The Mother Tongue

Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062417444
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
“Vastly informative and vastly entertaining…A scholarly and fascinating book.” —Los Angeles Times With dazzling wit and astonishing insight, Bill Bryson explores the remarkable history, eccentricities, resilience and sheer fun of the English language. From the first descent of the larynx into the throat (why you can talk but your dog can’t), to the fine lost art of swearing, Bryson tells the fascinating, often uproarious story of an inadequate, second-rate tongue of peasants that developed into one of the world’s largest growth industries.

Mother Tongue

Author: Joel Davis
Publisher: Carol Publishing Corporation
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Book Description
The author "presents the latest and most controversial research from the origins of language itself to the way the human brain makes and stores it, as well as how infants create it."--Jacket.

Mother Tongue

Author: Wallis Wilde-Menozzi
Publisher: North Point Press
ISBN: 0374720851
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Book Description
A probing and poetic examination of language, food, faith, and family attachment in Italian life through the eyes of an American who moved to Parma with her husband and family. In the 1980s, the American writer Wallis Wilde-Menozzi moved permanently with her Italian husband and her daughter to Parma, a sophisticated city in northern Italy, where he became a professor of biology. Her search for rootedness in the city that was to be her home introduced her to complexities in her identity as she migrated into another language and looked for links beyond the joys of Verdi, Correggio, and Parmesan cheese, which visitors have rightly extolled for centuries. The local resistance to change perceived as individualistic led Wilde-Menozzi to explore the pull and challenge of difference and discover the backbone she needed for artistic freedom. In Mother Tongue, Wilde-Menozzi offers stories of far-sighted lives, remarkable Parma men and remarkable women, including the Renaissance abbess Giovanna Piacenza, the fighting Donella Rossi Sanvitale, and her own indefatigable mother-in-law. Framed with a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Patricia Hampl, this classic on diversity and tolerance, family, faith, and food in Italy and the United States is at once timeless and timely, a “large, beautiful window into the intelligent, literate, reflective life of Italy” (Shirley Hazzard).

Silence Is My Mother Tongue

Author: Sulaiman Addonia
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1644451298
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
A sensuous, textured novel of life in a refugee camp, long-listed for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction On a hill overlooking a refugee camp in Sudan, a young man strings up bedsheets that, in an act of imaginative resilience, will serve as a screen in his silent cinema. From the cinema he can see all the comings and goings in the camp, especially those of two new arrivals: a girl named Saba, and her mute brother, Hagos. For these siblings, adapting to life in the camp is not easy. Saba mourns the future she lost when she was forced to abandon school, while Hagos, scorned for his inability to speak, must live vicariously through his sister. Both resist societal expectations by seeking to redefine love, sex, and gender roles in their lives, and when a businessman opens a shop and befriends Hagos, they cast off those pressures and make an unconventional choice. With this cast of complex, beautifully drawn characters, Sulaiman Addonia details the textures and rhythms of everyday life in a refugee camp, and questions what it means to be an individual when one has lost all that makes a home or a future. Intimate and subversive, Silence Is My Mother Tongue dissects the ways society wages war on women and explores the stories we must tell to survive in a broken, inhospitable environment.

The Mother Tongue

Author: Sarah Louise Arnold
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English language
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description

Beyond the Mother Tongue

Author: Yasemin Yildiz
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823241300
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
Monolingualism-the idea that having just one language is the norm is only a recent invention, dating to late-eighteenth-century Europe. Yet it has become a dominant, if overlooked, structuring principle of modernity. According to this monolingual paradigm, individuals are imagined to be able to think and feel properly only in one language, while multiple languages are seen as a threat to the cohesion of individuals and communities, institutions and disciplines. As a result of this view, writing in anything but one's "mother tongue" has come to be seen as an aberration.

Mother Tongue

Author: Joyce Kornblatt
Publisher: Brandl & Schlesinger
ISBN: 0648523349
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 185

Book Description
What does it mean when the identity out of which one builds a life turns out to be a lie? What is the impact on one's self and those one loves? Mother Tongue emerges from the fires of shocking loss, betrayal and grief-tested love. 'Mother Tongue is a profound and moving novel that asks complex questions with such crystal clarity they seem simple. Are we formed by our genes? Our history? Or do we make ourselves? How do we lose each other? More importantly: how do we find each other?' — Sophie Cunningham 'Mother Tongue is a tender and sensitive story about family secrets, loss and recovery from loss; a wise and lyrical meditation on the nature of love.' — Gail Jones

The Mother's Tongue

Author: Heid Ellen Erdrich
Publisher: Salt Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Book Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MINNESOTA BOOK AWARDS 2006. Poems in The Mother’s Tongue move in images of the living world that include plants and creatures both native and non-native to American landscapes. These poems move via persona and personal lyric through expressions of ambivalence about choosing the life of the body – of womanhood and motherhood – through the strange realm of pregnancy into the netherworld of the post-partum period and out into the world again, into the enlarged world, the world at war, the world of work and words. Finally these poems move to enter the world of women as transformed within the love of language – of recovered Ojibwe language and English renewed as first language in the mouths of infants. These are poems that urge women to discover the power of their own tongues as they teach speech – the sweet, salty, sour and bitter desires – the taste on the mother’s tongue.

Language Learning and the Mother Tongue

Author: Sara Greaves
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316516415
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Book Description
Drawing on research by French authors, this book introduces a major new concept, the (M)other tongue, and shows its relevance to language learning and pediatrics in a multicultural society. It is for students and lecturers in languages, linguistics, translation studies and education, and for child psychologists, psychiatrists and speech therapists.

Our Mother Tongue

Author: Nancy Wilson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781947644557
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
"The importance of the spoken and written word in Christian culture cannot be overestimated. In this English grammar guide, Nancy Wilson surveys the major concepts in English grammar for beginners at the late elementary and junior high level, or even adults seeking a brush-up. Our Mother Tongue dishes up examples and exercises that go beyond the stereotypical, contrived sentences serving merely to illustrate a point, and relies on selections from Scripture and great English literature to instruct students with regard to content, style, and structure."--