphasize either literal reflections of the Hebrew or distinctive elements of the vernacular language—and their underlying rationales. As he highlights distinctive features of Jewish Bible translations, he offers new insights regarding their shared characteristics and their limits. Additionally, Greenspoon shows how profoundly Jewish translators and interpreters influenced the style and diction of the King James Bible. Accessible and authoritative for all from beginners to scholars, Jewish Bible Translations enables readers to make their own informed evaluations of individual translations and to holistically assess Bible translation within Judaism. Leonard Greenspoon is Philip M. and Ethel Klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization and a professor of theology and of classical and Near Eastern studies at Creighton University. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

We are now living in the richest age of public memory. From museums and memorials to the vast digital infrastructure of the internet, access to the past is only a click away. Even so, the methods and technologies created by scientists, espionage agencies, and information management coders and programmers have drastically delimited the ways that communities across the globe remember and forget our wealth of retrievable knowledge. In Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age (University of Alabama Press, 2020), Nathan R. Johnson charts turning points where concepts of memory became durable in new computational technologies and modern memory infrastructures took hold. He works through both familiar and esoteric memory technologies—from the card catalog to the book cart to Zatocoding and keyword indexing—as he delineates histories of librarianship and information science and provides a working vocabulary for understanding rhetoric’s role in contemporary memory practices. This volume draws upon the twin concepts of memory infrastructure and mnemonic technê to illuminate the seemingly opaque wall of mundane algorithmic techniques that determine what is worth remembering and what should be forgotten. Each chapter highlights a conflict in the development of twentieth-century librarianship and its rapidly evolving competitor, the discipline of information science. As these two disciplines progressed, they contributed practical techniques and technologies for making sense of explosive scientific advancement in the wake of World War II. Taming postwar science became part and parcel of practices and information technologies that undergird uncountable modern communication systems, including search engines, algorithms, and databases for nearly every national clearinghouse of the twenty-first century. Nathan R. Johnson is assistant professor of Rhetoric at the University of South Florida. His work has appeared in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Poroi, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology and enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture. Connect with your host, Lee Pierce (they & she) on social and Gmail @rhetoriclee Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

The traditional Indian method of learning Sanskrit is through oral transmission, by first memorizing texts and then learning their meaning. The Western academic approach methodically teaches the alphabet, declensions, grammar, syntax, and vocabulary building. Zoë Slatoff-Ponté's Yogavataranam integrates the traditional and academic approaches for a full and practical experience of Sanskrit study. Yogavataranam: The Translation of Yoga (North Point Press, 2015) approaches language systematically and at the same time allows students to read important and relevant texts as soon as possible, while emphasizing proper pronunciation through its audio accompaniment. This new approach joins theory and practice to invoke an active experience of the philosophy, the practice, and the culture that together inform the multiplicity of meanings contained within the single and powerful word "yoga." By the way, you can study Sanskrit with Zoë. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

In her new book Typical Girls: The Rhetoric of Womanhood in Comic Strips (Ohio State Press, 2021) Susan Kirtley examines female-created comics that were nationally syndicated starting in the late 1970s-2010. Kirtley uncovers the understudied and developing history of these strips, defining and exploring the ramifications of this expression of women’s roles at a time of great change in history and in comic art. This impressive, engaging, and timely study illustrates how these comics express the complexities of women’s experiences, especially as such experiences were shaped by shifting and often competing notions of womanhood and feminism. Including the comics of Lynn Johnston (For Better or For Worse), Cathy Guisewite (Cathy), Nicole Hollander (Sylvia), Lynda Barry (Ernie Pook’s Comeek), Barbara Brandon-Croft (Where I’m Coming From), Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For), and Jan Eliot (Stone Soup), Typical Girls is an important history of the representation of womanhood and women’s rights in popular comic strips. