(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best linguistics reference books

The best intro I'm familiar with is Theory and Reality by Peter Godfrey-Smith. That's what I use for introductory courses.

Other than that, here are a few other things that (depending on your interests) might be worth your time. These are probably best read after you've gotten some exposure to the basics, which Theory and Reality should more than suffice to achieve. In no particular order:

• Philip Kitcher's Science in a Democratic Society and/or Science, Truth, and Democracy both directly address how to reconcile the value of science with other things that we might also value. Kitcher's a naturalist through and through, but he's also quite pluralistic in his thinking. Both those books tackle the question of what science is good for, what it isn't good for, and how we might go about integrating scientific expertise into an egalitarian society.
  
  
• Nancy Cartwright's A Dappled World. This is a very, very widely-cited classic, and a must-read at some point. I don't agree with her thesis, but it's an excellent book and is very well presented.
  
  
• Bas van Fraassen's The Scientific Image. Another classic that's been very influential. Again, I disagree with a lot of what he says, but he writes clearly and makes many great points.
  
  
• Stathis Psillos' Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth. A clear, cogent defense of scientific realism.
  
  
• James Ladyman and Don Ross' Every Thing Must Go. A spirited and unflinching defense of what philosophy as a whole should look like if it wants to take science seriously. It's not an easy book if you're not well-versed on physics, but it's one of my favorites.
  
  
• Eric Winsberg's Science in the Age of Computer Simulation. A great look at how advances in computation are changing what science looks like. This is a personal interest, but I still think it's a great book.
  
  
• Tim Maudlin's The Metaphysics Within Physics. A look at laws, explanation, and metaphysics from the perspective of physical theory.
  
  
• Michael Strevens' Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation. One of the best books on scientific explanation (and what makes it distinctive) around. Long, but worth it.
  
  
• Oppenheim & Putnam's article "The Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis". Flawed, but on the right track. A good discussion of how the different sciences fit together.
  
  
• Jerry Fodor's article "Special Sciences (or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis)" a counterpoint to Oppenhein & Putnam, and another very influential article. I don't like Fodor very much, but it's a good piece.
  
  I could go on indefinitely with this, but that's probably more than enough to keep you going for a few years. As an aside (and since you mentioned complexity already), I also recommend that anyone interested in the philosophy of science take a look at Cliff Hooker's anthology The Philosophy of Complex Systems Theory, which is (somehow) currently hanging out online for free. I paid something like $200 for the book, and while I think it was worth it, the fact that the PDF is right there is amazing. It's an incredibly wide-ranging look at some of the ways in which both philosophy and science are being shaped by complexity theory these days. It's really great.

I study topology and I can give you some tips based on what I've done. If you want extra info please PM me. I'd love to help someone discover the beautiful field of topology. TLDR at bottom.

If you want to study topology or knot theory in the long term (actually knot theory is a pretty complicated application of topology), it would be a great idea to start reading higher math ASAP. Higher math generally refers to anything proof-based, which is pretty much everything you study in college. It's not that much harder than high school math and it's indescribably beneficial to try and get into it as soon as you possibly can. Essentially, your math education really begins when you start getting into higher math.

If you don't know how to do proofs yet, read How to Prove It. This is the best intro to higher math, and is not hard. Absolutely essential going forward. Ask for it for the holidays.

Once you know how to prove things, read 1 or 2 "intro to topology" books (there are hundreds). I read this one and it was pretty good, but most are pretty much the same. They'll go over definitions and basic theorems that give you a rough idea of how topological spaces (what topologists study) work.

After reading an intro book, move on to this book by Sutherland. It is relatively simple and doesn't require a whole lot of knowledge, but it is definitely rigorous and is definitely necessary before moving on.

After that, there are kind of two camps you could subscribe to. Currently there are two "main" topology books, referred to by their author's names: Hatcher and Munkres. Both are available online for free, but the Munkres pdf isn't legally authorized to be. Reading either of these will make you a topology god. Hatcher is all what's called algebraic topology (relating topology and abstract algebra), which is super necessary for further studies. However, Hatcher is hella hard and you can't read it unless you've really paid attention up to this point. Munkres isn't necessarily "easier" but it moves a lot slower. The first half of it is essentially a recap of Sutherland but much more in-depth. The second half is like Hatcher but less in-depth. Both books are outstanding and it all depends on your skill in specific areas of topology.

Once you've read Hatcher or Munkres, you shouldn't have much trouble going forward into any more specified subfield of topology (be it knot theory or whatever).

If you actually do end up studying topology, please save my username as a resource for when you feel stuck. It really helps to have someone advanced in the subject to talk about tough topics. Good luck going forward. My biggest advice whatsoever, regardless of what you study, is read How to Prove It ASAP!!!

TLDR: How to Prove It (!!!) -> Mendelson -> Sutherland -> Hatcher or Munkres

No problem!

Philosophy of time is an enormous area!

Not only are there many distinct positions that attempt to address the scientific and philosophical questions in different ways, there are different positions regarding the very method by which we should attempt to answer these questions! Some of these certainly overlap.

What do I mean by this?

Putting it roughly:

There are those who tend to think that we should use science to answer these questions about time. All we should care about is what observations are made; we should only care about the empirical data. These people might point to the great success of our best scientific theories that refer to 'time', such as those in physics, including; Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Entropy (The Arrow of Time), and even Quantum Theory, but also those in neuroscience and psychology, where our perception of time becomes relevant (such as the Inference Model of Time and the Strength Model of Time). So we have notions of physical/objective time, and subjective/mental time. We may talk about time slowing down around a massive body such as a black hole, or time slowing down when a work-shift is boring or when we're experiencing a traumatic event.

But there are also those who tend to think that we should use not just science, but also uniquely philosophical methods as well. Conceptual analysis is one such method; one that involves thinking very carefully about our concepts. This method is a distinctically a priori method (A priori is just philosophical jargon meaning; "Can be known without experience," for example, the statement "All triangles have three sides"). These people think we can learn a great deal about time by reflecting on our concepts about time, our intuitions about time, and the laws of thought (or logic) and how they relate to time. This philosophical approach to answering questions about time is distinctively metaphysical opposed to the former physical and cognitive theories about time.

Of course there are many who may see the use in all of these different approaches!

