Reddit mentions: The best linguistics reference books

Let me start by telling you to save yourself the trouble. Learning Japanese is a long hard road and once you get to the end you'll realize that the Anime or manga that spurred your desire to learn is actually juvenile and terrible. The economy here stinks and translation is one of the most boring, tedious jobs in existence. Furthermore, even after you achieve intermediate proficiency and can speak and understand a lot of Japanese, you'll realize that it doesn't matter because speaking Japanese requires being Japanese to a certain extent and you won't and can't ever be Japanese.

If that still doesn't persuade you to learn any other language, here are a few resources:

Reviewing the Kanji Forum - This is a site devoted to Heisig's Reviewing the Kanji which is a series of books devoted to learning the Kanji independently and then learning the readings later. I suggest you do this. It will take anywhere from 3 months to a year and you won't be able to read or write any Japanese at the end of it, but in my opinion, this foundation is of profound necessity. After you do this, acquiring vocabulary and understanding even complicated scientific terms in Japanese will be leaps and bounds easier.

Tae Kim's guide to basic Japanese grammar - This is a basic primer. Free and through. Study it and internalize it. It's no substitute for a class and instructors to drill you, but it's free and explains concepts in Japanese grammar in a way that will complement any classes you take and/or let you work at your own pace towards more complicated material.

Anki - Download Anki. It's a Spaced Repitition System (SRS) program. Make two decks. A sentences deck and a vocabulary deck. Whenever you learn a new word, put it into the vocab deck and put interesting sentences into the sentences deck. Finish your reviews every day. (Like braces, this is something that will be with you for the rest of your life, so learn to love it.) Time box your reviews to about 5 minutes at a time.

Kanji in Context - Start working through this series of books. I do something like 2 kanji a day in the vocabulary workbook, putting all the words into an Anki deck and obscuring the kanji I'm learning, such that the answer to the card is to write that kanji. This primarily enforces the readings I'm learning. Writing things increases your ability to dedicate them to memory. I put the sentences into the sentences deck. Prepare to get behind. Maybe you'll slag through it.

lang-8 - Once you've got some conversational Japanese under your belt, sign up at Lang-8 and write some or respond to other journal entries. Native speakers congregate here and will correct your Japanese, talk to you in Japanese, and generally have a conversation.

Buy or research ways to study for the JLPT and sign up for level 4. The goal is not passing this test (only level 1 and 2 really matter and even then, most people who get this certification are NEVER asked they took it) but simply setting a deadline. Level 5 (test changed this year) is crazy easy. Make this your goal. Even if you can't actually get to a testing site or don't have the money, convince yourself that you do and buy some JLPT study guides and work towards level X (again, probably 5). Once you feel confident you can pass level 5, start studying for level 4 and so on. Use the bi-annual deadlines to keep yourself studying. Watch Japanese stuff on Youtube, find a way to go to Japan and do all this in a native environment. Once you get to the end of the road, you'll probably end up discovering that it wasn't worth it.

My recommendation is to learn Mandarin if you're interested in learning an Asian language and something European if you're interested in History. (If you're interested in reading historic Japanese texts, good luck. You'll have to learn Japanese and then classic Japanese. (Most natives can't read pre-WWII newspapers easily or at all-- this is where you're headed.))

I rather liked Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language, which is about how language may have first developed (all conjecture of course, we can never really know, but he makes some interesting points). Bonus: He writes for the average person, meaning you don't necessarily have to know anything about linguistics to read the book. Downside: It's a bit pop-science. But I liked it anyway. :)

Edit: I've also heard good things about Ken Jenning's Maphead. Ken's really awesome anyway, you should read his stuff. Great sense of humor. And along the same line, AJ Jacob's The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World was really funny and interesting.

Please don't use Rosetta Stone. It's really terrible for language acquisition. And no, it's not all there is... the great thing (and also overwhelming thing) about learning a language is that there are tons of different methods of tackling it!

Here's some resources I've found that have worked well for me:

Grammar:

Genki: This is a great two-part textbook provides a really good introduction into the language. Lots of practice problems as well.

Tae Kim's Guide: A free online resource for learning about Japanese grammar. Also very good, and worth reading even alongside Genki.


Vocabulary:

Anki: A very good SRS flashcard program. (SRS means that it shows you things you know well less frequently than things you are unfamiliar with... very efficient)

Rikaisama: A Firefox extension that allows you to hover over Japanese words in a webpage, and it will automatically display dictionary results for that word. It even has the ability to let you add hovered words straight to your Anki deck as vocabulary cards.

Read the Kanji: A website that provides you with around 7000 unique sentences worth of vocabulary and reading practice, with a really nice progress tracking system. Unfortunately, it's not free.

Kanji:

Remembering the Kanji: An excellent book that teaches you over 3000 kanji with a very strong system. It breaks the kanji into elements, and teaches you them as combinations of those elements. For example, unlike many books which try to teach you a 20 stroke kanji by saying "write it a bunch of times until you remember all the strokes", this book teaches it to you by saying "Hey look, this kanji isn't that bad... it's just a combination of two or three kanji characters that you've already learned."

Reviewing the Kanji: A website meant to be used alongside the above book. Provides tools to review the things you've learned, and track your progress. Also includes user comments and stories to be used as a supplement to those in the book.

-------------------------------

I'd start with those. But when you get further along in the language, even more opportunities for practice open up to you. Playing Japanese video games. Watching Japanese movies and shows. Listening to Japanese radio, or music. Browsing Japanese websites. Singing along to Japanese karaoke. Talking with Japanese natives. Whatever you enjoy. And there's tools to help you with all those things as well.

I've heard several Trumpians slip similar terms into conversations. Just yesterday a pro-Trump friend of mine, drew a comparison between family and nation by saying: "It's like mommy's gone and daddy isn't going to put up with the same bullshit as her."

I don't know if this metaphor emerged naturally or as a byproduct of a broadly distributed theme amongst the movement. In either case, it's been fairly well-described by George Lakoff as "strict-father" v. "nurturant parent" models of political thought. From [a 2004 SvN blog post](* https://signalvnoise.com/archives/000718.php):


> What the strict-father model attempts to accomplish is this: it is assumed children have to learn self-discipline and self-reliance and respect for authority. Now another important part of this model, in America but not in other countries, has to do with what happens when such children mature. The slogan, “eighteen and out,” is common. The mature children are supposed to be off on their own as soon as possible. Good parents don’t interfere in their lives. If the nation is the family and the government is the parent, in the strict-family model, the government shouldn’t meddle in their lives.

> When I looked at the liberal model of the family, I found it a very different model. It assumes the main thing a parent has to do is care for and care about his child. It is through being cared for and cared about that children become responsible, self-disciplined and self-reliant. The purpose is to make children become nurturers, too. Obedience for children comes out of love and respect for parents, not out of fear of punishment. Instead of punishment, you have restitution.

If you don't want to buy/read the books, here are some digestible references:

• http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/10/27_lakoff.shtml
  
• http://www.questioningchristian.com/2004/11/strictfather_co.html
  
  Longer reads for those more interested:
  
  
• http://escholarship.org/uc/item/4jt0p1hw#page-2
  
• https://www.amazon.com/ALL-NEW-Dont-Think-Elephant/dp/160358594X

I'm going to reply to this in a rather obtuse and general manner and just link with as many resources as I can, as I don't currently have time to fully explore the subject, and I'm not overly familiar with the philosophy of language and/or communication studies.

As to your opening comments, "how communication takes place and forms" makes me think you'd be really interested in Conversational Analysis - this Wiki article sources a lot of excellent resources.

1. Yes, of course, we both study language. I'm sorry I can't speak overly to specifics here, I don't know exactly where they intersect. I would guess somewhere in the Anthropological Ling, CogSci, or Sociolinguistics specializations, though I could most definitely be wrong here.
   
   
2. Pragmatics and Semantics are your best bets here, and likely the Conversation Analysis page I've already linked.
   
   
3. Wiki has an OK overview, but to me it has always seemed very fragmented and confusing. The Linguistics Society of America has a good Why Should I Major in Linguistics? page, though I'm not sure it's exactly what you're looking for. There is also this Linguistics Careers PDF that I stumbled across a while back that might have some useful info for you. Honestly, taking an Intro to Ling class is a good place to start if you're interested, as it's about the only way to really get a good grasp. You could also try just buying a textbook for a Ling 101 class, or browsing a nearby (University) Library's linguistics section. If you want a book, the most basic overview I can find on my shelf (most of the classes I take now are very specialized) is The Linguistic Wars, which does a good job of summing up the last 50 years of Linguistics in a decently accessible format without going overboard. David Crystal's Encyclopedia of Language is also interesting, but it's not really a page turner IMO. Encyclopedia is the right word.
   
   I'd be happy to answer more questions if you have any, though I am sorry I am not more familiar with Communication Studies and Philosophy of Language.

> Christian world view

For most of the history of America, Christianity was intimately tied with expanded social programs to help the needy, and moral issues were mostly left out of politics.

Knowing that they could not compete with Christianity and its support of the New Deal, big business leaders who did not benefit from it began to form think tanks to work up a strategy to counteract it. To clarify, a think tank is an institute that performs research intended to promote a specific world view. Essentially, these business leaders and millionaires paid scientists to figure out the best way to "sell" conservativism to the vast majority of Christian liberals and convince them to vote against their own self-interest (and, I would argue, the teachings of Jesus Christ).

One of the most famous players in this production was Paul Weyrich. His big breakthrough in think tank research was that by tying conservative economic policy with (manufactured) moral imperatives, he could convince people that liberal policy was immoral, which has a much stronger cognitive effect than convincing people that a certain policy is illogical or against their best interest. For example, you might avoid calling your mother a bad word, even if she deserves it, because you find it immoral to disrespect your parents - even though doing so may be very logical and may make you feel very good.

So they set to work on testing and developing moral arguments against liberal economic policy. If you do some reading into the output of those think tanks, I think you may find that many of your viewpoints align very closely with the talking points they spent very good money to scientifically develop and hone to be the most convincing.

They also did another very successful trick, which is to tie social issues that many Christians had strong feelings about - abortion, gay rights, interracial marriage - to their economic policy, despite the fact that they had little to no connection. (Quick - what's the connection between lower taxes and not allowing gay people to marry?)

If you, or anyone else, is interested in reading more, here are some good resources:

1. The official trailer for the film Common Ground: Christians and the Message of Bernie Sanders
   
   
2. The Gospel of Bernie Tumblr, run by a Liberty University alum. I suggest starting at the bottom of the page to read the oldest posts first.
   
   
3. Here is Bernie's full speech at Jerry Falwell's conservative, evangelical Christian Liberty University.
   
   
4. Read the aforementioned Wikipedia article on Paul Weyrich.
   
   
5. article (Politico): The Real Origins of the Religious Right
   
   
6. article (The Christian Left Blog): The History of the "Christian" Right
   
   
7. podcast (The Best of the Left): History of the Christian Right
   
   
8. book (George Lakoff): Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think

> How is defending our own norms and values bigoted?

What you consider "white people" norms and values, aren't "white people" norms and values. You think they are because you are uneducated and you dont know how people come to believe/value what they do or what creates "culture" or the values you claim to extol. When you learn the answer to these questions you will then realize how you are currently uneducated and hold values are backwards and contradict the ACTUAL values/norms of western civilization which are enlightenment values.