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Why is the term "openly gay" so widely used but "openly straight" is not? What are the unspoken assumptions behind terms like "male nurse," "working mom," and "white trash"? Offering a revealing and provocative look at the word choices we make every day without even realizing it, Taken for Granted exposes the subtly encoded ways we talk about race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, social status, and more. In Taken for Granted: The Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable (Princeton UP, 2018), Eviatar Zerubavel describes how the words we use―such as when we mark "the best female basketball player" but leave her male counterpart unmarked―provide telling clues about the things many of us take for granted. By marking "women's history" or "Black History Month," we are also reinforcing the apparent normality of the history of white men. When we mark something as being special or somehow noticeable, that which goes unmarked―such as maleness, whiteness, straightness, and able-bodiedness―is assumed to be ordinary by default. Zerubavel shows how this tacit normalizing of certain identities, practices, and ideas helps to maintain their cultural dominance―including the power to dictate what others take for granted. A little book about a very big idea, Taken for Granted draws our attention to what we implicitly assume to be normal―and in the process unsettles the very notion of normality. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Political Theorist Robert Bartlett spoke with the New Books in Political Science podcast about two of his recent publications, which take on translating the work of two distinct classical thinkers, Aristotle and Aristophanes. In discussing these thinkers, we talked about two of Aristophanes’ earliest extant plays, The Acharnians and The Knights. We also discussed Aristotle’s text, The Art of Rhetoric. All three of these works focus on the interaction of the words spoken by a public individual, and how those words are also received and considered by an audience, especially the citizens of the state. This conversation took us to ancient Athens and some of the earliest western thinking about the interrelationship between political rhetoric and emotions, and how these connections can be both useful and dangerous, especially for democracies. Bartlett explains that Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric (University of Chicago Press, 2019) is an important component of Aristotle’s thinking about politics, and one of his later works. The Art of Rhetoric explores the idea and art of persuasion, and Aristotle provides a defense of rhetoric for the polis. Bartlett also examines the way that Aristotle’s Rhetoric, while attacked by Thomas Hobbes in his writing, as he does with so many of Aristotle’s works, actually provides the basis for Hobbes’ understanding of the passions, and thus the basis for Hobbes’ own political theory. In an effort to examine the way that rhetoric and persuasion work, especially within politics, Aristotle delineates a clear account of the passions in Book II of The Rhetoric, and this, combined with the three modes of persuasion (ethos, pathos, logos), are key to considering how rhetoric can be used, for good or ill. It is inevitable that political rhetoric will come forward in societies, however large or small, simple or complex. Thus, Aristotle’s work explains not only how to best make use of rhetoric, it also explains the ways in which rhetoric can be misused, abused, and how it can threaten the society when used corruptly, especially by demagogues. Bartlett’s translation of Aristotle’s text guides the reader with clarity and accessibility, and his interpretative essay explores these important dimensions of understanding how rhetoric works, how it accesses our emotions, and how it can be used corruptly. This is particularly important to consider in our current political climates, in the United States and elsewhere, as we have seen the rise of demagogues and the inflaming of passions within the political sphere. Against Demagogues: What Aristophanes Can Teach Us about the Perils of Populism and the Fate of Democracy (University of California Press, 2020) examines many of the same themes as Aristotle explores in The Rhetoric, but in Aristophanes’ work, Bartlett notes, the use of comedy and narrative skewer the demagogue and his abuse of rhetoric. Once again Bartlett has translated the ancient Greek work, in this case, the two plays, The Acharnians and The Knights, and has provided an interpretative essay of each play. Against Demagogues also provides the contemporary reader with considerations of Aristophanes’ relevance, especially in his attack on demagogues. As Bartlett notes, the term “demagogue” itself only become negative in its valence when Aristophanes uses it this way in The Knights. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

At the intersection of epistemology and philosophy of language is a puzzle. First, it seems we don’t need less evidence for a claim that we know something if the practical importance of the knowledge claim shifts. Second, it seems we shouldn’t assert that we know something if we don’t. Third, it seems that if the practical importance of a knowledge claim shifts, we should back up our claim with more evidence. So is knowledge really insensitive to shifts in practical stakes? Or should the knowledge norm of assertion be abandoned? In Shifty Speech and Independent Thought (Oxford University Press, 2021), Mona Simion critically considers various types of responses to the Shiftiness Dilemma before defending her own solution. On her view, assertions obey both epistemic and non-epistemic norms, and what is permissible to assert shifts depending on all-things-considered judgments that rely on a contextually determined mix of these norms. Simion, who is lecturer in philosophy at the University of Glasgow, generalizes her approach to other types of epistemically relevant speech acts, and argues that only moral assertion requires special treatment, due to differences in audience understanding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Listen to this interview of Iain McGee, a PhD student in the Department of Religion and Theology at the University of Bristol (UK), where he also teaches Applied Linguistics. We talk about his book Understanding the Paragraph and Paragraphing (Equinox, 2018), the paragraph as a break in the text, about the paragraph as a unit of the text, and about the ¶. Iain McGee : "Often writing instruction in