Recommendations:

Physics:

Hawking, S 1988, A Brief History of Time: From The Big Bang to Black Holes, Bantam Books, Toronto; New York. [Chapters 2, 9 & 10. Absolute Classic, little dated but still great read]

Gardner, M 1988, Time Travel and Other Mathematical Bewilderments, W.H. Freeman, UK. [Chapter 1]

Greene, B 2010, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, W. W. Norton, New York. [Chapter 2 is a great introduction for Special Relativity]

Physics and Metaphysics:

Dainton, B 2010, Time and Space, 2nd edn, McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal; Ithaca N.Y. [Chapters 1-8, 18, 19 & 21. This book is incredible in scope, it even has a chapter on String Theory, and it really acknowledges the intimate connection between space and time given to us by physics]

Metaphyics:

Hawley, K 2015, Temporal Parts, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/temporal-parts/>. [Discussion of Perdurantism, the view that objects last over time without being wholly present at every time at which they exist.]

Markosian, N 2014, Time, The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/time/>.

Hunter, J 2016, Time Travel, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
<http://www.iep.utm.edu/timetrav/>.

Callender, C & Edney, R 2014, Introducing Time: A Graphic Guide, Icon Books Limited, UK. [Great book if you want something a bit less wordy and fun, but still very informative, having comprehensive coverage. It also has many nice illustrations and is cheap!]

Curtis, B & Robson, J 2016, A Critical Introduction to the Metaphysics of Time, Bloomsbury Publishing, UK. [Very good recent publication that comes from a great series of books in metaphysics]

Ney, A 2014, Metaphysics: An Introduction, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, London; New York. [Chapters 5 & 6 (Chapter 4 looks at critiques of Metaphysics in general as a way of answer questions and Chapter 9 looks at Free-will/Determinism/Compatiblism)]

More advanced temporal Metaphysics:

Sider, T 2001, Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time, Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, Oxford New York. [Great book defending what Sider calls "Four-Dimensionalism" (this is confusing given how others have used the same term differently) but by it he means Perdurantism, the view that objects last over time without being wholly present at every time at which they exist.]

Hawley, K 2004, How Things Persist, Clarendon Press, UK. [Another great book: It's extremely similar to the one above in terms of the both content and conclusions reached]

Some good Time travel movies:

Interstellar (2014)

Timecrimes (2007)

Looper (2012)

Primer (2004) [Time Travel on drugs]

12 Monkeys (1995)

Donnie Darko (2001)

The Terminator (1984)

Groundhog Day (1993)

Predestination (2014)

Back To the Future (1-3) (1985-1990)

Source Code (2011)

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

I'm afraid I can't answer your question directly, but I can help contextualize it historically and hopefully point you in the right direction.

Like u/ikid_ikid noted, the 6th century BCE didn't have strict national borders in the sense that we do nowadays. That part of India/Nepal was comprised of several smaller kingdoms, most notably for our purposes the Magadh. As you may know, the Buddha was born as a prince named Siddhartha in the Sakya clan (Sakyamuni translates roughly to 'sage of the Sakyas'). His hagiography depicts him as unusually skilled in many areas, including language, and this certainly would have helped him reach a larger audience in his teachings. It's also worth pointing out that, after his enlightenment at age 35, he taught for 45 years before his death. That's a long time, and despite the fact that he travelled by foot he was pretty mobile. If you look at this slightly cluttered map of the important sites in his life, you see how active he was.

However, Sakyamuni Buddha was not the only person who spread Buddhism. Far from it. To understand how Buddhism spread so quickly throughout northern India (and eventually much of South and SE Asia) let's look at two important factors. The first is the First Buddhist Council, which convened the year after Sakyamuni died. The council, comprised of 500 arhats (englightened ones, who had been taught by the Buddha or his close disciples) convened and standardized many of the monastic rules and teachings of the Buddha (Pali: dhamma, Sanskrit: dharma). With everyone on (theoretically) the same page, the arhats could spread the Buddhadhamma wherever they went.

The second important factor is the reign of King Asoka pdf, in the 3rd century BCE. Asoka was arguably India's greatest king ever, and he was the first ruler to unify most of the Indian Subcontinent. And he was a Buddhist. (Actually there's some speculation about his personal beliefs, but certainly promoted Buddhism as a matter of state). This was great news for Buddhism, which was popular but still relatively local and competing against plenty of other religions (Jainism, Ajivikia, the Brahmanism that would eventually become hinduism, to name a few). Asoka event sent his daughter to Sri Lanka, and established Buddhism there.

In my opinion, the First Buddhist Council and the reign of Asoka are the most important factors in understanding how Buddhism spread the way it did. However, there are plenty of other factors that I won't go into here. For example, if we look into the suttas in the Pali Canon, we see thatthe Buddha was extremely well-connected in his lifetime. This is not only due to his royal lineage but also to his wealthy and powerful lay disciples such as King Bimbisara. On a more societal level, the Buddha lived in a time of great social upheaval and urbanization. This may have lead to an increase in mobility and openmindedness that he might have made use of. Finally, if you want to get supernatural, the suttas often mention that the Buddha had 84,000 teachings -- which we might read as an arbitrarily high number -- for any individual's abilities and disposition. He also had plenty of "magical" powers. Though I don't specifically know if these allegedly allowed him to communicate using other languages, I would not be surprised to learn that they do.

As for sources, I apologize because I do not have my books with me at the moment. I've also taken some of this information from undergrad lectures, and therefore don't have specific references for them. As to general readings, I highly suggest reading suttas from the Pali Canon. The collection edited and translated by Rupert Gethin is the best I've read, and the preface in particular addresses some of what I've discussed. Gombrich's book about Asoka is very well-respected, as is Conze's introction to early Buddhism.

Right. I agree. I was thinking of "investigation" in a deeper sense of something more rigorous. Obviously we could talk about what's right/wrong right now, without any theory.

Would you agree that these theory-neutral investigations would not be useful if the other person doesn't accept your bedrock framework?

We probably have moral rules built into our brains, but I think that it would be confusing to consider that a "theory," because usually we have in mind something deliberate/conscious/intellectual when we say "theory."

Can we have complicated intellectual models in our minds that are unconscious? Chomsky notes that the vast majority of thought/thinking/decision-making is unconscious, but to say unconscious "theory" is confusing to me because it makes me think that you have like "Darwin's theory of evolution" in your subconscious, which is weird.