These things aren't your "heritage". What you refer to as this are really just a form of antiquated Christian traditionalism that contradict western values. If you actually want to know the great history of western values and realize the actual legacy of white people(if you insist on racializing such a thing), I recommend you read Anthony Kenny's "The History of Western Philosophy". Below is the Amazon link and below that is part one.

https://www.amazon.com/New-History-Western-Philosophy/dp/0199656495

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.bibotu.com/books/2015/A%2520New%2520History%2520of%2520Western%2520Philosophy%2520-%2520Vol%25201.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwi63e3r5a_eAhVlRN8KHWo_CM0QFjAAegQIAhAB&usg=AOvVaw29a-DaxnCVryAbRYj2FGL9

You can find pdfs of parts 2, 3, and 4 online for free by Googling the name of the book and pdf.

When you learn the history of ethics, Christianity, political philosophy, and knowledge you will learn the actual legacy of western civilization and realize it has nothing to do with race, even though the philosophers who have advanced all the things I mentioned in the western world were generally white due to their privileged status in western civilization over the span of 2000+ years(a fact you want to blindly dismiss or are offended by for some odd reason).

I hope you will take this comment seriously, resist your temptation to confirmation bias your views and resist your temptation to look away and look into this book I recommended. This book I recommended will unequivocally change your mind and literally teach you how to think accurately, as that is the true subject of it. A detailed history of philosophy that shows its gradual development and advancement.

I will be happy to elaborate on any questions you may have.

u/JoeNiw, u/Belongs_To_The_Nords, u/Al_Shakir, u/HagridTheSoviet, u/Porphyrogennetos

>The grammar simplifies itself the more people use it.

How are you defining grammar? I would highly recommend cracking a textbook on historical linguistics (Introduction to Historical Linguistics by Crowley and Bowern is great, as is Historical Linguistics by R.L. Trask).

You seem to be specifically referring to the tendency of highly synthetic languages to become more analytic over time -- but seem to be forgetting (or are unaware of) the fact that analytic languages become agglutinating and then synthetic over time. The whole process is referred to as the grammaticalization cycle.

>Language carries with it a certain amount of entropy; if it's taught properly it can maintain itself, but most people don't have the time or need.

Again, I highly recommend consulting an introductory textbook for historical linguistics.

>So gradually people start playing fast and loose with the syntax and what not.

This is flat-out wrong. Either of the books I mention above will explain why.

>Lexical complexity is only the result of introducing more words though conquest or immigration which is common enough but it doesn't happen on it's own.

This is also wrong. Seriously, both of the above books are great -- both are very readable, and Trask has the excellent quality of being charmingly (and intentionally) hilarious.

You're clearly interested in language, otherwise you wouldn't be posting in this subreddit. I think you'll find the scientific study of language to be incredibly interesting and fun -- and more rewarding than just positing unsubstantiated suppositions.

Two resources that a majority of folks here will (without doubt) plug to you:

Kanji Damage

Heisig's Remembering the Kanji

Both of these are based around learning the components that comprise the Kanji (radicals) as opposed to learning each Kanji stroke by stroke. Make some flash cards and drill! I would suggest writing them out, but others seem content using an SRS like Anki. Some people also advise following Heisig's method and NOT learning the Japanese pronunciations until you've learning a hefty majority of the common use kanji, while others say you should learn the readings while you go (the Kanji Damage way). I've been chugging through Heisig's book at twenty kanji a day and it's been pretty easy.

Overall, as has been said over and over in this subreddit, do whatever you need to do to make learning it easy for you! Try stuff out and if it doesn't stick, move on to the next resource. Best of luck!

EDIT: I'd also like to add how even though kanji will seem really intimidating at first, once you get in the groove you'll find it's incredibly easy. Seriously. I'm at over 300 Kanji after three weeks of studying and can easily retain 90% of that when I'm studying and reviewing. If you approach it from the right angle, it shouldn't be too bad! :)

"Do you have any data to back up your claim that "While not all conservatives raise their children in this way, the vast majority do, and it is what I have experienced"."

http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Politics-Liberals-Conservatives-Think/dp/0226467716/

"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarianism"

Those just from top of my head, but the study of conservative/authoritarian model vs empathetic model of parenting is deep and long. They even developed a pretty well establish and commonly applied measurement; the F-scale.

People, in the USA, who score high on it trend GREATLY towards conservative politics and the GOP and apply strict authoritarian models of parenting.

That all said, in reply to the OP "question" the reason Libertarians tend to shy away from liberal politics and positions, despite sharing far more of their political positions with them, is the Libertarian view empathy as a weakness and share the conservative fear of the their fellow man as something inherently evil. Liberal models involve a focus on empathy, nurturant parent modeling, and a belief the true nature of man is decent.

Or, Liberals tend to think we do better when we come together for our mutual benefit and Libertarians AND conservatives believe their fellow man is dangerous and destructive.

Ironically, at least conservatives understand we all must work together and accept the limitations on our freedoms that all societies bring. Libertarians seem to have either not read or understand basic foundational concepts like Hobbes Social Contract or just rather want the protection of the social contract but are unwilling to share the burden.

Really, a Libertarian is just a narcissistic (or extremely ignorant) conservative. The authoritative model is the "answer' to a conservatives basic mistrust of his fellow man. The Libertarian still fears/distrusts his fellow man but seeks some impossible worldview where he is "self-reliant" YET still benefits from all the positive features of a structured (authoritative or not) society.

In my experience the young Libertarian is just generally ignorant of basic social contract (and will often "grow out of it" as he learns and understands the world better) and the older Libertarian is just a ragging narcissist who believes the world has done wrong by him or else he would be fabulously wealthy and appreciated as he was clearly meant to be.

I wouldn't bother. Have an interest in the language, sure! but don't try to learn it like you would a real-world language, because you can't really. You have to learn one of the Neo-Sindarin languages, which are contentious and no one agrees on which one is best, as you can probably imagine. If you like the version spoken in the Peter Jackson movies then I'd recommend getting hold of a copy of David Salo's A Gateway to Sindarin - it's not a "learn Sindarin" book per se, but it is a comprehensive grammar of the language as it appears in the movies. Personally, I think that Salo went a bit too far in his analysis of the consonant mutations and he, quite unbelievably, misanalysed one of the phonemes (he cites Sindarin <lh> as /l̥/ when it had already been known for some time to be /ɬ/).

Sindarin's vocabulary is nowhere near large enough to make every-day conversation, unless you want to talk about Middle-earth as if you live there... then by all means dive in! It's a good language to have an interest in and study it from an academic view, but not as a language to try to become fluent in and say "hey, I speak Elvish - mae govannen!"

You could, however, learn Welsh which has a phonetic inventory almost identical to Sindarin (even /ɬ/), very similar consonant mutations and other similar grammatical features, and it's a language spoken in the real world by real people, should you wish to speak with them. So you could (depending on where you live) claim to speak Elvish and then just speak Welsh...

From what I've heard, your best choice for an all-encompassing teach-yourself-linguistics book is the Language Files from Ohio State, which has a pretty big linguistics major.

If you want a more layman's introduction you can check out Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. The guy did a lecture at my school just yesterday, and he's quite good at explaining sociolinguistic concepts in everyday language. His current shtick is on analyzing language use. You can see a pretty cool video (an illustrated form of an excerpt from his current lecture) on Youtube.

If you want to go deeper, you might want to find book lists from a particular university. My university doesn't offer its lists publicly, but Ohio State does.

With a few exceptions (computational and certain sorts of applied linguistics like SLP), most linguistics graduate programs don't have specific technical expectations for students coming in. I'd just ask around. If you're picking a grad school, unless there's a compelling reason to stay close to home, you shouldn't be afraid to explore around the country. You'll end up getting paid pretty much the same amount anywhere if you're a linguistics grad student. My own school, Cornell University, has a lot of historical linguistics going on, especially Indo-Europeanist stuff, which you might be inclined to do as an anthropologist.

Finally, OCW has an abundance of linguistics courses available. Follow along with a few of those, although know that linguistics itself is a very diverse field that I can most closely analogize to biology. If you're studying pragmatics and sociolinguistics, you may do extremely well without ever knowing how to read a phonetic waveform. Just poke around and see what you like.

Do all that, and you'll be quite well prepared, and put a paper and a couple conferences under your belt as an undergraduate (at least in the Northeast, there are a few public undergraduate research conferences) and you should be no less prepared than your run-of-the-mill grad school-destined linguistics student.

As far as I know, the most popular introductory textbook is Fromkin's. You can get an older edition for cheaper. I studied with the 5th edition less than 3 years ago and it was fine. For something less unwieldy and more practical to carry around with you, Barry Blake's All About Language is really good. Less than 300 pages and manages to cover a huge amount of stuff clearly.

Personally, I think that historical linguistics is a really fun and relatively easy way to get into Linguistics as a whole so I'd recommend Trask's Historical Linguistics. I know that the Campbell and Crowley textbooks are also very popular, but I don't have personal experience with them. Maybe somebody else can weigh in on which is easiest for a beginner?

I have to plug my professor Kate Burridge here who has written some excellent pop-linguistics books: Gifts of the Gob, Weeds in the Garden of Words and Blooming English. Her more serious books are also written in a highly accessible manner and she is probably one of the world's experts on Euphemism and taboo. Here's a clip of her in action.

Some fun linguistics-related videos:

TED - The Uncanny Science of Linguistic Reconstruction

Pinker on Swearing

David Crystal on British tv

Another fun way to learn would be to listen to this song and look up all the terms used in it.

If you like learning about how languages develop and change, this book will probably have a big effect on the way you see language shifts. It's an entry-level summary of the basic language evolution principles that allow, for example, modern linguists to reverse engineer ancient languages with scant records.

The book jumped to mind because, if you understood some of these concepts, you'd never argue that people will descend to pointing and grunting. Using intense words to describe relatively mundane phenomena (e.g. "awesome") is something people often bemoan, but as those words become banal people continually seek new ways to make their communication - their very voices - stand out from the crowd in its intensity. That's a bit of a treadmill, but it's not necessarily one that actively lacks virtue.

Using "lazy" language like contractions, malapropisms, nonstandard spellings, metatheses, and so on isn't necessarily "destructive" to a language in a holistic sense, either. If certain terms or formations lose their specificity in a miasma of misuse, the need for that specificity doesn't necessarily go away. As long as people have need to communicate with specificity, they will reach for ways to do so when the moment requires it. Language is the tool we all use to convey meaning, and we're tool-makers at the very core of our collective being.

There are some "errors" I actively object to because they interfere with my speedy comprehension of written material in a jarring way. Some of that, I'm sure, is my own conditioned outrage. (For example, a sentence like "it's suppose to be this way," is jarring to me, but it's tough to make a sound semantic argument why "supposed to" and "intended to" should have identical meaning that precludes the use of "suppose to" without feeling like you're throwing good linguistics after bad.) Some of it I feel has genuine utility in easing comprehension, e.g. they're/there/their, its/it's.

