Ocean State Libraries

One of George Bernard Shaw's best-known plays, Pygmalion is based on ancient Greek mythology. Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures, which then came to life. The general idea of that myth was a popular subject for Victorian era British playwrights. Shaw's updated and revised version of this ancient Greek legend was first presented in England in 1914. Poking fun of the antiquated British class system, it introduces Henry Higgins, a professor...

"Everyone likes to think they know a bit about language: There are some words that you simply can't translate into English. The origin of a word tells you how it should be used. A dialect is inferior to a language. The problem is, none of these statements are true. In Don't Believe a Word, linguist David Shariatmadari explodes nine common myths about language and introduces us to some of the fundamental insights of modern linguistics. By the end of...

Addresses the foundation of language and its connection to portions of the brain. The components of language are explained in easy-to-understand terms and the progression of the language from Germanic to Old, Middle, and Modern English is fully illustrated, including such revolutionary language upheavals as those brought about by the Norman Conquest and the Great Vowel Shift.

Conventional wisdom suggests English is going to the dogs, that bad grammar, slang, and illogical constructions signal a decline in standards of usage - to say nothing of the corruption wrought by email and text messages. But English is a complicated, marvelous language. Far from being a language in decline, English is the product of surprisingly varied linguistic forces, some of which have only recently come to light. And these forces continue

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Presents lectures (each 30 minutes in length) by John McWhorter, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, based on his courses in Linguistics.

A professor of English delves into the past, present, and future of different languages.

"What if all our legends are true? A rousing, fast-paced novel of time travel unlike any other, from acclaimed author Wil McCarthy. What if our legends are older than we think? All the Stone Age has left behind are rocks and bones; all other materials have rotted away, leaving no trace. But what if "cave men" never existed, and the Stone Age was a time of great sophistication still preserved in our oldest stories? In a brilliant and dangerous brain...

"A tour of the world's twenty most-spoken languages explores the history, geography, linguistics, and cultures that have been shaped by languages and their customs." -- "English is the world language, except that most of the world doesn't speak it--only one in five people does. Gaston Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world's 7.4 or so billion people in their mother tongues, you would need to know no fewer than twenty languages....