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.

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.

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).

Mother Tongues

Author: Barbara Johnson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674011878
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and Sylvia Plath make up the odd trio on which this book is based. It is in the surprising and revealing links between them--links pertaining to troublesome mothers, elusive foreign languages, and professional disappointments--that Barbara Johnson maps the coordinates of her larger claims about the ideal of oneness in every area of life, and about the damage done by this ideal. The existence of sexual difference precludes an original or ultimate "one" who would represent all of mankind; the plurality of languages makes it impossible to think that one doesn't live in translation; and the plurality of the sexes means that every human being came from a woman's body, and some will reproduce this feat, while others won't. In her most personal and deeply considered book about difference, Johnson asks: Is the mother the guardian of a oneness we have never had? The relations that link mothers, bodies, words, and laws serve as the guiding puzzles as she searches for an answer.

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 Tongue

Author: Sarah Louise Arnold
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English language
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Book Description

Mother Tongue

Author: Christine Gilbert
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1592407927
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
One woman’s quest to learn Mandarin in Beijing, Arabic in Beirut, and Spanish in Mexico, with her young family along for the ride. Imagine negotiating for a replacement carburetor in rural Mexico with words you’re secretly pulling from a pocket dictionary. Imagine your two-year-old asking for more niunai at dinner—a Mandarin word for milk that even you don’t know yet. Imagine finding out that you’re unexpectedly pregnant while living in war-torn Beirut. With vivid and evocative language, Christine Gilbert takes us along with her into foreign lands, showing us what it’s like to make a life in an unfamiliar world—and in an unfamiliar tongue. Gilbert was a young mother when she boldly uprooted her family to move around the world, studying Mandarin in China, Arabic in Lebanon, and Spanish in Mexico, with her toddler son and all-American husband along for the ride.Their story takes us from Beijing to Beirut, from Cyprus to Chiang Mai—and also explores recent breakthroughs in bilingual brain mapping and the controversial debates happening in linguistics right now. Gilbert’s adventures abroad prove just how much language influences culture (and vice versa), and lead her to results she never expected. Mother Tongue is a fascinating and uplifting story about taking big risks for bigger rewards and trying to find meaning and happiness through tireless pursuit—no matter what hurdles may arise. It’s a treat for language enthusiasts and armchair travelers alike.

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: Emine Sevgi Özdamar
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Book Description
Four stories on the lives of Turkish immigrants in Germany. One of them, Blackeye in Germany, is narrated by a man's donkey, while A Charwoman's Career draws on the author's own experiences before she went on to better things: stagehand, actress, playwright, theater director and now novelist. Lots of black humor.