Some corrections, such as less/fewer and further/farther, I feel are pedantic. As you might gather from my username, I have a certain appreciation for the pedantic, and I'm aware that I'm not alone in that capacity. I don't think that's any great sin, in and of itself! I will often correct people on matters of pedantry on the off chance that they, too, appreciate a good bit of pedantry. Overall, I try to control the image and tone of that communication carefully, though, because of something my Aunt, a professor of linguistics at University of Texas, told me a long time ago:

"One person can't hurt a language, but they can hurt feelings. Act accordingly."

This is a professor whose career's work was in recording and preserving endangered languages in the Yucatan.

So yeah - lighten up, there, son. Ain't none of these people gonna hurt English none, so long as folks've got stuff to say and use English to do it. If something trips you up, decide if it's because of a specificity/fluency barrier or just a learned "correctness fetish," and then do the needful.

WE DONT FEAR YOU.

WE DONT FEAR YOU.

WE DONT FEAR YOU.

WE DONT FEAR YOU.


"'You cannot accept that we don't fear you'"


I've pointed this out a few times, Trump is a "Father Figure", and it's a CLASSIC Father that abuses his wife and children, year, after year, after year. And they take the abuse. But yet the wife and kids will stay. Until one day, "Dad" goes too far. The kid's rebel.


Trump supporters are wired to "LOVE DAD", but one day Dad goes too far, and the kids rebel, and walk out saying, "WE ARE NO LONGER AFRAID OF YOU, DAD!" That happens. The sense of freedom is unbelievable.


A Trump supporters brain can be rewired, it takes a very strong jolt of reality to do it, but this could.


PLEASE read Lakoff, ($4 on Amazon used will CHANGE your life) he is brilliant at taking apart the "Father Figure" aspect of Trump voters. And one day, the kids do leave. It's not impossible to reprogram a brain. Think this quote by AOC will live on in the history of Ameria, for generations. 4 women, take on Dad, and he will crumble. It can happen.


"You cannot accept that we don't fear you'" 1000 years from now, they'll look back at AOC, and the teachers of the day will say to the 3rd graders, "See what you are capable of? Yes, these women changed the world, you can too."


\> Ten years after writing the definitive, international bestselling book on political debate and messaging, George Lakoff returns with new strategies about how to frame today’s essential issues.

Called the “father of framing” by The New York Times, Lakoff explains how framing is about ideas―ideas that come before policy, ideas that make sense of facts, ideas that are proactive not reactive, positive not negative, ideas that need to be communicated out loud every day in public.


https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/160358594X/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

The fundamental question that we're really fighting over is "How can society best be organized?"

And believe it or not, it's REALLY REALLY GOOD that we're fighting over it. Well, maybe not fighting, but definitely that we're debating...well, maybe we aren't debating, but WE SHOULD BE.

I hate to perpetuate the political dichotomy that seems to permeate the public sphere, but the truth is that we really are pretty evenly split into two fundamental camps based on answers to that fundamental question:

1.) The "conservative" answer is "Society is best served by individuals taking care of themselves." From this ethic, you get memes like:

a.) "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps."

b.) "Greed is good/let the markets decide."

c.) "Small government/don't depend on government."

d.) "Freeloaders/welfare queens/etc."

2.) The "progressive/liberal" answer is "Society is best served by individuals taking care of each other." From this ethic, you get memes like:

a.) "From each according to his own effort, to each according to his need."

b.) "Income inequality is bad for everyone."

c.) "Government is good/government protects us from corporations."

d.) "Affirmative Action/Hate Crime Legislation/ect."

For more information, I highly recommend George Lackoff's tome on the subject. You can get it used on Amazon for ~$7 including shipping.

I think it's not the best for this particular goal. The section "general introductions" contains a lot of books that are mostly appetizers. If you have already decided to study systematically to build a solid foundation you can downright skip these.

All the books of the other sections are either classics in their own right (therefore, you will study the meat of them in your study of the history of philosophy, and you will do so in the context of what they were replying to, what kind of assumptions they made etc.) or famous but not essential books that have been chosen according to the tastes of the author of the list (therefore you don't need them for foundations; you can always choose to include them in your list if you decide they are valuable in their own right).

So I say skip all the list for now. A much better and much faster way would be to read Anthony Kenny's history of philosophy. If you work through it making sure you understand all the arguments, your focus, thinking, and comprehension skills will already be at another level.

After that, you can start grappling with the Critique of pure reason. Be warned that most of the "introductions", "guides", "explanations" and "companions" to the CPR are actually investigations of obscure points that manage to be harder to read than the actual CPR. The best two books that I found that are actually introductory guides to CPR are this and this.

Despite the titles, they are not "Kant for dummies". They are actually dense expositions which require concentration, familiarity with terms used in philosophy, and knowledge of what came before Kant (both offer a quick overview, but if you don't already know what it's talking about it will just leave you dizzy). Of course, if you have already done step 1, this will be a breeze for you.

I suggest you read both before opening the real CPR, but if you only have patience/time for one: Rosenberg is more one-sided, more focused on certain aspects, and somewhat less clear on some points, but he will really get you excited on what the CPR can mean - it will become a great adventure that could possibly transform your whole understanding of yourself and the universe. Gardner is less exciting, but he is so clear, so exhaustive in predicting what kind of doubt can arise for the reader and in presenting the different interpretations, that it is scary.

Like Aksalon said, Peter Ladefoged's website will be your best friend. I've also suggested this book before. It's really clear in its explanations and, a plus for someone who's not fully committed to throwing money into text books yet, it's cheap :)

If you decide linguistics is something you might consider as a major in college, it definitely wouldn't hurt to try e-mailing a professor at the university you want to attend whose work you find interesting. If you can tell from the responses you're getting here, us linguistics people really like to talk about our work! :) Even those of us who aren't professors!

If you are so inclined, it might be helpful to read Moral Politics by George Lakoff. He's a linguist and a progressive/democrat activist person, and some of his books are straightford political advocacy books. That one however, is more of a linguistics/ psychology book. In it he advances his theory that political positions (including on gay marriage) tend to stem from our tendency to consider political/societal level issues from the vantage point of our unconscious/ received assumptions about how families ought to work on an authoritarian-nurturing spectrum. Basically, on an unconscious level, we analogize. I found the book repetitive and boring at times, but his basic premise has been pretty useful way to think about these things for me.

Anyway, maybe thinking about this issue from some other perspectives-- sociology, gender politics, civil liberties, etc. could help you gain perspective on the ultimate source of your discomfort (as in, why is this a key religious belief for so many people? What does the status quo actually do-- who does it benefit, and why?). Once you understand your motivations a little better, maybe things won't feel the same anymore.

Well this one's kind of an interesting possible case of language change. See, lol started, of course, meaning "laugh out loud". Eventually, though, it's taken on its own status as a general term to indicate something is funny. It no longer necessarily means the person is actually "laughing out loud". One piece of evidence for this includes that it has its own pronunciations (/lɑl/ as in "lawl" or /lol/ as in "lohl" or approximately "Lowell", where the vowel rhymes with "pole") apart from pronouncing the initialism (that is, "ell oh ell"). Another piece of evidence is that it has its own derivations relating to this more general concept, as in doing it for the lulz. Applying the original literal meaning to this idiom would suggest this be read as *doing it for the laugh out louds or *doing it for the laughs out loud or something else that is just essentially nonsensible.

So, how does this apply to lol out loud? Consider the relatively famous case of the evolution of the word "today" from Latin to French. The Latin word for "today" is hodie (similar to hoy in Spanish). hodie is reduced from hoc ("this") + die ("day"). Derived from this, in Old French people thus said hui for "today", which more or less meant "this day". Eventually, though, this wasn't enough, and people eventually came to say au jour de hui, which literally means "on the day of this day". This was reduced to aujourd'hui. Finally, in modern times, some people now apparently colloquially say a jour d'ajourd'hui, or "on the day of on the day of this day". (source, see also Deutscher's Unfolding of Language for more details). So, hopefully you can see a connection: even though lol may in some cases literally mean "laughing out loud", it is not out of the realm of language change for people to eventually start saying lolling out loud unironically, as the original form gets reduced and/or loses its original literal connotation.

Language Myths could be a good start. It's a collection of essays written by linguists about some common misconceptions about language and how it works. It covers some really common myths, such as the "Eskimo language has thousands of words for snow" nonsense, and covers some sociolinguistic things like people's perception of language and the idea of prestige. It's written for people without a linguistics background.

If you would prefer something more akin to a university introduction course in linguistics rather than a coffee table book, try reading Language Files. Personally, I think it's a little too shallow, even for an introduction, but maybe you'd like it.

If you'd like to save the effort and money and just read Wikipedia pages, there are a ton of relevant ones.

Descriptivism

Problems with Prescriptivism

Sociolinguistics

Prestige

Dialect

Or, a single person's dialect: Idiolect

Sociolects

Some dialects of English that some people might consider "incorrect":

African American English Vernacular

Chicano English

Hiberno-English

Jamaican English

Standard Singaporean English

If you have any more questions, please let me know. I'd be more than happy to do anything I can to help.

“Lol, k-buddy.”

What a schmuck.

https://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_84.html

Speaking American: How Y’all, Youse , and You Guys Talk: A Visual Guide https://www.amazon.com/dp/0544703391/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_MjDCCbR9VX4XD

The above link is the actual survey results from which NYT pulled their information. As you can see, the two terms are used interchangeably in much of the United States. The original, peer-reviewed, quantitative survey was conducted by the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee.

The second link is the results of the 350,000 Americans who took the NYT survey as compiled into a visual guide. On the description section of the page you will actually see the map for roundabout vs traffic circle. Traffic circle is only almost exclusively Dallas, OKC, Louisiana, and the East Coast north of South Carolina. The rest of the country seems to use the term roundabout. Now, it only takes a very simple high school education in reasoning and a working middle school knowledge of geography and using maps to see that it is pretty clearly a regional difference to the tune of about 350,000 real data points deep.

But, as we all know, whatever one edition of one dictionary says is probably a better source for the growth and evolution of language than a research study involving living speakers of the language, so you should definitely just keep blindly citing the Oxford English Dictionary like it makes you intelligent. That’s why any time someone says they have “imposter syndrome,” I politely point out that word is not proper English since it’s not part of the 2017 Oxford English Dictionary, and that’s my preferred version on which to base all usage of language.

Tl;dr - you are a pedantic, condescending tool (and unfortunately not even a smart one) who thinks the stand up shots subreddit is the best place to flex your lack of intelligence, “buddy.”

It’s a fundamental personality trait. Some people are drawn to this this “strong father” archetype and enjoy authoritative leaders and a social hierarchy based on social darwinian justice. Others, i.e. educated people (seriously, look it up), prefer egalitarianism and freedom of choice, with a solid social safety net. These are less likely to believe that the people that happen to be “on top” morally better than those currently on the bottom. Whereas the authoritarian thinker finds comfort in believing that everyone is getting exactly what they deserve.

So this explains, for example, some of the defense of the current president. He is the president, thereby he deserves to be the president. He is “wealthy,” thereby he is better than those who are not, and has moral authority. It doesn’t matter what he says or does, because authoritarian people rigidly respect the power structure, because it makes their world make sense.

This is mostly coming from this book (and some psych papers that I can’t recall at the moment):

https://www.amazon.com/ALL-NEW-Dont-Think-Elephant/dp/160358594X

It might be helpful to read an introductory text first. My first philosophy of math course used Stewart Shapiro's [Thinking about mathematics] (http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-about-Mathematics-The-Philosophy/dp/0192893068/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341687670&sr=8-1&keywords=stewart+shapiro) as a supplementary text. I didn't use it too much, but it is pretty good and quite approachable from what I recall. Shapiro is a very well regarded contemporary philosopher of mathematics.