Mikhail writes here about rules in our brains, subconscious, but they aren't theory, I don't think:

>Is the science of moral cognition usefully modeled on aspects of Universal Grammar? Are human beings born with an innate "moral grammar" that causes them to analyze human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness as they analyze human speech in terms of its grammatical structure? Questions like these have been at the forefront of moral psychology ever since John Mikhail revived them in his influential work on the linguistic analogy and its implications for jurisprudence and moral theory. In this seminal book, Mikhail offers a careful and sustained analysis of the moral grammar hypothesis, showing how some of John Rawls' original ideas about the linguistic analogy, together with famous thought experiments like the trolley problem, can be used to improve our understanding of moral and legal judgment. The book will be of interest to philosophers, cognitive scientists, legal scholars, and other researchers in the interdisciplinary field of moral psychology.

Mikhail tinkers the thought-experiments to show all the sophisticated unconscious judgments that people make that the people themselves can't explain (of course), but that show deep moral principles. I'm not sure how much people differ on these principles.

You and I could "investigate" a Trolly Problem scenario and debate it, without any theory, but what if we disagree on a fundamental value? Then don't I need to construct (and argue for) and underlying theory that supports my value, or else we're at an impasse?

(I was also curious about impasses regarding rationality too, but that's a different topic.)

Disclaimer: I have no formal education on ancient philosophy, how have I read through the works in their original or in translation, most of this is regurgitated from Sir Anthony Kenny's A New History of Western Philosophy, which is selling on Amazon for a bargain price of $30, along with some Wikipedia information and my interpretation. If someone with better knowledge can elaborate in better, more accurate detail, please do so.

Okay, I twisted the facts a little, it was more like he was the first that we have documentation for who saw the connection between evidence and theory. For example, in politics, while Plato talked about ideal cities in Reppublic, Laws and Timaeus, imagining societies that does not rely on money, Aristotle did his research, and compared and contrasted the constitutions of Greek city-states against each other. From there he categorized constitutions into monarchy, aristocracy, etc.

Here is a fun-fact kind of paragraph that fails miserably at showing Aristotle's putting theory behind obervation, and it's not even very empirically factual. The nature of Greek philosophy has been to describe the world in terms of abstract, all-encompassing mechanics, and so I would say that Plato did something similar with his constitutions for ideal cities, assuming that its citizens will be happy to live in a state that supports only the most virtuous ways of living, not unlike how fundamentalists think that a state should not allow abortions or same-sex marriage, as the ideal citizen will not get raped or have homosexual tendencies, and even if so, would not give in to these unnatural activities. Such an act would be against justice (it is unjust as the person has no right to do so) and nature. (BTW, Plato was, rare for his time, homophobic, IIRC, and also thought that sex was only for procreation). Probably after looking at the data, Aristotle recognized that a state does not always have the most ideal rulers and citizens, and a constitutional democracy was best. He thought that Plato's constitutions were impractical because the diversity of different kind of citizen is essential, and life in a city should not be like in a barracks. I think he argues from the observation that a state is composed of combined villages to form the city-state, and from there recognized that Plato's state would not satisfy the reasons why people come together to form a state.

But his greatest scientific contribution is in biology, in his treatises, History of Animals, On the Parts of Animals, and On the generation of Animals. He cites earlier writers, accompanied with great scepticism of their claims. He had Alexander send him specimens from all over the world, and Aristotle not only observed the animals but also dissected them. His investigations on animals are quite detailed. The way he forms theory out of observation is by categorization, drawing parallels across organisms; classifying them into genus and species. Where he encountered insufficient evidence he would mention it; on the reproduction of bees, he says, "The facts have not yet been sufficiently ascertained. If ever they are, then we muse trust observation rather than theory, and trust theories only if their results conform with the oberved phenomena." But still there is still some speculation; for example he thinks that bodily features conform to one's disposition.

Admittedly, his methods aren't as developed as our modern scientific method which devises experiments to test theoretical predictions against, but Aristotle's basing theory on observation rather than imagination was the spark. It is a contrast from other philosophers who devise metaphysical systems to explain phenomena when a detailed observation might have painted another picture. At that time, his way of research would have been regarded as another philosophical approach, but today, with the work of Enlightenment thinkers we have matured his method into a formalized, effective system; and so it falls out of the realm of philosophy where questions are asked about uncertain ideas and knowledge, and into science, where theoretical results are induced from observation through formal process we call the scientific method.

> I’m not the grammar police except in my own head, and I don’t correct people (except my husband because I love him and don’t want others thinking he’s ignorant) but I do think less of them and I don’t like that about myself. [...] So I’ve written down that sentence from the advice column, and hope that if I see it several times every day, I will become less critical of others’ shortcomings and more gracious with people in general.

Something else that can help is to remember that just because we think we know something doesn't mean we're correct about what we know.

Quite a bit of the English "grammar" we learn in school has little to do with what's objectively grammatically correct in our language and much to do with who speaks certain ways. "I've never been there" and "I ain't never been there" are equally correct; the latter simply uses stigmatized forms. Every person speaks one or more dialects, and every dialect is a rule-governed system. But when rules conflict, the one that's seen as "right" in mainstream society is the one used by those with more societal power and prestige.

There are even completely artificial, nonexistent "rules" imposed on the language from the outside, purely for the purpose of signaling prestige. It's never incorrect, for example, to end a sentence with a preposition. This is and always has been grammatical in English, in any dialect—but for hundreds of years, as a completely arbitrary rule it's been a useful shibboleth for identifying who can afford a certain level of education.

If you're the autodidactic type and want to learn more about what we were incorrectly taught in school, a couple of books I highly recommend as primers are American English: Dialects and Variation by Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling and English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States by Rosina Lippi-Green. Both of these texts were fundamental to shattering and rebuilding my entire grammatical worldview during my first linguistics course in college, prior to which I'd considered myself quite the expert on what was "right" and "wrong" in English.