classroom environments is readerless in terms of the actual text and in terms of who will engage with it. Many writers in classrooms know that the only reader will be the teacher. But when it comes to writing for purposeful reasons, then we will be thinking of the reader, and the reader will have certain (as Michael Hoey puts it) textual colligation expectations, that means that the reader will be expecting paragraphs to flow in a certain way, will be expecting certain ways of organizing that text. And so, for the writer in that environment, the writer needs to be aware of those discourse-specific ways in which we communicate. One of the points I make in the book is that, Alexander Bain and his work in particular never really considered the reader and as such, made rather prescriptive, one-size-fits-all comments on what good paragraphing is. But in reality, the genre very much determines how we will go about writing our paragraphs, for example, how many sentences we might have, or the kinds of links between the paragraphs, for example, those links will be very different between reading an article in a newspaper and reading a journal article. And so, that sensitivity to genre is one of the focal points of my research, and I want to draw attention to the fact that we need to understand genres better so that we can make comments about the paragraph which are more intelligent, more specific, and more relevant to the actual readers of real genres and to the writers engaged with those genres." Daniel Shea heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

James Fredal is Associate Professor in the Department of English at The Ohio State University. The recipient of multiple awards for his work in rhetorical theory and history, Fredal is the author in 2006 of Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens: Persuasive Artistry from Solon to Demosthenes and now The Enthymeme: Syllogism, Reasoning and Narrative in Ancient Greek Rhetoric (Penn State UP, 2020). Central to rhetorical theory, the enthymeme is most often defined as a truncated syllogism. Suppressing a premise that the audience already knows, this rhetorical device relies on the audience to fill in the missing information, thereby making the argument more persuasive. James Fredal argues that this view of the enthymeme is wrong. Presenting a new exegesis of Aristotle and classic texts of Attic oratory, Fredal shows that the standard reading of Aristotle's enthymeme is inaccurate--and that Aristotle himself distorts what enthymemes are and how they work. From close analysis of the Rhetoric, Topics, and Analytics, Fredal finds that Aristotle's enthymeme is, in fact, not syllogistic and is different from the enthymeme as it was used by Attic orators such as Lysias and Isaeus. Fredal argues that the enthymeme, as it was originally understood and used, is a technique of storytelling, primarily forensic storytelling, aimed at eliciting from the audience an inference about a narrative. According to Fredal, narrative rather than formal logic is the seedbed of the enthymeme and of rhetoric more broadly. The Enthymeme reassesses a fundamental doctrine of rhetorical instruction, clarifies the viewpoints of the tradition, and presents a new form of rhetoric for further study and use. This groundbreaking book will be welcomed by scholars and students of classical rhetoric, the history of rhetoric, and rhetorical theory as well as communications studies, classical studies, and classical philosophy. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Listen to this interview of Ken Hyland, Professor of Applied Linguistics in Education at the University of East Anglia, UK. We talked about his book Second Language Writing (Cambridge UP, 2019), the importance of reflection to teaching, and about the importance of teaching to research, and about the importance of research to reflection. Interviewer : "I wonder whether second language writing isn't sometimes identifying itself too closely with language learning, and not–––well, it should be writing in a second language, shouldn't it? You know, put something up front which is what this is really about." Ken Hyland : "Yeah, I think that one thing that an emphasis on second language writing has given us is the recognition that writing is important. I don't think that there is a university anywhere now that doesn't have a writing center or at least an office where students can go and get consultation about their texts. Writing has been recognized as important, and also in native-English-speaking contexts as well, and in UK universities. And in fact, when we look at writing at advanced levels, like PhDs and writing for publication, language doesn't really come into it anymore. It's a rhetorical issue. And this crude native/nonnative polarization I think breaks down entirely. You know, it's counterproductive, because it demoralizes second-language writers who are trying to get their PhD or publish in journals, and it ignores the very real writing problems experienced by native English speakers, by L1s, you know. So, the L1s get ignored, in favor of the L2s, who get the courses, but everyone's unhappy because it's seen as a language issue rather than as a writing issue." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Catriona McKinnon is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on climate ethics and environmental justice. Much of her recent work aims at addressing denialism about climate change. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Future of Truth project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Through discussion of his famous 1970s experiment alongside new research, in Why Chimpanzees Can’t Learn Language and Only Humans Can (Columbia University Press, 2019), Herbert Terrace argues that, despite the failure of famous attempts to teach primates to speak, from these efforts we can learn something important: the missing link between non-linguistic and linguistic creatures is the ability to use words, not to form sentences. Situating language-learning as a capacity gained through conversation, not primarily representing internal thought, Terrace takes naming as the first step towards language. By drawing on research in developmental psychology, paleoanthropology, and linguistics, Terrace builds a case for understanding human language as grounded in social interaction between mother and child, rather than an inevitable, asocial result of a person’s development. Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Successful word-coinages--those that stay in currency for a good long time--tend to conceal their beginnings. We take them at face value and rarely when and where they were first minted. Engaging, illuminating, and authoritative, Ralph Keyes's The Hidden History of Coined Words (Oxford University Press, 2021) explores the etymological underworld of terms and expressions and uncovers plenty of hidden gems. He also finds some fascinating patterns, such as that successful neologisms are as likely to be created by chance as by design. A remarkable number of new words were coined whimsically, originally intended to troll or taunt. Knickers, for example, resulted from a hoax; big bang from an insult. Casual wisecracking produced software, crowdsource, and blog. More than a few resulted from happy accidents, such as typos, mistranslations, and mishearing (bigly and buttonhole), or from being taken entirely out of context (robotics). Neologizers (a Thomas Jefferson coinage) include not just scholars and writers but cartoonists, columnists, children's book authors. Wimp originated with a book series, as did goop, and nerd from a book by Dr. Seuss. Coinages are often contested, controversy swirling around such terms as gonzo, mojo, and booty call. Keyes considers all contenders, while also leading us through the fray between new word partisans, and those who resist them strenuously. He concludes with advice about how to make your own successful coinage. The Hidden History of Coined Words will appeal not just to word mavens but history buffs, trivia contesters, and anyone who loves the immersive power of language. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

When Trump became president, much of the country was repelled by what they saw as the vulgar spectacle of his ascent, a perversion of the highest office in the land. In his bold, innovative book, Political Perversion: Rhetorical Aberration in the Time of Trumpeteering (University of Chicago Press, 2020), rhetorician Joshua Gunn argues that this “mean-spirited turn” in American politics (of which Trump is the paragon) is best understood as a structural perversion in our common culture, on a continuum with infantile and “gotcha” forms of entertainment meant to engender provocation and sadistic enjoyment. On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Dr. Joshua Gunn (h) about lots of things other than Trump, from horror shows to sexting to Pee-Wee Herman, structural perversion, and, yes, some Trump. We are recording this episode as the second impeachment trial for former President Donald Trump begins and the Trump fatigue is real. But this is not exactly a book about Trump. As Gunn puts it, “labeling Trump and his ilk as ‘fascist’ displaces our collective responsibility for their ascent to national power.” In Political Perversion, Gunn argues that “Trump’s rhetoric and person are better understood as replicating a style and genre of political discourse” that has a long history, but Gunn has eloquently re-imagined as what he calls “structural perversion.” Gunn argues that perverse rhetorics dominate not only the political sphere but also our daily interactions with others, in person and online. From sexting to campaign rhetoric, Gunn advances a new way to interpret our contemporary political context that explains why so many of us have difficulty deciphering the appeal of aberrant public figures. In this book, Trump is only the tip of a sinister, rapidly growing iceberg, one to which we ourselves unwittingly contribute on a daily basis. We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed chatting about this fascinating book. Connect with your host, Lee Pierce, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Jennifer Mercieca is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Texas A&M University. She is the author of Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump. You can follow her on Twitter: @jenmercieca. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Future of Truth project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Ramsey McGlazer's Old Schools: Moder nism, Education, and the Critique of Progress (Fordham University Press, 2020), traces the ways in which a group of modernist cultural practitioners (thinkers, politicians, artists, poets, novelists, and filmmakers) across varied linguistic and cultural contexts ((Italian, English, Irish, and Brazilian) resisted certain notions of education perceived as “progressive”. At the heart of this remarkable study, pulses a nexus of issues that are of interest to anyone teaching anything anywhere: What is education? How does it differ from “instruction”? What is education for? (if anything) What does it mean to ask the question “what is education for”? Who is education for? What are the stakes of that question? Education reforms from the end of the Victorian Era until the mid-20th century sought to surpass the “sterile and narrow” forms of education that insisted on rote learning (memorization, declamation, imitation, and so forth) that did not help students of any age or grade “transform.” Resisting the ideology of “progressive” education, the figures in McGlazer’s fascinating study propose instead a “counter tradition” that sought to offer