You could also start with the [SEP article] (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-mathematics/). This will give you an overview of the area, its history, and the various sub-disciplines. That can help you narrow down what in particularly you are interested in which will make it easier for you to find appropriate books.

I've only taken one module in philosophy of mathematics (also the only actual philosophy class I've taken) but Shapiro has a good book we used as a go-to text. Link below bc I don't know how to format on mobile. As far as prerequisite knowledge, you shouldn't need much beyond set/model theory and some mathematical logic, and even that isn't necessary depending on how far your studies are.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thinking-About-Mathematics-Philosophy/dp/0192893068

Gives a good overview of various topics in PoM, mainly questions of either:
• Ontology - Do mathematical objects exist? If so, in what sense?
• Epistemology - How do we have mathematical knowledge? How does it apply to the real world?

Aside from the book mentioned above, just do a quick Google and see what you can find in your library catalogue! Ayer, Kant, and Quine are some prominent authors.

Hope that helps some :)

1. Make sure you brush up on the language point you're teaching. Have examples prepared beforehand that you can present to your students, and a way of explaining it that is concise and easy to understand. Practical English Usage by Michael Swan is quite a useful resource.
   
   
2. Have a good lesson plan prepared, but don't be a slave to it. Parts of the lesson may take more or less time than anticipated, depending on student interest, how long it takes to grasp something, etc. As you gain more experience you'll get better at estimating how long particular stages of a lesson should last.
   
   
3. Don't be too hard on yourself if you have a bad class. It happens. Reflect on it to see if there was anything you could have done differently, but don't dwell on it too much. Move on.
   
   Bonus tip - trying to get the students to speak English can be a struggle, but there are ways to motivate them. One method I use is to have a yellow and red card to hand, like a football referee. If a student uses their first language too much, they get the yellow card. If they do it again, they get the red card and have to do a forfeit - something like singing a stupid song or press-ups. Perhaps let the class take a vote on what the forfeit should be - that way no-one can really complain if they have to do it.

In my opinion, the most convincing explanation of why economically-disadvantaged whites vote for a political party contrary to their economic interests (and why rich, city-dwelling intellectuals vote Democratic) is in Moral Politics by cognitive linguist George Lakoff.

The argument is essentially that the two major ideologies in US politics are defined by deeply held worldviews about morality, not economic self-interest or sincere policy preferences. It was a lot more convincing to me than Frank's "they vote Republican because they're dupes" thesis. The argument is too complicated for me to break out in detail here, so I'd recommend the book, even though it was written during the 1990s, so its examples are a little out of date.

I think we should also be careful when analogizing past political parties to our own. The "Progressive movement" around the turn of the century is most definitely not the same as today's left-liberal "Progressives" in the Democratic party. Many pet causes of the Progressive Movement (e.g. temperance) would be considered very conservative today. Politics was sufficiently different 100 years ago that even drawing left-right analogies simplifies things way too much. The issues were far different in that time, as was the composition of the electorate.

EDIT: added a link

>But what exactly does a linguist do

If you mean job-wise, this here shows some of the different kinds of trouble you can get into as a linguist.

If you mean what kinds of things you can study, the school I go to requires classes in 4 core areas of study: phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax (I think most universities probably have a similar requirement.). From there you can then take advanced topics in those areas or in other areas like sociolinguistics, areal linguistics, language acquisition.

The program I'm doing is focused in language documentation, so that involves learning how to go out to the field (or wherever you find a consultant) and make records of languages with little to no description. This includes gathering material to write up descriptions that can range from simple overviews of the phonology or the morphology of the language to writing a whole grammar of the language (like this one).

>why did you choose this for studying

I've just been interested in foreign languages for as long as I can remember. Trying to figure out how they work the way they do is just an extension of that for me. I really like syntax and historical/comparative, and also just learning how other languages express things.

Wikipedia is actually a pretty good place to start learning about the subject. The Language Instinct is pretty good and The Unfolding of Language is really good to see how languages can change over time.

Unfortunately, there's not really one standard way to learn Tolkien's languages, so some courses disagree with each other, and it's important to watch out for what the author of any given course decided vs. what Tolkien intended.

That being said, I'm a huge fan of Ardalambion – the Quenya courses they have are fantastic, though a bit dense with linguistic concepts (but he teaches terminology as he goes, and the ideas are worth knowing).

For Sindarin, I've had some good experiences with Your Sindarin Textbook but it's not nearly as detailed or as easy to follow. You may also hear about David Salo's Gateway to Sindarin. Salo's the linguist who worked on the Jackson movies – his work is good if you're looking for movie Sindarin, but it's pretty non-standard regarding the Sindarin of the books.

Of course, there's also /r/Quenya and /r/Sindarin, both of which have excellent resource lists.

This reminds me of the endless epistemology debate about what it meant to "know" and what is meant by "justified true belief" and so on ad infinatum for decades.

It's interesting (and it can be useful), but it's not practical. If you want to actually accomplish anything, you need to learn to get at the truth reliably. Currently, science is doing this quite well, thank you, and I'm cool to just let it truck along and see where it ends up. Let's not cross bridges before we get to them. The scientific method's track record on "discovering the things that are most likely to be true about the universe" is so far way better than any other technique's.

"Don't Sleep, there are snakes" by Dan Everett - it's a fascinating book about a linguist/missionary who went to work with a tribe of Piraha speakers in the Amazon. Loses his religion, and discovers a language that doesn't really fit into the orthodox view of linguistics and is causing a whole lot of debate.

The Drunkard's Walk - is a great book on how misconceptions of probability rule your life. It's a fun introduction to probability theory and has all sorts of WTF moments in it.

Edit: oh and possibly my favorite book I've read all year is David Attenborough's autobiography A life on air - it's full of all sorts of amazing, hilarious, and insightful anecdotes of Attenborough's 40-odd years of making nature documentaries, and contains lots of interesting info about the state-of-the art in TV making over time (e.g. "we could only run that type of camera for 20 seconds, or it would overheat and catch fire"). Great stuff.

I highly suggest you read the book The Unfolding of Language

It is one of my favorite books, readable to a layman yet delving into some pretty complex stuff in terms of grammatical complexity, phonology etc. It is basically an introduction to linguistics and morphology class nicely encapsulated in one very well-written book.

And it deals specifically with your question.

The author of the book analyzes linguistic creative destruction, that is, what we perceive to be the "erosion" of grammatical structures actually helps to build new ones over time. A good example he gives is the latin verb conjugation giving way to that in the romance languages. Latin loses the structures like amavero, I will love, whereas French takes the infinitive amare --> aimer and adds the verb avoir, have. So we get the complex French conjugation system wherein the future is denoted by "aimerai", "i will love", for example.

Anyway, I highly recommend that book if you ever have a few lazy days to read through it.

One thing I found was to do my best to understand their philosophy and what values were important to them.

I found 2 books to be pretty good on explaining the differences: Moral Politics (which is a bit dated) and The Righteous Mind. I think Haidt's book explains things a bit better because his premise is that we have several different axes for our value systems, and that those differences give rise to our different political differences.

I can only speak for hist ling, but I've loved Trask's - detailed and the exercises can be challenging. I used Crowley/Bowern's in a class and found it a bit slower with not all the information you might want, though there are tons of examples from non-IE languages which is nice. Judging by Amazon another favorite seems to be Campbell's, though I don't have experience with it. I think all of these books would require some prior work in phonology/phonetics, though nothing you couldn't pick soon enough (they might even have a refresher sections, I can't recall).

This compilation looks good. There's also the classic Chomsky Reader which was my introduction.

Chomsky can be a lttle tough to read, especially the later stuff. The earlier books are quite readable, but starting in the mid-80s it get a bit tougher. He's really at his best in spontaneous interviews. Here is a transcript of an early talk he gave, it lays out his personal political philosophy and its roots very clearly.

This book is my own personal favorite, a big collection of transcripts covering just about everything, even some linguistics.

Short answer: Have a triliteral for "speak", then answer questions like

• If I put m-rh-n into a pattern for creating verbs (*emrhen) what does that mean?
  
• If I put sh-k-t into a pattern for creating nouns (*shekt) what does that mean?
  
• What other words can I form from m-rh-n and sh-k-t?
  
  Some cautionary advice: give some thought to the shape of the language before triliteral roots developed and what sound changes created the sense in the speakers' minds that three letters chosen from within the word would carry meaning as opposed to a whole root - your language will come out better for it. The Unfolding of Language has a pretty good overview of the process in Semitic - if you're not careful you'll end up creating something not interestingly different from Arabic.

I think you are unwisely dismissive of the chronological route.

Placing abstract and difficult ideas in historical context and threading a narrative is a great way to make those ideas more concrete and engaging.

A psychological sense of the historical roots of ones culture is also a fantastic bulwark against feelings of arbitrariness and absurdity of modern life.

I think any discipline, whether philosophy, mathematics, science, engineering or art is only enriched by the chronological approach. History is important and wonderful and learning the history of the development, evolution and progress of culture is a great counterpoint to learning history as one damned atrocity after another.

A book like Kenny's A New History of Western Philosophy is big and dense, but not impossible to "conquer". It took me about 6 months to finish. That required a bit of commitment on my part, yes, but don't assume OP is a slacker that can't even commit to such a elementary project as reading through a slightly long book.

There are shorter less dense historical introductions to philosophy too.

Recommended these a while back, great, assessable reads.

The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker
http://www.amazon.com/The-Language-Instinct-Mind-Creates/dp/0061336467/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343383543&sr=8-1&keywords=the+language+instinct

Patterns in the Mind by Ray Jackendoff
http://www.amazon.com/Patterns-Mind-Language-Human-Nature/dp/0465054625/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343383561&sr=1-1&keywords=patterns+in+the+mind

And if you are into etymology, check out

The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, by Bill Bryson
http://www.amazon.com/Mother-Tongue-English-How-That/dp/0380715430/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343383614&sr=1-1&keywords=the+mother+tongue

The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour Through Mankind's Greatest Invention, by Guy Deutscher
http://www.amazon.com/The-Unfolding-Language-Evolutionary-Invention/dp/0805080120/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343383676&sr=1-2-fkmr0&keywords=guy+deucher+language

Again, all superb books.

I picked that example because it is bluer than the traffic lights I'm used to in the US. Japanese speakers historically treated the English equivalents of blue and green as shades of the same color ao, but with language shift midori came to be seen as its own color "green" distinct from ao, roughly equivalent to blue. According to the book Through the Language Glass, Japanese traffic lights were imported from the US in the 1930s before the linguistic shift and so were called ao even though they were just as green as American traffic lights. In 1973 after the shift, the lights were still called ao and the Japanese government decided to make the traffic lights as blue as possible while still following international guidelines.

An important point: just because blue and green were treated as shades of the same color, it doesn't mean Japanese speakers couldn't tell the difference. English speakers are perfectly capable of distinguishing light blue and dark blue even though they fall under the same term "blue", while Russian speakers treat light blue and dark blue as independent colors.

He's not kidding. Mnemonics are the shit.