If you mean get into, as in you want to be interested but just can't find the motivation, what got me interested was reading about it. Learn from the best. Here are some good ones on documentation itself (I guess more on the eminence of languages dying and the need for documentation):

• Linguistic Fieldwork—Claire Bowern
  
  
• When Languages Die—David Harrison
  
  
• Vanishing Voices—Daniel Nettle & Suzanne Romaine
  
  
• Endangered Languages—Sarah G. Thomason
  
  Fieldwork is often closely associated with typology, so here are some books that explain some of what's possible in the world's languages:
  
  
• Describing Morphosyntax—Thomas Payne
  
  
• Ergativity—R.M.W. Dixon
  
  
• Changing Valency—R.M.W. Dixon & Alexandra Aikhenvald
  
  And then there are reference grammars, often the fruits of fieldwork. Here are some good ones I've gone through:
  
  
• A Grammar of Tariana—Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
  
  
• A Grammar of Hup—Patience Epps
  
  
• Basically any other one in the Mouton Grammar Library, plus here are some free ones from Language Science Press.
  
  Then again, if you mean get into it meaning what language should you pick and what part of the world, that's a harder question to answer. I feel like languages just sort of happen to people: they know someone who happens to come from a community of minority language speakers, or they have a friend who says they ran into an understudied language while abroad, or you yourself happened to live in that part of the world for whatever reason. It's hard to go study a language out of the blue because you need an "in" somehow, which is hard to purposely get, I think.

I'll add my two cents since this is something I've put some thought into, and will point to some other works you can check out.

I'll go a step beyond McCarthy here by saying I'm a fan of Zapffe's idea that self-awareness might be a mistake, a evolutionary trap:

>Such a ‘feeling of cosmic panic’ is pivotal to every human mind. Indeed, the race appears destined to perish in so far as any effective preservation and continuation of life is ruled out when all of the individual’s attention and energy goes to endure, or relay, the catastrophic high tension within.

>The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by overevolving one ability is not confined to humankind. Thus it is thought, for instance, that certain deer in paleontological times succumbed as they acquired overly-heavy horns. The mutations must be considered blind, they work, are thrown forth, without any contact of interest with their environment.

>In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground.

I am very interested in the historical cases of feral children, and the reports of the attempts to re-integrate them after years away from other people. It seems there is a age past which the mind loses a certain plasticity of infancy and learning speech is no longer possible. Though of course the cases are rare and the reports often hobbled by the perceptions of their time, it is also of great interest to me that these children appear to stay at about the same general level of intelligence as the animals that raised them for the rest of their lives (if they were rescued after a certain developmental period). I wonder about the relationship between language and self-awareness and to what degree they depend upon each other. You could learn so much with just a handful of EXTREMELY UNETHICAL experiments.

Other fun notes:

Peter Watt's Blindsight is a recent sci-fi novel with aliens who work entirely "subconsciously" (without self-awareness) and are able to be much more efficient as a result.

People who speak languages with more colors are able to distingush more colors

There is a ton of interesting work out there that has been done about the ways that limited language can lead to limited thought, if you're interested.

I also recommend The Spell Of The Sensuous if this is interesting to you. One of my favorite books. Hopefully we can get to it in the book club some day.

Philosophy isn't simply "musing on the nature of things." I believe the field of philosophy you have in mind here is metaphysics, and, while metaphysics may be defensible in its own right, it's certainly not the only area of philosophy. One of the fields that I find particularly exciting right now is philosophy of language. A big research interest in the field is how we can go from not having genuine meaning and understanding in our practices to having it. This has been one of the trickiest problems in philosophy to date, but after Wittgenstein, philosophers have made some serious progress on the issue which is now converging with empirical science.

One of the top scientists working on the question, Michael Tomasello, who does a bunch of comparative psychology experiments with either apes or young children trying to make sense of intentionality and meaning. In his book Origins of Human Communication he draws heavily from 20th century philosophers such as Wittgenstein, H.P. Grice, and David Lewis. It is not simply that he says "Oh, I showed that these guys (who were just idly musing) turned out to be right. Yay Science!" Rather, he explicitly uses their work (mostly Grice) as models in his theorizing that helps make sense of his empirical data.

Philosophy has a history of doing things like this, charting the way for new fields of scientific study. There's also serious philosophical work to be done within existing scientific fields. Philosophy of biology and philosophy of physics are active fields, and usually the work in these fields focuses around trying to sort out difficult conceptual issues that arise in the empirical research. Typically the philosophers in these fields are experts in that scientific field, they know all of the relevant scientific literature, and often work in conjunction with scientists. It's certainly not just idle musing.

As you might expect, you get what you pay for with these books. For one, they're not the most durable. Second, thrift books are going to be very bare bones. For instance, there aren't any supplements in the Dover edition of The Prince. In all honesty, it's not worth the $3 unless you just like to physically hold a book. You could get the exact same thing online, for free, at a website like Project Gutenberg.

Now, if you spend a bit more money, there are very good editions of the classics. Take, for instance, Cambridge University Press' edition of The Prince, which you can get for $15. It comes with an introduction by one of the world's leading scholars on political philosophy, notes on the translation, and copious footnotes to provide context and further information to the reader. These features are important, especially for novices who might not know the historical context of the book or who might want suggestions for further reading.

On another note, I wouldn't call classics like The Prince and the Republic history books. They're certainly historical, but they're not history books. You might get better answers to your question over at /r/askphilosophy.

Instead of reading the classics, my suggestion would be for you to read a history book about the classics, something like Anthony Kenny's New History of Western Philosophy, which is a great introduction to the topic.

My intro grad class read the following, so I think they're a good place to start:

The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice

https://www.amazon.com/Green-Book-Language-Revitalization-Practice/dp/9004254498

Saving Languages

https://www.amazon.com/Saving-Languages-Introduction-Language-Revitalization/dp/0521016525/ref=pd_sbs_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=DXKK7FQ77XYXCPQWPVM9

Reversing Language Shift

https://www.amazon.com/Reversing-Language-Shift-Theoretical-Multilingual/dp/1853591211/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1480605154&sr=1-1&keywords=reversing+language+shift

When Languages Die

https://www.amazon.com/When-Languages-Die-Extinction-Knowledge/dp/0195372069/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1480605172&sr=1-1&keywords=when+languages+die

In addition to many articles, but if it's articles you want, you can't go wrong with anything by Leanne Hinton.

If all you know right now is that you think you're interested in Endangered Languages, then read read read is really the best advice, so you can get an idea of what "the field" entails and start to find what interests you. What part of the world? What language family? What type of work - applied and/or academic? Are you interested more in documentation, description, or revitalization based work (most projects involve all three, but usually weighted a bit more toward one or the other)? And what subfield of linguistics do you want to specialize in? etc.