resistant strategies in “old school” pedagogies focusing on rote means, reproducing (though McGlazer will “queer” that term) ordained content. The practitioners McGlazer focuses on include figures like Walter Pater, author of the influential Studies in the History of the Renaissance, first published in 1873 and whose interest in mechanistic pedagogies anchors the first chapter. Giovanni Pascoli and his focus on grammar follows, then a chapter on “direct instruction” in James Joyce’s Ulysses. McGlazer concludes by focusing on films centering on instruction, like the pedagogy of pain in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) and avant-garde Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha’s film Claro (1975). McGlazer’s focus on this nucleus of texts and practitioners from the end of the 19th Century to about the middle of the 20th gives rise to questions about tradition, resistance, and the ideology of education that are evergreen and of interest to educators in a wide array of places and spaces and Old Schools will be of interest to anyone who has taught and anyone who has learned. Ellen Nerenberg is a founding editor of g/s/i-gender/sexuality/Italy and reviews editor of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies. Recent scholarly essays focus on serial television in Italy, the UK, and North America; masculinities in Italian cinema and media studies; and student filmmakers. Her current book project is La nazione Winx: coltivare la futura consumista/Winx Nation: Grooming the Future Female Consumer, a collaboration with Nicoletta Marini-Maio (forthcoming, Rubbettino Editore, 2020). She is President of the American Association for Italian Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

In The Dutch Language in Japan (1600-1900): A Cultural and Sociolinguistic Study of Dutch as a Contact Language in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan (Brill, 2020), Christopher Joby offers the first book-length account of the knowledge and use of the Dutch language in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. For most of this period, the Dutch were the only Europeans permitted to trade with Japan. Using the analytical tool of language process, this book explores the nature and consequences of contact between Dutch and Japanese and other language varieties. The processes analyzed include language learning, contact and competition, code-switching, translation, lexical, syntactic, and graphic interference, and language shift. The picture that emerges is that the multifarious uses of Dutch, especially the translation of Dutch books, would have a profound effect on the language, society, culture, and intellectual life of Japan. You can get The Dutch Language in Japan (1600-1900) at a discount at the Brill website by entering the code 72150 on check out. (Promo Code effective until May/31/2021) Jingyi Li is a Ph.D. Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Listen to this interview of Joan Turner, author of On Writtenness: The Cultural Politics of Academic Writing (Bloomsbury Academic 2018). We talk about writers, writing, writers writing, unwritten subtexts, and written text. Interviewer: "What do you see as the step which writing practitioners can take in the direction of their discipline-based colleagues, and what's the step that researchers can take toward writing practice?" Joan Turner: "Well, obviously, it has to be something that has to be ongoing, and in many respects, it comes down to individuals. There are a lot of well-meaning researchers who value collaboration with writing practitioners, as there are many who don't. And I think is it probably incumbent upon the writing practitioners to kind of put themselves forward more, to kind of slough off the sense of inferiority that might surround them because of how institutions position writing development, and they just have to attempt to begin the conversation. I think that often, when they do, on an individual level, it works. Although often, another problem that occurs with that, is, if you're actually making contact with a particular department where you've got a lot of students, then you might make contact with a particular individual, who then leaves that institution or goes on to a different role in the institution, and is no longer collaborating with the writing center, and then you have to begin again with another one. So, it can be an uphill struggle, but I do have some optimism that things will get better." Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communications, a Special Series on the New Books Network. Daniel is Director of the Heidelberg Writing Program, a division of the Language Center at Heidelberg University, Germany. Just write [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Whether framed as complaints about cancel culture or as increased awareness of prejudice, stories about offensive language are common in our daily news cycle. In On the Offensive: Prejudice in Language Past and Present (Cambridge UP, 2020), linguist Karen Stollznow explores the history of language that offends, including talk about race and ethnicity, gender, religion, mental health, physical appearance, and age. Her book tells the origin story of how terms come to have the power to offend. It also investigates the euphemism treadmill, the phenomenon of offensive terms being replaced with new, neutral terms which eventually become offensive as well. Despite the large number of terms the book deals with, she argues that it isn’t impossible to keep track of what’s offensive and what isn’t. By explaining the background to our language and its implications for the lived experiences of human beings, Stollznow hopes the book will enable its readers to examine their own language and its power—for harm and for good. Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras (and stuff). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Citizenship is acquired and constructed through various mechanisms, including language tests, that require individuals to demonstrate a sufficient national identity. For some recent migrants, acquiring citizenship and passing rigorous language testing still is not enough to feel like they belong. Becoming a Citizen: Linguistic Trials and Negotiations in the UK (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2019) provides valuable context for how language and sociolinguistics impacts citizenship in both official and unofficial ways. Kamran Khan, a sociolinguist at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, explores the process of acquiring UK citizenship and investigates how the naturalisation process is experienced, with an explicit focus on language practices. This ethnographically-informed study focuses on W, a Yemeni immigrant in the UK, during the final phase of the citizenship process. In this time, he encounters linguistic trials and tests involving the Life in the UK citizenship test, community life, ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages), adult education and the citizenship ceremony. The richness of linguistic data featured in this book allows for a nuanced portrayal of the complexities of becoming a citizen. This is especially so in the context of the UK's assimilationist form of citizenship which is reflected in the introduction of a citizenship test within a broader socio-political climate. Becoming a Citizen offers a detailed analysis of the linguistic process of naturalisation in the UK and is relevant to scholars working in sociolinguistics, language policy, migration studies and ethnographic research. Nafeesa Andrabi is a 4th year Sociology PhD student at UNC-Chapel Hill, a Biosocial Fellow at Carolina Population Center and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

The most widely spoken Jewish language on the eve of the Holocaust, Yiddish continues to play a significant role in Jewish life today, from Hasidim for whom it is a language of daily life to avant-garde performers, political activists, and LGBTQ writers turning to Yiddish for inspiration. In Yiddish: Biography of a Language (Oxford University Press, 2020), Jeffrey Shandler presents the story of this centuries-old language, the defining vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, from its origins to the present. Shandler tells the multifaceted history of Yiddish in the form of a biographical profile, revealing surprising insights through a series of thematic chapters. He addresses key aspects of Yiddish as the language of a diasporic population, whose speakers have always used more than one language. As the vernacular of a marginalized minority, Yiddish has often been held in low regard compared to other languages, and its legitimacy as a language has been questioned. But some devoted Yiddish speakers have championed the language as embodying the essence of Jewish culture and a defining feature of a Jewish national identity. Despite predictions of the demise of Yiddish-dating back well before half of its speakers were murdered during the Holocaust-the language leads a vibrant, evolving life to this day. Jeffrey Shandler is Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

In this episode, I interview Gert-Jan van der Heiden, Professor of Metaphysics and Philosophical Anthropology at Radboud University in Amsterdam, about his book, The Voice of Misery: A Continental Philosophy of Testimony, recently published by SUNY Press. In the book, van der Heiden takes up the question of testimony, which is popular in philosophical discourses today—from analytic epistemological approaches to those that emerge from critical race and feminist theory. While important advances are made in these disciplines, van der Heiden argues that contemporary continental philosophy offers a rich source for another approach to testimony that combines the ontological, epistemological, ethical, and logical elements of testimony in order to more fully understand what occurs in the event of bearing witness. Beginning with six literary experiments, The Voice of Misery approaches the event of testimony and its connection to language at the limits of what can be expressed: in the silent, the unspeakable, the mute. From this grounding, the text then moves into a more traditionally philosophical investigation of the peculiarity and particularity of testimony in a dazzling dialogue with the most well-known figures of recent continental thought: Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Giorgio Agamben, and Martin Heidegger, amongst others. Ultimately, van der Heiden extrapolates from the thinkers and authors with whom he engages an effective and moving overview of the acts of witnessing and bearing witness, allowing us to better understand how these twinned acts structure our realities. Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Religious people have a range of new media in which they can share their beliefs and reflect on what it means to believe, to act, and to be members of their religious communities. In Talk about Faith: How Debate and Conversation Shape Belief (Cambridge UP, 2021), Stephen Pihlaja investigates how Christians and Muslims interact with each other through debates broadcast online, podcasts, and YouTube videos. He explores the way in which they present themselves and their faiths and how they situate their ideas in relationship to each other and to their perceived audiences Pihlaja argues that people position themselves and others differently depending on conversational contexts and topic, generalizing about themselves in relationship to a range of already-existing storylines, whether they're talking about biblical inerrancy, the nature of Islam, to homosexuality and interracial dating. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language