I'm learning kanji at the rate of 20 per day with the help of this book's mnemonic system. I spend at most five minutes per character, and after studying them and writing them down only once, I am able to remember them incredibly easy.

With the help of anki for review, it only takes me about four separate reviews spaced over a week or two to remember a character, essentially, permanently. According to my anki history, I've never failed a card that the system considers "memorized", and my success rate for cards a week or less old is 82%.

Before I came across that book I linked a little bit above, I was trying to memorize them by rote, writing each character down dozens and dozens of times every day until it stuck. I could only do maybe three or four characters each day, and I almost always half-forgot them three days later.

There's a way, sort of, J.R.R.Tolkien has left all his linguistic writings on the Elvish Languages in 7 big boxes, (thousands of pages per box) and Christopher Tolkien has later referred to them naming as Quenya A, B, up to Quenya G, for they can be specifically identified. Yes, not a couple of boxes, but even 7, my mellyn (PE: 22, p. 141).

Be aware, though, that if you do not have a particular background, these pages will be likely not understandable, sadly...

Regarding what you can hear/read online:

In real life it is simple. If you do not follow the rules of English grammar you are not writing or speaking in English. If you don't follow Tolkien's rules you are not writing his elf! Anyone who visits the websites dedicated to Elvish languages (Eldalie, Quenya.101, Ardalambion, etc.) or reads the books dedicated to them (those of David Salo, Ruth S. Noel, Pesch, Comastri, etc.) trying to learn Quenya or Sindarin, will be baffled by the array of many different and conflicting grammar rules. These sites and books never agree with each other. Why?

Because every author has invented his own rules.

We read from many writers (Drout, Pesch) and on the net that there are many “neo-elvish” languages: the neo-quenya and neo-sindarin. But it is not correct, neo-elvish languages do not exist or rather are not languages. Writing: Something wure mi expectatione [sic] does not mean that whoever wrote it is the creator of a neo-english language, the same with: Alaghioru saranno alboro dormirenene [sic] won’t make you the creator of a new neo-italian language. To create a neo-language one must first of all be a linguist, know the rules of a Tolkien elven language well and from there build a new elven language. What a job! Those who build what they call neo-Sindarin and neo-quenya only rarely mention Tolkien's grammars and almost never explain what they do (for example, I change this thing written by Tolkien, because I invented a certain new rule). What they build are not languages. They distort the little of what they understand about Tolkien's logopoeia at will.

This is a nicely annotated compendium that teaches the history of Ancient Greek through reading. You will find a huge assortment of dialects and genres represented:

https://www.amazon.com/Historical-Greek-Reader-Mycenaean-Koine/dp/0199226601

Combine with an historical grammar and you should be good to go. This is a recent introduction by a great scholar:

https://www.amazon.de/Historische-Grammatik-Griechischen-Laut-Formenlehre/dp/3534206819

Anything by Pierre Chantraine is highly recommended if you can read french. Both his treatment of Homeric, his historical grammar and his dictionary.

Another good dictionary to consult for individual glosses is the one by the late Robert Beekes. It's not perfect but very accessible:

https://brill.com/view/title/17726?lang=en

I would recommend you to consult Fortson and Ringe if you have little previous experience with diachronic linguistics. Ringe for methodological questions and Fortson for Proto-Indoeuropean. Proto-Greek contains many morphological archaisms inherited from Proto-Indoeuropean. You can focus on inner greek developments, but not everything you encounter can be analyzed in a meaningful way within Greek, so it's good to know where to look if the greek data is insufficient:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/historical-linguistics/6722029555C7DB845251785673A48B4C

https://www.amazon.com/Indo-European-Language-Culture-Benjamin-Fortson/dp/1405188960

If you want an in depth introduction to Ancient Greek dialects for students at graduate level and above this tome by Gary Miller should come in handy along with Buck's classic work on the subject, but it's not necessary if you only want to brush up on the fundamentals:

https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Greek-Dialects-Early-Authors/dp/1614514933

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-greek-dialects-9781853995569/

If you are into rigor, Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment is unparalleled. A good teaser for the book is this podcast with the author. If the podcast tagline "An Epistemology for James Randi" appeals to you, you'll like the book. Even if it doesn't, you still might. ;-)

If you actually want to use your skeptical outlook to change the world, one of the authors wrote Why Empathy Matters: The Science and Psychology of Better Judgment. The book explains a lot of modern cognitive science and uses it to give excellent suggestions for how to structure out own lives and our societies use our biases against us to trick us into living something closer to what most can agree is the good life.

>Is there a good book I could read to learn more about (proto-)Indo-Europeans and all those subgroups you mentioned?

For the Proto-Indo-Europeans, you can read Beekes, Mallory, or Fortson. For the Pre-Indo-European people, there has yet to be a book addressing all of them (and there's a good chance there will never be a book, because so little is known about them). You can see my blog, which I linked in my first post, to see a survey of all the Pre-Indo-Europeans. From there, you must google search. If you have any questions about specific Pre-IE people, just ask.

>I'd like to learn more about this stuff too. In a way, it seems to parallel the old (and probably wrong?) legends about the ancient history of India.

Yes, well, the linguistic conquerors of Europe were the same conquerors of India: the Indo-Europeans. A lot more of the Pre-IE cultures of India survive than do in Europe.

edit: A side-note, my list on my blog is incomplete. There is a bounty of Pre-IE studies of tribes in northernmost Europe: the Baltic strip, the higher reaches of Sweden, Finland, and Norway, and the expanse of northern Russia. These tribes are often called Pre-Proto-Uralic tribes, because those lands were displaced by the Urals rather than the Indo-Europeans. Unfortunately, the good majority of stuff being written on it is in Finnish, which I can't read.

If you are a serious learner of the language, then this is site all you need IMO: All Japanese All The Time. I stumbled across this site while in college and in the course of three years (one of which was spent abroad in Japan), I learned Japanese to a very high level. If you are still a student, it will be even easier for you to take on this method.

One more thing. This is also a part of the AJATT method, but deserves separate recognition: Remembering the Kanji. In all my years of learning Japanese, this book was the single most useful text I've ever encountered.

Good luck!

No problem, it was fun. :D

If you're interested in IE Historical Linguistics, you might want to check out Ben Fortson's awesome Introduction, though this is much more focused on the reconstructed language itself and the development of the individual daughter languages than in the history and culture of the original Indo-Europeans.

For more of a broad cultural history, you might want to check out Mallory's book, which is written in a very easy to read style.

General principle and approach to understanding existence:

Anekantavada

Historical Materialism
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Books I'd recommend to every former believer:

The Birth and Death of Meaning

To Have or To Be

Language in Thought and Action

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Also Ayn Rand and Sam Harris have been good examples that show to me that losing religious belief doesn't necessitate that someone becomes "good". This has driven me to relentlessly continue to search for, and facilitate the experience of Truth, Justice, Beauty, Love. In that sense I've retained the concept in Islam of jihad (to relentlessly strive and struggle for Truth Justice Beauty Love).

In this stage of our material history, I believe this can only be accomplished through abolishing private property.

3 minute intro to Marxism

10 minute intro to Karl Marx --- (Reminder for newcomers that private property refers exclusively to the means of production, not your home and other possessions which are considered personal property)

Introduction to Marxism by Professor Richard D. Wolff

Against Capitalism by Jerry Cohen

Introduction to Anarchism by Noam Chomsky

Chomsky on capitalism #1

Chomsky on capitalism #2

Here is a list of some more Chomsky videos

'Anarchy Works' - A simple Q&A style book

Albert Einstein - Why Socialism?

The Conquest of Bread by Kroptokin - Anarcho-Communism, audiobook

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Engels

What is Property? by Proudhon

Reform or Revolution by Rosa Luxemborg

Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman

A Peoples History of the United States by Howard Zinn ...Universally acclaimed by those on the left, and a definite classic/must-read ... can also be found in audiobook form on kickass torrents or the pirate bay

Capital Volume 1 by Karl Marx - Explained by David Harvey

The Principles of Communism

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

The Zapatista movement: A modern day libertarian socialist society

Rojava: Another modern day socialist society

Marx's concept of false consciousness; similar to what we call 'the matrix' in the 21st century

Marx on 'alienation' of workers

Liberationschool.org

http://ouleft.org/


/r/Socialism

/r/Socialism101

/r/Anarchy101 <--- the best of all the '101' subreddits IMO as it has the most content (use the search bar as well)

/r/Communism101

/r/DebateACommunist

/r/DebateAnarchism

https://youtu.be/-w12bkm9g8o?t=3m18s <--- Capitalist exploitation explained


Leftist movies and documentaries:

'Americas Unofficial Religion - The War on an Idea' - Short documentary about the history of socialism and the left in America ... This one is absolutely essential


'Matewan' - A labor union organizer comes to an embattled mining community brutally and violently dominated and harassed by the mining company - 7.9/10 on IMDB

['Land and Freedom' - an unemployed communist that comes to Spain in 1937 during the civil war to enroll the republicans and defend the democracy against the fascists. 7.6/10 on IMDB](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114671/?ref=fn_al_tt_1)


'The Take' - tells the story of workers in Buenos Aires, Argentina who reclaim control of a closed Forja auto plant where they once worked and turn it into a worker cooperative.

'Inside Job' - documentary featuring Matt Damon about the 2008 financial crisis

'Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media' - documentary about the noted American linguist/political dissident and his warning about corporate media's role in modern propaganda.


'Che: Part One' - In 1956, Ernesto 'Che' Guevara and a band of Castro-led Cuban exiles mobilize an army to topple the regime of dictator Fulgencio Batista.

'The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975' - about the Black Panther movement, featuring Angela Davis, MLK jr, Malcom X

'The Perverts Guide to Ideology' - In this clip from the film, Slavoj Zizek explains ideology

Socialism is an economic and social system defined by social ownership of the means of production. (Workers democratically own and operate the places in which they work, as opposed to private power aka capitalism)

The means of production are non-human inputs the create economic value, such as factories, workplaces, industrial machinery, etc. Socialists refer to the means of production as capital, or private property. Private property in the socialist context shouldn't be confused with personal property, such as your home, car, computer, and other possessions.

In a capitalist society the means of production are owned and controlled privately, by those that can afford them (the capitalist aka those with capital). Production is carried out to benefit the capitalist (production for profit). Workers are paid a wage, and receive that amount regardless of how much value they produce.

Communism is the highest developed stage of socialism wherein there is no state, no money, no class system. The means of production are owned by all and provide for everyone's needs.


Past and present socialist/anarchist societies include - Revolutionary Catalonia, Anarchist Aragon, Shinmin Province in Korea/Manchuria, Free Territory of Ukraine, The Bavarian Soviet Republic, The Paris Commune, The Zapatista controlled areas of Chiapas (current day), Magonista Baja California, Shanghai People's Commune, Rojava (current day), etc

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The only other drive available to me is to be a careerist, which I am not interested in. I just need the money to make a living but I don't plan on going above and beyond even though the opportunities do present themselves to me.

George Lakoff will help you understand conservatives (and swing voters) better than any pundit ever could.
He also does a great job of explaining the moral nature of politics, and how liberals can formulate better moral arguments to persuade what he calls "bi-conceptual" voters.