It sounds a bit like Little Fuzzy followed by the sequel Fuzzy Sapiens

https://www.amazon.com/Little-Fuzzy-Sapiens-Book-ebook/dp/B0082T1G7C

Little Fuzzy is a 1962 juvenile science fiction novel by H. Beam Piper, now in public domain. It was nominated for the 1963 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

The story revolves around determining whether a small furry species discovered on the planet Zarathustra is sapient, and features a mild libertarianism that emphasizes sincerity and honesty

I think others here have made a decent case for the value language conservation provides to linguistic theory, but the replies have been scant on the value these languages have towards their communities. I recommend you check out When Languages Die by K. David Harrison (he's also made a documentary, The Linguists which is nice too). Also check out Dying Words by the aforementioned Nick Evans (I'm meeting him in a few weeks, so excited!). I also recommend joining the Resource Network For Linguistic Diversity on Facebook as well as the open-access online journal Language Documentation and Conservation.

I really recommend the book mentioned in the article, Rosina Lippy-Green's English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States.

It is one of the best written books I've come across on the topic and very accessible even if you don't have a strong knowledge of sociolinguistics.

Also, nice to see some love for sociolinguistics on this sub!

This question has been asked before, so I recommend doing some searches on the sub.

The general summary is: we don't really know. There are various theories out there as to the origins of AAE. All of them have merits but also have biases. You can read about this on the AAVE wiki page.

A great book on AAE is Green's African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. I'm pretty sure the "Look inside" feature will let you read the preface "On accounting for the origin of AAE."

The data showing that a lot of the coal was originally deposited as charcoal is quite recent, but it's also completely solid. Something about getting identical spectroscopic results between modern day charcoal and Carboniferous coal. However, there's no reason why peat and charcoal wouldn't get along perfectly well - something must have been deposited in between the forest fires. See this: http://www.amazon.com/Oxygen-Molecule-World-Popular-Science/dp/0198607830

When it comes to the oxygen levels, I realize that I leaped to far too broad conclusions. About half a dozen people posted overnight showing data asserting that whatever was going on with oxygen through the Mesozoic was more complicated than I'd thought it was. I responded to OmniHippo's post regarding this.

In response to your third paragraph, I'm pretty sure that you're talking about the Snowball Earth episodes, which mostly happened LONG before the Carboniferous.

In response to your first and second paragraph, thanks. Nice catches.

Go and buy these three books: The Language Construction Kit, Advanced Language Construction (don't worry, it's not that advanced), and The Conlanger's Lexipedia. And if your conlangs are designed for made-up worlds, then get [The Planet Construction Kit] (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Planet-Construction-Kit-Mark-Rosenfelder/dp/0984470034/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_3?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=W79ND56BKPK8EKXT2VQZ) too. If you want to make cultures that are not European then I'd also suggest The China Construction Kit!

Of all of these I'd suggest that you definitely buy The Language Construction Kit and see how you get on. I'd also suggest buying some grammar books of languages you're interested in, and even go so far as to learn a second language if you don't speak one. Having knowledge of at least one other language will help you a great deal.

/u/NOT_AN_ALLCAPS_ACCT summed it up well.

If you want to get a decent crash course in the topic, track down this book.

To give an example: In Chinese the way to make a plural form of a pronoun is to add "men". So "ta" is "he", then "ta men" is "they". But in Old Chinese this "men" word didn't exist, so where did it come from? The most widely accepted proposal is that it itself is a contraction or "mei ren" meaning "every person". ta mei ren => ta meiren => ta men. In the modern language "Men" is a plural marker, but one that can only be applied to a handful of words referring to people (e.g. pronouns, "student", "comrade"). mei ren can still exist and be grammatical, but it's separate from men.

There are a billion great examples from IE languages as well, but I lack the ability to give good examples.

Yeah, looking back at that thread some of the complaints are pretty stupid IMO. But the LCK is still a good book to start off with.

You might also want to check out its sequel, Advanced Language Construction. It's pretty good and covers some other interesting topics like creoles, sign languages, and NW Caucasian verbs.

You should check out two books: This anthology edited by Martinich & Sosa (has the major, classic readings and a lot more), and Scott Soames' introductory book. Soames' book is a fairly gentle walkthrough of some important contemporary topics.

If you're looking for names: Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, Kripke, Davidson, Kaplan, Chomsky, Millikan, Brandom, and Stalnaker. Those are all great philosophers of language from roughly the 20th century.

Lots more opens up once philosophers start taking linguistics seriously. If you're a philosopher who wants to do philosophy of language, you need some familiarity with semantics. For that, Heim & Kratzer's Semantics in Generative Grammar is the tops. There's so much good work on modality and conditionals from linguists and philosophers (Lewis, Kratzer, Yalcin, Stalnaker...too many to name, really), lots of work on contextualism in epistemology, entire literatures on small fragments of language, and so on. But the stuff I recommended above will get you acquainted with the classics.

The academic discipline is called phonology. If you're the sort of person who enjoys rule-based games, like RPGs and board games, I think you'll find it a lot of fun. I like the book Introducing Phonetics and Phonology by Davenport and Hannahs as an introductory text. You need a basic background in phonetics to do phonology, and this text gives it to you.

Almost nobody who works with Egyptian makes any serious attempt to pronounce it correctly. They just use the closest easy-to-pronounce consonants, and stick in whatever filler vowels are natural in their native language. This is partly because we're talking about a language that was spoken a couple thousand years and which had many regional dialects, and so historical pronunciation varied considerably by time and place.

If, however, you want to learn more about the reconstructed pronunciation, then Lorpieno is an excellent choice from a linguistics perspective, and Allen is great if you want a course.

Check out the table of contents of a good reader for philosophy of language, such as Martinich and Sosa (see this review for the ToC). Many, though not all, of the works should be individually downloadable through your university library, especially ones originally published as standalone articles; those that are exercepted from books may be less accessible, but you still might find scans of them online, if your google-fu is up to the task.

Of course, a book/ToC like that is quite daunting to the uninitiated, and for this reason it's good to actually acquire the book itself, so that the authors (in the introduction to the book and introductions to each piece of work) can guide you. But you probably don't want to drop $80 or $100 on a book you may not actually need. It may be a good idea to contact the professor and ask which book they plan to use, so that you can get it early, or if there will be no book, then a list of (at least some of) the works that will be covered.