Edit: The poll referenced in this very post is one of many examples I've seen in recent years of actual data backing up Lakoff's theories. When combined with recent studies showing the differences between the parts of the brain liberals and conservatives use to process political/moral issues, Lakoff's concepts are dead-on.

You should just read this book. It's extremely easy and still very useful, and written by the best philosopher of maths currently alive.

More contemporary philosophy is interesting too. A bit more complex but very rewarding. My path into it was religious philosophy so I read people like William Lane Craig, Bertrand Russel, Plantinga, and various bloggers. It's surprising how many bored philosophy grad students have blogs.

For heuristics and biases you'll be fine with anything by Tversky and/or Khaneman. They essentially started the field and then literally wrote the book. For a fusion of philosophy and applied rationality try Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment.

I recommend Language Files written by the faculty at the Ohio State University. It was my intro to linguistics book and it offers a very general yet thorough survey of all of the sub-fields of linguistics. It really is a fantastic book and I reference it frequently. Older editions will do if you are on a budget.

You could go Pinker, you could go Lagefoged, but really you're only going to be scratching the surface of very specific areas that way. Books like Pinker's are great for getting your mind wandering about language, though.

I'll echo the obvious: linguistics. "A Very Short Introduction" would be good, as would be "The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language" ( http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Encyclopedia-Language-David-Crystal/dp/0521736501 ).

I started getting interested in linguistics very young (beginning at 4, then with much more interest in high school when I began to take German). Now I'm in an MA program in Linguistics and am aiming for a Ph.D. to be a professor in the field. Enjoy!

I'd recommend reading a book on the history of philosophy. That way, you'll have a working understanding of all the major philosophers, and you will probably find someone's philosophy interesting enough to pursue them further. A classic is Samuel Enoch Stumpf's Socrates to Sarte. A friend of mine also recommended a more contemporary book that he said is becoming more standard today. A New History of Western Philosophy by Anthony Kenny.

Other standards works many students start with include Rene Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy. Also, Plato is a good starting point. The Five Dialogues are some of his earlier works. These include the Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, and Phaedo. I personally started with Plato's Republic, which a former professor informed me that you must read in order to consider yourself educated in today's world (Interestingly enough, he's only ever said that about books he's read).

I invent a naming language.

For my high-fantasy game world I took the time to sit down with the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Encyclopedia-Language-David-Crystal/dp/0521736501) and the Zompist site (http://www.zompist.com/resources/) and build a set of naming languages. Then I wrote a program that uses the rules that I distilled to generate names.

For a far-future science-fiction setting where player characters are artificial intelligences, I came up with a scheme for mapping bytes to components of names, and wrote a program to generate 64-bit names.

If you're a programmer, it's pretty easy to write programs that generate names, if you have a general idea of what you want the names to look like. You can do it several ways:

• travesty generators, like Dissociated Press (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travesty_generator)
  
  
• Markov chains (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain#Markov_text_generators)
  
  
• rule-driven generators (make a table that encodes the rules that names have to follow and randomly choose elements that follow the rules)
  
  If you use generated names, you have to do some tuning and selection because occasionally you'll get really terrible ones. I don't find the tuning onerous because the testing usually ends up making me laugh. All of the above types of generators can generate some hilarious names.
  
  

Here is a good start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography#History

>Inconsistencies and irregularities in English pronunciation and spelling have gradually increased in number throughout the history of the English language. There are a number of contributing factors. First, gradual changes in pronunciation, such as the Great Vowel Shift, account for a tremendous number of irregularities. Second, relatively recent loan words from other languages generally carry their original spellings, which are often not phonetic in English.

>The regular spelling system of Old English was swept away by the Norman Conquest, and English itself was supplanted in some spheres by Norman French for three centuries, eventually emerging with its spelling much influenced by French. English had also borrowed large numbers of words from French, which naturally kept their French spellings as there was no reason or mechanism to change them.

This book was recommended in another thread:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521736501

Kyle did a nice job there. The framing pressures at Fox News are at such full force that you have to be very active in counteracting them. Otherwise you will fall into any of a long list of games they play with their average viewer to gain support for their conclusions. I would suggest a book by George Lakoff called Don't Think of an Elephant, as it's about that very subject

As with all thoughts, there will always be people who co-opt them for their own ends, regardless of the actual substance of them. Both Capitalism and Communism were/are exploited to enrich very few despite promising prosperity for all. All religions have been abused in so many ways to justify so many atrocities throughout history. Monarchism, Feudalism, Racism, Sexism, Fascism, Anti-Semitism, and so on. Even ideologies which focus entirely on freedom like Libertarianism or Anarchism can and have been used to control and manipulate.

​

Social Constructivism is an idea. It's a theory that attempts to explain aspects of human societies and behaviours. It is used by stupid people stupidly, and smart people smartly. It can be used to control or free people. It seems to be an inevitable aspect of human nature to tend towards oppressive hierarchy. It takes concious effort to fight it. That is what these people, for the most part, believe they are doing. And, if we're being honest with ourselves here, they actually are. They have the stats to prove that these negative outcomes are ongoing even in rich developed Western countries. You say that they are deliberately employing a divide-and-conquer strategy as if they are waging a war on everyone else. As if it's you and them. But it isn't. All they want is a good and just society, which I think is something you want too. I know I do.

​

The French revolutionary philosophers, along with British ones, together formed the rights-based natural-law freedom-focused philosophy that founded the United States and dominates the Anglosphere, and the rest of the Western World. It is a rich and varied body of work I'd encourage you to look into since you seem quite interested in it. Here's some good starting points: Jean-Jaques Rousseau, and this is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Positive and Negative Freedom. The latter is excellent and has articles on everything you can think of. A really good book is a New History of Western Philosophy by Anthony Kenny. If you can only read one thing, read that. It's like 1000 pages but it breezes by; his style is so good and engaging. The reasons why these ideas came about was in the pursuit of freedom. Even Marx. He and Adam Smith were actually very much cut from the same cloth. It's all very interesting.

​

China is not as monolithic or united as you seem to think it is. It has suffered and continues to suffer from frequent unrest and dissent. We rarely hear about it over here in the West. But remember: everyone in China is basically just like you. The country is as mixed as you'd expect over 1.5bn people to be, it's just relatively cut-off from the rest of the world.

​

​

I like Micheal Swan's - Practical English Usage.

You probably could read it to learn grammar, but I teach ESL and find it's a great reference with clear explanations and examples.

If you are interested, maybe check out one of Lakoff's books like "Don't Think of an Elephant. This critique rings true for me as I work in community mental health, mostly with children and families. I see the impact of differing parenting strategies/structures every day. I am biased I'm sure, but I think securing funding for basic access to healthcare, education and mental health services for children would go a long way towards solving our problems in this country. The right-wing worldview is not pro-social and in some cases is downright anti-social. Lakoff puts forward a number of solutions for this problem.

I agree that the structure of our democracy most likely needs to be altered. This could mean moving towards a parliamentary system and/or it should include efforts to increase voter participation and civil society.

if you're interested in book recommendations, I've been been reading the unfolding of language, which has some good discussion about the sort of processes that cause inflections to appear and disappear. I've found it to be a very easy and interesting read!

One of my favorite books when it comes to Linguistic Anthropology, and it touches on language conservation issues:
We Share Walls

This is my favorite Linguistic Anthropology Reader, tons of articles that really make up the base of the field: Linguistic Anthropology Reader

A fun read even if you don't like Evolutionary Psychology: http://www.amazon.com/Grooming-Gossip-Evolution-Language-Dunbar/dp/0674363361

I haven't read The Horse, the Wheel and Language. I will look out for it now, I'm very interested in Indo-European history and the reconstruction of Indo-European ur-culture.

I can't really claim to be an expert on linguistics. But Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction, while not exactly a riveting thrill-ride, does set out the whole basis of linguistic change and development over time, and explains the way in which languages can be reconstructed. I studied philology as a part of history (you can track cultural changes through vocabulary, for example, or date sections of a manuscript using word changes), and this kind of guide is very helpful. It does help with understanding how Tolkien managed to create a language, too.

Most definitely! I'm a Hebrew speaker, and this happens all the time. Also, in Guy Deuthscher's book Through the Language Glass he gives a nice example of a poem by Heine where this comes through. Look at the original poem, alongside several translations. The German song hinges on the fact that "pine" is a masculine noun, while "palm" is feminine, and the English translations choose various ways to accommodate this. In Deutscher's book (I read the Hebrew version of it) there's also a Hebrew translation of the poem, using Hebrew's gendered nouns in a way analogous to that of the original.

A good general resource is this site (particularly the 'links of interest' section if you're looking at the real world history). It should be more than enough if you're writing a typical high school paper or low level college paper. You'll probably need more for a hardcore research paper though.

I'm assuming your prior knowledge is pretty limited if you even think you can write much about Dwarvish or Black speech. Dwarvish has the most vague of grammar outlines less than a page of vocab, and Black Speech has less than that. You could talk about Elvish all day though.

If you're able to get your hands on A Gateway to Sindarin then half your paper is finished already. (Disclaimer, David Salo seems like a decent author and linguist to my amateur eyes, but he has a nasty habit of making educated guesses and treating them as fact. But as a general introduction to a complete beginner it's an amazing book.)

Other than that it's hard to recommend any singular sources that can help much beyond having complete familiarity with Tolkien's world and published books. Stay the hell away from lotr.wikia and related sites, but honestly Wikipedia itself gives a decent overview here. Just be sure to only get ideas from there and back them up yourself from the source material.

> Wow, is this really true?

From what I've been told about current theory </disclaimer> Yes. Although it had less to do with hunting and more to do with climate change (migration). <disclaimer> I realize when talking about evolutionary forces, everything kinda comes down to hunting and mating. But more directly: climate.

Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language is an excellent, readable book that was required for anthropology.

That's a very interesting question. I'm not sure specifically about "the black earth," though I have heard a lot about the use of color by Greek poets.

I found the most articulate answer in this segment from Radiolab.

Basically, the Greeks, and other ancient people, simply didn't have the color perception that we do. We don't think it had anything to do with the number of cones in their eyes, though. Rather, they didn't have names for some colors, and lacking labels they the lacked handles necessary for perception. A survey of texts across cultures showed that, for example, red is always the first color to appear in writing, and blue is always the last to be explicitly labeled.

There are several theories as to why. One hypothesis tells us that we only create words for colors we can produce ourselves — creating blue dye seems to come late to most cultures, for example, while humans have never had trouble making red messes wherever they go. But what about the blues in nature — such as water, or the sky? If you look at the works attributed to Homer, the sea is "wine-dark" and the sky is silver or grey, not blue.

There was a book written on the subject, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, by Guy Deutscher. The larger Radiolab episode from which the Homer piece is excerpted is also terrific.

I hope this leads you toward a reasonable and more specific answer to your question.

Edit: I neglected to bring it back around and say that lacking more subtle color labels, such as brown, it would make sense that they'd see the earth as simply black. But that's only my hypothesis.

This is one of the most informative and entertaining books I have ever read. It discusses how language has changed and keeps changing, and how the so-called "degradation" of language is actually what's responsible for its amazing complexity.

This does a pretty good job of it: https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Politics-Liberals-Conservatives-Think/dp/0226467716

Strict father vs nurturing parents mentality.

Fortson, Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction is what you want. Absolutely superb in every respect.

Yep, that's definitely true. This, incidentally, is what Heisig set out to do with Remembering the Kanji, to give an English speaker the same advantage in Japanese as a Chinese speaker (that is, know how to write each kanji and a rough approximation to its meaning).

This is the best coffee table book I own. It's fun to get the family together, ask how they say things, and then read about how regional it is.

They have a whole section for Boston stuff.

One of my fave authors too! Start here and this one is pretty on topic as well.

You are probably beyond this stage, but I would generally suggest Shapiro, https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-about-Mathematics-Philosophy/dp/0192893068, to a student interested in that topic as a good starting point.

To understand the general history of math, you won't need to understand what you most likely consider to be math. You will, however, need to understand how to put yourself in the shoes of those who came before and see the problems as they saw them, which is a rather different kind of thinking.

But anyway, the history of math is long and complicated. It would take years to understand everything and much of it was work done on paths that are now basically dead ends. Nevertheless, here are some other resources:

• In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World - In general, Ian Stewart is very good for introductory explanations to math.
  
  
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Perhaps the only explanation of Gödel's work that I would consider "good." It's notoriously lengthy and can be difficult to read, but it doesn't assume much about the reader.
  
  
• Thinking about Mathematics: The Philosophy of Mathematics
  
  
• Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings
  
  
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  
  
• Science: A History - Math did not evolve in an intellectual bubble and much of the mathematics we use today evolved out of a sort of feedback loop between scientists and mathematicians.
  
  Of course, let's not forget what is possibly the most complete single resource available today:
  
  
• Wikipedia
  
  This is a huge area and I applaud you for being interested in it. If you decide to look into it seriously, you WILL find yourself confused, bored, and annoyed at times. Yet it's a beautiful history and one that will illuminate much of the apparently meaningless gibberish in calculus, as well as many other areas.
  

This is a really good book that I had to use in my philosophy of mathematics course. It's very accessible, and gives you a great introduction to philosophy of mathematics. It keeps things in perspective and reminds you what's at stake, the main questions, all in historical context: http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-about-Mathematics-The-Philosophy/dp/0192893068

Here's a professional review of the book attesting to its awesomeness: http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/mbalagu/papers/Review%20of%20Stewart%20Shapiro%27s%20Thinking%20About%20Mathematics.pdf

> My knowledge of kanji is laughable at best.

Heisig's Remembering the Kanji has a very novel approach to learning the kanji, although It's not for everyone. The problem for me was that I was both being too lazy, but also that it works best with English as your primary language.

As for vocabulary training I'm not sure.

130597304| > United States Anonymous (ID: YsAOjqlH)

>>130596498 →
I'll throw this in for free:
https://www.amazon.com/Language-Thought-Action-S-I-Hayakawa/dp/0156482401/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1497917429&sr=1-1
It was a textbook I had to get for an Advanced Writing course I took.

Sir Anthony Kenny's "A New History of Western Philosophy"

https://www.amazon.com/New-History-Western-Philosophy/dp/0199656495

In my experience subject histories are a wonderful way to learn the major epochs and gain an deep understanding of historical advancement without focusing solely on dates an events.

Anybody interested in this stuff should read "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes" by Daniel Everett. The tribe isn't exactly uncontacted but it's an excellent insight into how a pre-agricultural culture lives. One of my favourite books in fact.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0375425020

Grooming, Gossip, And The Evolution of Language written by Dunbar provides a lot of interesting insight and theory of our communication and relationship histories. I read it for an Anthropology of Communication class and highly recommend it to anyone interested by this topic!

Because English is crazy like that.

Source: ESL teacher.

On a more serious note, if you're looking for a good reference, I highly recommend Practical English Usage by Michael Swan. This is the bible for people like me.

He wrote a book called, "Don't Sleep there are Snakes". It was a tough read because he's a linguist and goes into great detail about it.

Edited for werds: thanks Timmetie.

I originally heard about it on RadioLab:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/211213-sky-isnt-blue

They link this book as their source:
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/080508195X/radiolabbooks-20/

As to "westerners view sex the way saudis do"... I mean, we have, historically? For purposes of this conversation, I'm defining the "Saudi view of sex" to mean "women are the property of their closest male relative, and have minimal choice in spouse. Women are sequestered from public life."

Into the early 20th century, public toilets for women were not really A Thing, because women were expected to stay in the home: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_toilet#Social_hierarchies_(access_for_women)

Into the 20th century, it was considered inappropriate for a reputable woman to be out and about without a male escort (or older woman). Women belonged in the home, and their society was focused in the home; they did not have a role in public life. In my grandmother's professional career, she was forced out of her job when she was married, because there was the expectation that married women belonged at home; they shouldn't be out of the house working.

Among rich folks, again into the early 20th century, there was the whole idea of a girl being "out", which signaled they were available on the marriage market, and men could make offers for their hand in marriage. The idea of a daughter as a piece of property to be sold to uphold alliances or strengthen bonds between families has absolutely been part of western culture.

Up until the late 20th century, marital rape was still legal in some US states, because "a husband can't rape his wife, he's entitled to sex from her",which is treating the wife as property.

In my own mother's adult lifetime, married women couldn't open bank accounts or have credit cards because they were seen as just an extension/property of men.

That's kind of drifting from the idea of sex, but it's the ingrained idea that women are property, not people, and thus objects to be acted upon.

And while many of those things I cited above were 100 years ago, that doesn't mean we have cultural amnesia and the values of prior generations have no effect on us.

In the modern day, "Purity Culture" is going strong. You have the trope of the Dad with a shotgun or rifle, scaring off his daughter's suitors. Or purity balls, in which teen women make pledges of virginity-until-marriage, often to their father. Again, it casts women as property, and men as the owners of women's sexuality.

Depends on what method of learning you subscribe to. The book you suggest is fine, and the Genki books are fine for the standard way of learning.

Learning Kana is easy...actually easier than English as there is no guessing, there is only one way to pernounce "ichi" as written in kana. The problem is Kanji, and oh what a problem it is.

I did not succeed as to learn any language takes a good amount of effort that you are willing to put in but here is a method I subscribe to. Using this book you would learn how to read Japanese using Kanji the quickest. The thing is, that what you are learning in this book isn't actually how to read, but more how to reckognize each kanji symbol. The idea is that once you learn how to recognize each Kanji, it will be 100x easier to put words to it. This book falls into the method that this guy http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/ follows. Which while crazy, I can see being effective.

Japanese is hard fyi

I loved Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action. Well written and covers a lot of topics. Might be what you're looking for! http://www.amazon.com/Language-Thought-Action-Fifth-Edition/dp/0156482401

Language in Thought and Action

An engaging introduction to thinking about language and communication. I recommend it if you were interested in how Ben Franklin's little rules about communication helped him achieve all he did. (It wasn't intuitive to me).

I also recommend it if you ever make little jokes about the dumb things people say, or have ever puzzled over why we bother with ritualized greetings.

There's a pretty good reader on the subject called Thinking about Mathematics that I used for a reading course in undergrad. I don't know much about the technical literature beyond that level, though, as my formal philosophy career went on hiatus when I entered my Ph.D. program. Since then, I've been more or less an armchair philosopher.

By the way /u/theorymeltfool, if you want a nice book about understanding human communication, I highly recommend Hayakawa (1939), Language in Action (amazon).

Try Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language. Beautifully written as well as expert.

Especially on Greek literature German is very usefull as your second modern language. For native English speakers it's not that hard to learn either.

In Germany English and German are required for your bachelors (additionaly French or Italian for masters, and both for your doctorate at most universities).

> I was wondering if anyone who has experience in the major or something similar had anything to offer as far as advice and suggestions are concerned.

Getting into the basics of Indoeuropean Studies is very helpful. I've seen many students who didn't do it and lack an understanding of grammar. They have memorized der neue Menge for composition, but couldn't get behind the concept of latin or indoeuropean grammar.

I'd recommend Clackson and/or Fortson. When you have learnt German pick up Meiser for Latin and Rix for Greek.

I would add to that the argument by Robin Dunbar he makes in his book: accents help to quickly recognize if someone else is part of your in-group (family, community, region, etc.). As such, accents are deemed to be a mean to establish trust between people on a certain level.

I don't have an answer for you, but your question reminded me a book I heard about a while ago. I think it's this one. Seems like the book talks about this issue in the context of colors and direction words. It might be a place to start or have an appendix with some recommended reading.

On Amazon. There's a free audiobook as well.

Have you looked at this recent book by Josh Katz? You should be able to get some ideas from it. The easiest thing for a survey is lexical choices, like pail/bucket.

https://www.amazon.com/Speaking-American-Youse-Visual-Guide/dp/0544703391/

I think you'll love the book "Language in Thought and Action"

I read a great Linguistics/Travelogue book called Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes about living with an Amazonian tribe and studying their language, and he came up with a similar conclusion.

Studying PIE isn't really like studying a modern language or ancient languages with an extant corpus. Courses in Proto-Indo-European linguistics are often very technical and a lot of it involves getting to grips with the principles behind reconstruction (so, sound change laws etc). Most people who specialize in PIE academically learn ancient IE languages to facilitate their research, not the other way round.

EDIT: if you are interested though this textbook is a good place to start

I like RTK. Some people have problems with it, but it worked for me. Also using anki with a kanji deck is very helpful.

Anthony Kenny's A New History of Western Philosophy is very good. Kenny has compared it to both Russel and Copleston, saying he wanted to be as readable as the former and as accurate as the latter. Each volume is divided into historical survey and analysis. It looks like the one-volume edition is what's currently available.

It does stop in the 1970s, and some have complained that Derrida gets the short shrift. But I found the writing accessible and the work thorough. Augustine and Wittgenstein, in particular, get some very good attention.

I loved The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher.

> That's absurd.

No. It isn't. And many have written about this subject.

“To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.” - Aldous Huxley

Conservative ideology is fundamentally about keeping existing hierarchies in place. They believe God is on top, and the believe men belong above women, parents above children, whites above non-whites. They believe that this is righteous and endowed by god, and that if you disrupt it, if you putting "the wrong people" in the "wrong places," that would allow the evil in the world to win.

Even more so, hidden in this belief, is the idea that hierarchies are inevitable. They think that disrupting the hierarchy does not destroy it but merely re-arranges it. Thus, by moving black people from "their place," that will inevitably result in white people being slaves. This is why they feel threatened. They never even entertained the possibility that people can be equal.

Thankfully, these are just ideas. They can be hard to unlearn, but it's why Fox News is so dangerous, reinforcing these beliefs at a substantial profit. If you want to know more, check out Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant: https://www.amazon.com/ALL-NEW-Dont-Think-Elephant/dp/160358594X/ref=dp_ob_title_bk which I found quite illuminating in this regard.

This is essentially the method (but with illustrations) behind Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, which is excellent.

Interesting how they interpret this 'green/blue' test differently, I'm having trouble finding the actual paper for the study.

Some people seem to think its that we simple didn't perceive blue, the radio lab article was based on stuff from through the language glass so its not like we actual didn't 'see' blue, its just that it didn't show up enough in experience to warrant a word to be created for it, in the Namibian tribe they studied, there were many many different words for green in their language though, and they found that even though we see them all the same colour, the Namibians could differentiate about 12 different shades as if they were completely different colours.

Interesting book, and sort of shows that how we perceive the world changes with how we communicate.