For people interested in Native language revival, I heartily recommend getting to know the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival (AICLS). They partnered with UC Berkeley to create the first Breathe of Life program, for people learning languages with no living speakers.

They came up with the The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice, by Leanne Hinton and Ken Hale, which is great material no matter what language you are studying.

David Harvey invented ACORNS, a free computer program that allows you to test yourself on the language you are studying.

/r/conlangs !!!

Here's a good podcast.

Book from the guy that created Dothraki (he's also on the podcast every now and then) about constructing languages

The language construction kit. Gives you a general overview of how languages do things and how you construct languages

Second part of the LCK. Highly optional

After you're done with either the podcast or the fist LCK, you might as well get into the grammar of other languages instead of using language construction things.

Don't do auxlangs, though.

Edit: There's also a planet construction kit in case you want to get straight into world building as well

It's actually not the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that you're concerned about here. The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is about linguistic relativity leading to conceptual, and thus experiential, relativity. You can reject this relativity and still hold that language is necessary for conscious experience in the full blown sense that humans have, but think (contra Sapir/Whorf) that language shares a basic enough generalized form to avoid complete conceptual relativity. This is in fact the position I hold. You might want to check out Sellars' [psychological nominalism] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_nominalism) with respect to this (although "consciousness" as it's currently formulated in the philosophical literature was not a very standard term at the time Sellars was writing and so he didn't speak to this problem directly).

As for your second question, if one takes anything from the work of the latter Wittgenstein, then no, since the sort of conceptual capacities necessary to invent a language, such as an understanding of the function of labeling can only make sense to one who has been inducted into a language. A good ontogentic story of human language which draws heavily from this Wittgensteinian point is given in Michael Tomasello's book The Origins of Human Communication reviewed here.

Also, there was a post on this a while ago that might be of interest.

You might want to read just one of the four Nikayas, or an anthology like Sayings of the Buddha or In the Buddha's words.

On the Mahayana side, it is better to start with the books of modern teachers like others have recommended. My personal recommendations are any book by Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche and "The method of no method" by Chan master Sheng Yen. Mahayana sutras can be underwhelming or confusing to the beginner - I can recommend the Prajnaparamita sutra (i.e. the Diamond sutra or a longer version.)

My experience was a bit weird because for the first few years I was spending around 1/3 or 1/2 of the year in the US, then the rest in the UK. So my accent didn't start to change till relatively recently. In the past few years I've spent all my time here, and I guess after about a year I started to soften my 'r' and harden my 't'. Then the words I used frequently started changing and I started using the 'ah' in the middle of words. Now it's a really fucked up hybrid of both, so my family thinks I'm full on English sounding - and they comment on it. But English people here know I'm not English. They're just never very sure where I'm from so they have to ask.

However, I must admit that in formal situations I have learned to sound as English as possible - so ordering food, asking for directions, post office, etc. I suspect this is because I'm always aware I'm different and I get really fucking tired of people bitching about American policy or just being obnoxious about what part of the States I'm from (No, it's not near Florida. Yes, I've been to Fla. no, I don't like it there. Ugh!). So to avoid that, my brain automatically goes into formal gear. When I'm with friends I sound more Yank. When my daughter and I speak we fall back into a pattern of very fast Yank-speak.

I'm sure you could learn an accent without knowing Phonetics, but the phonetics will make it easier because it provides a framework for understanding sounds. Try an intro book like this one and you'll soon find the symbols make it way easier to understand. I haven't done much academic stuff in a while, but when I did it and my hearing was good I could 'see' the sounds people were making using the IPA in my head while they were talking. Very useful for imitation!

> Axler + Evan Chen for linear algebra

> Sutherland + Evan Chen for topology

> Tao analysis I and II for analysis

> Pinter + Evan Chen for abstract algebra

> Evan Chen for complex analysis


Thanks :)


Is this what you're referring to
? link, re the napkin project? That's
a neat idea.


How long have you spent going over them?

Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology is an astounding collection of contemporary work in metaphysics. As you may guess from the title, the focus of the essay is on metaphysics itself.

Ted Sider's introduction in his book Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time also does a pretty good job of explaining contemporary analytic metaphysics.

It sounds like a good introduction to Phonetics and Phonology might be of interest to you. This is the one I first used.

You'll want to check out Phil Kitcher's Science, Truth, and Democracy. He addresses the realism vs. constructivism debate in the first chapter and comes out strongly on the side of realism, arguing directly against a number of anti-realist theses (while conceding a few minor points).

Personally, I've had phases of being a militant realist and a militant anti-realist. In the longer run though, I've come to think that both sides have good points to make, that the truth is more complex than either side is would have us believe, and that a strong allegiance to one side or the other will cause the student to tune-out as much information as they tune-in. Such is the nature of the 'ism' and the adversarial academic philosophical climate.

Yeah, I don't think Chomsky has written in depth about this, but obviously he'd be alive to the risk of naturalistic fallacy. He praises this 2011 book, exploring the topic -

https://www.amazon.ca/Elements-Moral-Cognition-Linguistic-Cognitive/dp/0521855780

Highlights from my library...

At introductory level, Skilton A Concise History of Buddhism is a good overview of Buddhism from an historical perspective.

Foundations of Buddhism by Rupert Gethin is a fairly good modern overview of Buddhist ideas.

Kalupahana A history of Buddhist philosophy - slightly eccentric, but some excellent coverage of Buddhist thought. Stops short of Tantra. However, supplement with Samuel The Origins of Yoga and Tantra.

Snellgrove Indo-Tibetan Buddhism covers late Mahāyāna and Tantra; theory oriented. Perhaps a but dated now, but non-sectarian.

For early Buddhist texts, Gethin's selections from the Pāḷi Canon is probably a better bet than Bodhi's massive tome. It is more focussed. If you get into Pāli Suttas then get the Nikāya translations, starting with Majjhima Nikāya (the most readable). Another lesser know anthology is by Glenn Wallis Basic Teachings of the Buddha. Slightly idiosyncratic, but a very interesting perspective.

For a traditional anthology of Mahāyāna texts try the much neglected Śikṣamuccaya by Śāntideva (8th Century). I have a different edition to this link, so maybe look around.

Tantra doesn't lend itself to anthologies. I think probably the best introduction to Tantra is Hakeda Kūkai: Major Works, though it may not entirely stand alone, you'll at least know what the right questions are. I've never found any book by a Tibetan Buddhist to rival Kūkai for clarity of exposition about what Tantra Buddhism is.

In terms of practice, Buddhism is often sharply divided by sectarianism and so books on practice tend to be narrowly focussed along sectarian lines. And even on single practices within sects (such as books on Theravāda approaches to breath meditation only; Zen approaches to koan practice and so on.). Note that having asked for a comprehensive book, most of the suggestions are sectarian and ignore centuries of development of Buddhism in other directions.

Buddhism also often suffers from a theory/practice disconnect. A lot of our theory/doctrine has no practical application; while some of our practices are poorly understood and communicated.

The fact is that if you take one sect at a starting point, you will find much of what you learn contradicted when you shift to a different sectarian point of view. Sects tend to present their sectarian point of view as Buddhism without ever letting on that other brands are available. So a comprehensive outline of Buddhism is almost impossible without fudging a lot of conflict and contradiction.

First line of the book description:
> Blending the spirit of Eats, Shoots & Leaves with the science of The Language Instinct...

o_0 This does not make me want to read this book. OP be warned. Seems like there will be a lot of facepalming involved. I'll probably check this book out anyway (I love to facepalm), but I'd recommend something by Michael Tomasello instead, such as Origins of Human Communication or The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition.

> I think it still holds up as an examination of what it means to be a person.

Agreed. Should have mentioned this too. I think I got mine for free from amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Little-Fuzzy-Sapiens-Book-ebook/dp/B0082T1G7C/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=little+fuzzy+piper&qid=1555953262&s=gateway&sr=8-1

I think Soames and Lycan's books are pretty good.

In my seminar on the philosophy of language we used this one. It's a pretty good collection of key articles.

Here is what I've been recommended:

Loprieno: Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction (a bit heavy on linguistics, but nothing you can't handle with some basic knowledge)

How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs: A step-by-step guide to teach yourself by Collier and Manley

L'Égyptien hiéroglyphique by Assimil

Middle Egyptian by Allen

Unfortunately, there isn't all that much "real" literature in ME, but it must still be a load of fun. :-)

True and consistent across the United States see:
http://www.amazon.com/African-American-English-Linguistic-Introduction/dp/0521891388

Oxygen. All books by this author are AMAZING (yes in caps).

I highly recommend this book by Scott Soames. Couple that with reading the seminal papers by Frege, Russell, P.F. Strawson and the others that are cited in the text (the papers recommended in the /r/philosophy reading list are all worth reading).

At what level? Sutherland's Introduction is good. I also recommend Korner's lecture notes.

For AAVE, there's this book. It's awesome and very descriptive, too.

Do yourself a favor, read this public domain book called "Little Fuzzy":

https://www.amazon.com/Little-Fuzzy-Sapiens-Book-ebook/dp/B0082T1G7C

Then hunt down Scalzi's reboot authorized by the original author's estate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_Nation

"A way to intensity what you're saying" is your analysis or interpretation, and might not be correct. You should be careful not to jump to conclusions about the meaning of the construction.

In accordance with the other person's comment, which seems to nail it, the construction seems related more to expressing or beckoning familiarity rather than "more intensity".

Also, it has probably been popularized by rap and AAVE, given a new art, given a new life. So if you hear it more lately, that's probably due to cultural influence or momentum. But that's different than the construction itself "coming from" the dialect. Whereas, there are many great [other] expressions that entirely originate in African American English.

African American English: A Linguistic Introduction by Lisa Green is my go-to reference, but it was published before the rise of Twitter and doesn't contain reference to this use of "that".

Agreed with the above post, and add A New History of Western Philosophy by Anthony Kenny. Doesn't seem terribly well-known, but I've found it to be incredibly helpful and much less biased than Russell -- though I haven't read the Copleston, so I can't compare.

I just wanted to add that there was a sort of secondary mode of hieroglyphic usage, and from what I remember, I think it developed a good bit later, when Middle Egyptian was being used as the courtly language of the New Kingdom, wherein foreign names were written with the hieroglyphs representing vowels. I want to say it was sometime around the time that they also added the 'L' hieroglyph.

If you want to get into some (REALLY INVOLVED) reading on the subject, Anthony Loprieno has a book on Middle Egyptian wherein he uses known vowel sounds from Coptic and other closely related languages to try and reconstruct the full, vocalic forms of words from Middle Egyptian. You can find that book here: http://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Egyptian-A-Linguistic-Introduction/dp/0521448492.

Source: I majored in linguistics and minored in Ancient Egyptian (Near Eastern Languages and Cultures) as an undergrad.

The book referenced at 4:20 is Elements of Moral Cognition: Rawls' Linguistic Analogy and the Cognitive Science of Moral and Legal Judgment by John Mikhail. Seems very interesting.

You would probably really enjoy reading this book - http://www.amazon.com/The-Spell-Sensuous-Perception-More-Than-Human/dp/0679776397

I assume you're looking for some pop sci books rather than papers? If so, I really enjoyed:

• Oxygen: the molecule that made the world by Nick Lane (Amazon)
  
• Richard Fortey's "Life: the first 4 billion years" has a good section at the start
  
  EDIT: I don't have as many books as I thought I did, I've been reading papers rather than books

No, but funnily enough you're the second person to ask that.

It's from here.

edit: Just realised you're both people.

https://www.amazon.com/Spell-Sensuous-Perception-Language-More-Than-Human/dp/0679776397

favorite non-fiction book, warped my perception of the world for weeks after reading it

There are many good analytic introductions to philosophy of language, including Martinich and Sosa and Soames.

Oh gosh. Where to begin?

First of all, if you're a student, I suggest going to your university library and just typing "phonetics" or "phonology" into your library computer's search. You should have all sorts of books, some of which are research-based, some of which are textbooks, available to you.

As far as the textbooks I've read, there's Language Files, Introducing Phonetics and Phonology, and one other that I can't remember the name of at the moment...

However, what I would REALLY suggest you use, is Wikipedia's Index of Phonetics-related Articles. It's a treasure trove of information.

Haha you are echoing my own thoughts and worldview that began with reading the PEAR, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research
experiments, onto Ayahuasca experiences, animism and shamanism and realising archetypes are an actual thing, then hefty doses of Jung, and the books of David Abram (Spell of the Sensous especially).

https://www.amazon.com/Spell-Sensuous-Perception-Language-More-Than-Human/dp/0679776397


Then on to the occult driven by this pondering over the role of language in shaping reality and the seeming power of words, symbols, sounds to alter... your perception of reality? Except sometimes they alter objective reality, and the psychological model of Spirits was shattered conclusively for me one night suddenly throwing a whole ecosystem of beings into the mix.

And now I am back where I started, pondering the role of the world of symbols, archetypes and spirits and hidden forces and the implications for, as the guys at Princeton named it, anomolous engineering.

This is the missing key. What humanity and science lacks in order to bring forth, as you say, the Golden Age, is what we today call the occult. It's like mainstream civilization is missing half the picture.

That means we need to apply science to the occult, and the occult to science. We already know that a experiment is affected by the experimenters expectations. We know that the cat is in limbo till the box is opened. We know the placebo effect is better then pretty much every drug at healing. We know that random number generators are affected by crowds. And statistics tell us weather is not behaving like normal on holidays. The mountain of evidence is tall enough and has been for decades.

Now we need theorists, both scientists and occultists to come up with the why, and a new class of engineers to figure out the how and the applications thereof.

As to the spirits, and their nature? Some might be natural universal forces, spontaneously birthed by every complex system you could think of, from stars to planets to animals to plants, to that bend in the brook with a rock that creates a bit of turbulence.

Some might be man made or indeed, once men and women. Some might be current or long dead terrestrials and extraterrestrials, some might be AI's the size of planets built by long gone aliens, some might be interdimensional visitors from each category above. There be multitudes.

As far as I am concerned the first non human contact happened tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago and is ongoing every day all around the world. The norm throughout human history was probably much more contact then we have today. That might be a problem.

I hadn't seen this answer yet, so I will throw it out there. Like most of the other ideas here this is a hypothesis. Life has made various evolutionary innovations over history and one idea is that woody bark/stems were first evolved sometime immediately proceeding the carboniferous. Woody stems are stronger and more resilient because there are protein cross links between cellulose strands. Cellulose being a long strand of linked sugars. Woody stems are very difficult to digest, which is why pretty much nothing eats it. When it first evolved, literally nothing ate it because it was so new and no organism had the tools to break it down. So, during the carboniferous trees and plants with woody stems proliferated because they had few or no natural predators, and probably also because they could grow taller than their competitors thanks to the strong stems and thus had better access to sunlight. They did still die of old age however, and that woody material would just sit there without decaying. Eventually it would be buried and millions of years later we would dig it out of the ground as coal or oil.

Well, the process plants use to grow is they take CO2 out of the atmosphere to build cellulose and other structural molecules and release oxygen. So what was happening in the carboniferous was that this was a very one way process. The carbon was being fixated and nothing was breaking it down to re-release it.

That all changed when fungi, think mushrooms and molds, eventually evolved the enzymatic equipment to break down woody stems. Sometime at the end of the carboniferous presumably. With this second innovation, the woody part of plants didn't just sit around waiting to be buried, it was broken down the fixated CO2 was released back into the atmosphere. Obviously this added a new variable to the equation and the oxygen level in the atmosphere struck a new and lower balance.


I suggest "Oxygen" and "power, sex, suicide" by nick lane if you are really interested in this subject.

https://www.amazon.com/Power-Sex-Suicide-Mitochondria-Meaning/dp/0199205647

https://www.amazon.com/Oxygen-Molecule-World-Popular-Science/dp/0198607830

Alan Watts was an extraordinary human. Definitely one of the most insightful people in the English-speaking world. I can't recommend him highly enough.

I also strongly suggest David Abram. His major work is The Spell of the Sensuous. Watts points out that we've mistaken our map for the territory. Abram begins to teach us how to put the map down.

It actually is. Excellent book called Oxygen: The Molecule that made the World by Nick Lane details how life came about and ends due to our reliance upon oxygen.

He also wrote Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life which I would also highly recommend. Basically, it details how eukaryotic cells developed through the Hydrogen Hypothesis.

Ted Sider might be worth checking out.

The Spell of the Sensuous?

Also on kindle http://www.amazon.com/Little-Fuzzy-ebook/dp/B0082T1G7C/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1375923665&sr=1-1&keywords=Little+fuzzy

I'm reading Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World. next up is Sullenberger's book

> What are they?

There are many - you can read about them in a grammar of AAVE the same way you can for English, French, Tok Pisin, British/American/Jamaican English, whatever.

Books of anybody named Gethin are not the primary religious texts in Buddhism. There is a Rupert Gethin thats written books about Buddhism though, according to Google.

I think this must be it
https://www.amazon.com/Sayings-Buddha-Translations-Nikayas-Classics/dp/019283925X

To all the people talking about telomeres:

Turns out telomeres isn't the answer. Most cells don't divide enough times to get to their Hayflick limit, and those that divide indefinitely (stem cells, germ cells) express telomerase. Current frontrunning theories deal with oxidation from damaged mitochondria and resulting dysregulated metabolism. The body doesn't really have any evolutionary incentive to live much longer than enough time to raise your kids. See the disposable soma theory. For more information check out this book

As a side note, not everything is replaced every 7 years. Neurons are permanent, elastin in skin isn't replaced (hence, wrinkles), etc.

There's a book you should read. It's called When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge.

Every language carries knowledge which is valuable to humanity for historical, anthropological, and even medical and environmental reasons. There are some languages spoken by a small number of indigenous people which carry information about medicinal herbs that the rest of the world is oblivious toward.

When languages are lost, all of the knowledge written down is lost, all of the history is lost. Look at Egypt; humans today only understand a fraction of the language of Ancient Egypt, which makes studying its history very difficult. Everything that happens in the world today is going to be valuable for future historians, and languages need to stay alive for history to stay alive.

And since people don't live forever, it's necessary for languages to be passed down to younger generations in order for the knowledge to remain accessible.

Unfortunately my only source is this book... perhaps you find it on the internets or otherwise :P

http://www.amazon.com/Oxygen-Molecule-World-Popular-Science/dp/0198607830/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1347771712&sr=1-2&keywords=oxygen