Every EFL/ESL teacher should have a copy of Practical English Usage by Michael Swan. It is the ultimate language analysis of English.

Here's an abbreviated excerpt of a section from that book that addresses the issues in that above example sentence you gave:

>281 infinitives (3): without to
section 2: after let, make, hear, etc

>Certain verbs are followed by object + infinitive without to

>They include let, make, see, hear, feel, watch, and notice.

>ex: She lets her children stay up very late. NOT She lets her children to stay up very late.
ex: I made them give me the money back. NOT I made them to give me the money back.

>...

>For more information about structures with make, see 335.

If you can't get the book, you're looking for when to use to or not with infinitive verbs, which should be very easy to find online material for.

Google it, then read this book.

> should be Colours/Colors are

Yay sloppy editing.

I don't know the correct term for this, or even much about it at all, but I do know that other languages to this to a far greater extent than English. For example, I remember [reading about] (http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0375425020) an Amazonian tribe that can apparently have entire conversations using only pitch.

I also know that people in the Canary Islands used to use [whistles to communicate] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbo_Gomero_language), which I assume is the same phenomenon.

I am going to respectfully disagree with you, as someone who is learning both.

Btw, perhaps I should further clarify that I am primarily focused on the reading/translation of the language, not the speaking. This may be an important factor I neglected to add.

I do not disagree that proximity is an aid. This is why French and English are very easy to learn. But Latin and English are two very different comparisons, and are farther in proximity.

As an example of what I was talking about with regards to syntax, there was a cited example in The Unfolding of Language that talked about how amazed Turkish teachers were at Japanese rapid acquisition of their language, in comparison to the difficulties they had with english.

Regardless of the controversy over whether or not turkish and japanese falls under the altaic family, it was clear that the common reason for the rapid acquisition was because of their similar SOV syntax, despite japanese not being an alphabetical language, and the large difference in vocabulary.

Syntax matters.

I think the difficulties of Chinese lie with the pedagogy, not its inherentness. When Greek was first taught to the humanists, it was an abysmal failure because of the lack of established teaching materials (cited from Sailing to Byzantium).

I would like to propose though, you take a crack at reading Chinese, ignoring the conversation. Tuttle has a good book that breaks down Chinese radical components, and should aid in memorization. This is the future I believe.

But I feel otherwise, we may just have to agree to disagree.

Hmm .. try Shapiro's Thinking about Mathematics. It's very good and accessible, and Shapiro is quite eminent.

I don't have an answer for all three of your questions, but here's a partial answer to one.

> What factors made the various American accents sound the way they do

So in North American English, a lot of the differences between accents are in the vowel sounds. Think of how a stereotypical white New Yorker might say the o in "coffee", how a Canadian might say about, or whether people have the cot-caught merger. There are some differences in how consonants are pronounced as well, such as how often you might say walking or walkin' or saying this as dis. There are some grammatical differences, such as using might could in the South, needs washed in the Midwest, or invariable be in African American English. And there are word choice differences, as in pop vs. soda, put up vs. put away, or roly-poly vs. potato bug.

If you have access to a university library, you might want to look up the Atlas of North American English by Labov, Ash, and Boberg. As a more coffee-table book that more intended for a general audience, try Josh Katz's book Speaking American

>which is just too absurd to even debate.

Both of us see the world differently. Our frameworks of understanding and interpreting the world stand in complete opposition on what we're talking about. That's why you don't understand what I'm saying. You should read George Lakoff. I think you'll find it informative... especially relating to this debate.


I recommend, The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

Also: The Essential Chomsky, another good compendium.

Perhaps you could start with a historical overview like this one?

Potentially helpful: https://www.amazon.com/Gateway-Sindarin-Grammar-Language-Tolkiens/dp/0874809126

In case you're up to getting a book, I highly recommend David Salo's A Gateway to Sindarin. It's about $25 on Amazon.

We view the world through the lens of the language in which we speak. Words are simply symbols of ideas which each language deals with differently depending on history and heritage. Some examples of untranslatable words from other languages

This is an interesting book about language shaping thought.

This book is the go-to if you're interested in political messaging.

Everyone interested should read or re-read "Don't think of an elephant." by Lackoff. I just re-read my 2004 version and noticed that there was an updated version in 2014. Amazon Link

Russell's history is great, but Anthony Kenny's updates it for the 21st century:
http://www.amazon.com/A-New-History-Western-Philosophy/dp/0199656495

Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher is about if and how our perception of the world depends on our language and whether languages are more influenced by nature or culture. Blew my mind quite a few times.
It's easily one of my favourite non-fiction books.

It didn't begin decades after Nixon. It started when they lost to Kennedy, so before Nixon. Read Don't think of an elephant by George Lakoff. Excellent and informative.

If you really want to learn Japanese for real you should buy Remembering the Kanji, Vol. 1 and use this site until you have learned enough kanjis. Then proceed with SRS'ing sentences. After a year or so doing it everyday you will be able to get around Japanese websites and such!
EDIT: my sentence didn't made sense.

I hate them all too, let's create an "internet super secret club" where the requirement would be to read this book every day.

>When a legal distinction is determined ... between night and day, childhood and maturity, or any other extremes, a point has to be fixed or a line has to be drawn, or gradually picked out by successive decisions, to mark where the change takes place. Looked at by itself without regard to the necessity behind it, the line or point seems arbitrary. It might as well be a little more to one side or the other. But when it is seen that a line or point there must be, and that there is no mathematical or logical way of fixing it precisely, the decision of the legislature must be accepted unless we can say that it is wide of any reasonable mark.

–Oliver Wendell Holmes, quoted from here

I believe that gives some perspective on this situation. Yes, there may be an apparent contradiction with the law. However, because a written rule can't precisely cover all possible situations in the world, our legal system may use discretion when applying rules to specific events.

In that way, you may see that the contradiction isn't as blatant, but rather an exposure of the way our system works.

Read this and this. Those two books are probably why I decided to major in linguistics. Both well written, and not at all dry

I don't know why it would come across like that. The facts are the ones you choose to ignore here because it conflicts with something you were taught years ago. If you want to know some actual facts read a book like this one.

But without actually taking the time to study the field why would you think you have the facts? It seems to me more like something challenged what you believed to be true and you got incensed over it.

The Essential Chomsky - a selection of his most important work.

Following along with this comment, I strongly recommend the book Through the Language Glass. He is also one of the sources for the Radiolab episode you mentioned.

In the text Deutscher goes into detail on why, as /u/edXcitizen87539319 mentions, the whole idea that Homer couldn't see blue is very, very wrong. He suggests that the common trend in the development of color words (red, ochre, green, violet, yellow, blue) is more likely due to linguistic interaction between the groups of interest, and the simple fact that some colors are more important to specify (red can mean fire, or poisonous, and so on, while before the invention of dyes blue was really only useful for the sky and the water). There are also counter-examples of tribes in Africa and the Americas that followed a completely different order of color word development.

However, Deutscher goes on to describe some of the experiments that do show a connection between a society and its language. For example, languages with more speakers tend to have less grammatical complexity (this is a statement backed up by statistics performed on linguistic databases). Also, if a language makes a distinction (such as the light blue/dark blue distinction) native speakers are often faster to make that distinction in practice (such as separating slightly different shades of blue napkins quickly).

It is a very interesting topic of research, but, as is often the case when comparing different cultures, interpretations of the data are often prone to extremes when reality is typically quite mundane.

Practical English Usage is a grammar bible, but not exactly a text book. If you want exercises maybe murphy.

>every society has made up a religion

Actually, this isn't true

But even if it isn't, what about someone like me who never believed in the supernatural? I mean, I've been called "demon spawn" but I'd never thought it was accurate.

Blogspam to Amazon affiliate link, bypassing /u/AutoModerator rules.

Here's the actual link: https://www.amazon.com/Speaking-American-Youse-Visual-Guide/dp/0544703391

Rosetta Stone sucks donkey dong. Use Tae Kim's guide, Remembering the Kanji, and Genki. For listening, Pimsleur's and Japanese Pod 101 are quite good.

This one: https://www.amazon.com/Practical-English-Usage-Michael-Swan/dp/0194420981

But this book is only necessary if you have students that have challenging questions about English usage (high school, uni, adults, etc.).

Moral Politics by George Lakoff, and The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. Both are solid books on why conservatives and liberals think differently, though the first is a little dated with its references.

Nah, Russell was somewhat biased and did interpret a lot of philosophers just wrong. Also, he smears his positivist opinion all over the place. Anthony Kenny's [A New History of Western Philosophy] (https://www.amazon.com/New-History-Western-Philosophy/dp/0199656495/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1500643240&sr=8-1&keywords=a+new+history+of+western+philosophy) fits you way better.

Here are some recent introductory books on the subject:

https://smile.amazon.com/Historical-Introduction-Philosophy-Mathematics-Reader/dp/1472525671/

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0521533414/

https://smile.amazon.com/Thinking-about-Mathematics-Philosophy/dp/0192893068

https://smile.amazon.com/Philosophy-Mathematics-Princeton-Foundations-Contemporary/dp/0691161402

Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic is a classic "primary text" that advocates a specific point of view (that arithmetic can be reduced to logic in some sense).

These are a couple of contemporary introductory books that provide decent surveys of some major views:

http://www.amazon.com/Philosophies-Mathematics-Alexander-George/dp/0631195440

http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-about-Mathematics-The-Philosophy/dp/0192893068/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_z/181-3737012-4965247

EDIT: If I had to choose, I would pick the Velleman/Alexander book.

Check out Kenny's A New History of Western Philosophy, especially book IV, which covers way more of the 20th century than Russell's book.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/reading

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/5y49nz/as_a_hs_sophomore_i_would_like_to_venture_into/den54ll/

https://www.amazon.com/Law-Legislation-Liberty-statement-principles/dp/0415522293/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

https://www.amazon.com/Road-Serfdom-Documents-Definitive-Collected/dp/0226320553/ref=la_B000AQ6W60_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1503059047&sr=1-1

https://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-State-Utopia-Robert-Nozick/dp/0465051006/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1503059077&sr=1-1&keywords=nozick

https://www.amazon.com/Contemporary-Political-Philosophy-Will-Kymlicka/dp/0198782748/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1503059099&sr=1-4&keywords=contemporary+political

https://www.amazon.com/New-History-Western-Philosophy/dp/0199656495/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1503059282&sr=1-1&keywords=new+history+of+philosophy

http://econlog.econlib.org/

http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/

Try this book called Through the Language Glass http://www.amazon.com/Through-Language-Glass-Different-Languages/dp/0312610491

I am positive I read something very similar to that quote in "Though the language glass", a book I read just last year. Wether that is the origin of that quote or if the author was, in turn, quoting somebody else I don't know.

Give him a counter example written by someone with credibility.

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language is actually very readable even though it's an "encyclopedia." Probably not exactly what you were looking for, but I'd suggest taking a look at it. It's expensive, but perhaps a local library has it.

Speaking American a book about American dialects.

The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher

You're also completely misrepresenting grammar and language. Try looking into the field of linguistics. Here's a couple book suggestions for you. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0140260234 And http://www.amazon.com/The-Unfolding-Language-Evolutionary-Invention/dp/0805080120/ref=la_B001JOASIU_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1342795681&sr=1-2

I read this in thinking of this question Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages