New Books In Language

Sometimes we have to depend on philosophy to explain to us why something apparently simple is in fact extremely complicated. The way we use referring expressions – things that pick out the entities we want to talk about, such as “Mary”, or “that guy over there” – falls into this category, but is no longer just a matter for the philosophers; it’s complicated enough to require highly interdisciplinary explanation. In his book, Computational Models of Referring: A Study in Cognitive Science (MIT Press, 2016) Kees van Deemter approaches the problem from a computational angle, asking how we can develop algorithms to produce referring expressions that are communicatively successful, efficient, and potentially even human-like in their performance. He draws on a broad range of work from across cognitive science to address this question, and in doing so, also gives us an excellent example of how computational thinking can inform linguistic theorising. In this interview, we discuss several aspects of this work, inclu

On this program, we talk to Sarah Ruden about her new book, The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible (Pantheon, 2017). Novelist J. M. Coetzee praised the book, saying, “If you seriously want to know what the Bible says but don’t have the time or the courage to master Biblical Hebrew or Koine Greek, then Sarah Ruden is the best guide you are likely to find: friendly, informal, yet with a scholarly grasp of just how unrealizable perfect translation is.” Sarah Ruden holds a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She has taught Latin, English, and writing at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Cape Town and has been a tutor for the South African Education and Environment Project, an education-enrichment nonprofit in Cape Town. She was a scholar in residence for three years at Yale Divinity School and a Guggenheim fellow and is now a visiting scholar at Brown University. In the fall of 2016, she received the Whiting Crea

For this episode, New Books in Jewish Studies interviews Lewis Glinert, Professor of Hebrew Studies at Dartmouth College, where he is also affiliated with the Program in Linguistics. His book, The Story of Hebrew (Princeton University Press, 2017), can be defined as a biography of Hebrew language that spans Millenia. The book includes a chronological description of the use and perception of Hebrew in different communities across the world, addressing questions related to the ways in which Hebrew has been represented and utilized by Jews of different backgrounds, Christian scholars and colonials, and modern day Israelis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The ‘ideological odd couple’ of Robert George and Cornel West jointly authored a statement defending free speech on campus and elsewhere. Find out why. Robert George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Professor of Politics at Princeton University, and the founding director of Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. His research focuses on issues in ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of law. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Contemporary scholarship on the Mughal empire has generally ignored the role Sanskrit played in imperial political and literary projects. However, in Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (Columbia University Press, 2016), Audrey Truschke, Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Rutgers University–Newark, demonstrates that Sanskrit was central to the process of royal self-definition. She documents how Brahman and Jain intellectuals were working closely with Persian-speaking Islamic elite around the cultural framework of the central royal court. These projects often revolved around cross-cultural textual production and translation, putting Sanskrit and Persian works in conversation. The production of Mughal-backed texts, and the literary reflection or silence about Brahman and Jain participation reveals unexplored horizons for understanding South Asia imperial history. In our conversation we discussed the dynamics of the Mughal court, the influential leaders Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan,

The unprecedented crime of the 1994 Rwandan genocide demanded an unconventional legal response. After failed attempts by the international legal system to efficiently handle legal cases stemming from the genocide, Rwandans decided to take matters into their own hands and reinstate Gacaca law, which had been the sole legal system in Rwanda prior to colonization. Gacaca, a Kinyarwanda word referring to a type of grass or traditional lawn, is also a metonym for place and mediation. Gacaca law allows perpetrators and victims to resolve their differences before the community, and a panel of eminent persons, inyangamugayo. Gacaca seeks not simply to punish crime but to repair the social fabric rent by crime. In his book Practical Challenges in Customary Law Translation: The Case Of Rwanda’s Gacaca Law (Organization for Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa, 2015), Telesphore Ngarambe uses a fusion of cultural and translational studies, with emphasis placed on cultural contextualization, to make

As described by Dovid Katz, Yiddish is an extraordinarily multifaceted language: a language that is at once acclaimed as sacred and dismissed as deficient, profoundly connected to centuries of religious and cultural history yet marketed superficially, held to be dying out yet booming at an unprecedented rate. Yiddish and Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) charts the fascinating, complex course of the language, and discusses its development, spread, displacement, and how it has been threatened by pressures towards assimilation in many diverse ways. As we discuss, this history illustrates and challenges important ideas about the interplay between language, power and identity. Chris Cummins (www.crcummins.com, c.r.cummins@gmail.com) is a lecturer in Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matthew Pauly’s Breaking the Tongue: Language, Education, and Power in Soviet Ukraine, 1923-1934 (University of Toronto Press, 2014) offers a detailed investigation of the language policy–officially termed Ukrainization–that was introduced in Ukraine during the formative years of the Soviet Union. Out of a massive amount of archival records and documents, Pauly reconstructs a complex and controversial process that happened to have significant consequences for the subsequent decades. In his research, Pauly presents Ukrainization as a process that impacts multiple fields, outlining the connection between the nation formation and language/cultural policy. The areas that appear to have experienced changes as a result of Ukrainization include educational institutions, political establishment, economy, ethnic groups. Significant attention is given to education and pedagogy. Breaking the Tongue in much detail discusses the role of educators in the process of the Ukrainian culture popularization. While accounting fo

In Borrowed Voices: Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination (Rutgers University Press, 2016), Jennifer Glaser, Associate Professor of English and comparative literature and an affiliate faculty member in Judaic studies and womens, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, examines how racial ventriloquism became a hallmark of Jewish-American fiction. She offers a nuanced analysis of this practice of Jewish writers speaking for or as other minorities. This book is a compelling contribution, bringing Jewish cultural studies into conversation with critical race theory in innovative and provocative ways. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Teenagers get a lot of bad press. Whether it’s how they look, how they dress, the things they say, the way they say it – it sometimes seems as if they can’t get anything right. And when it comes to language, it’s clear that teenagers are special. But though anecdotal evidence abounds, just how special, and in what ways, has rarely been the subject of detailed empirical research. Sali Tagliamonte’s book Teen Talk: The Language of Adolescents (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is the first step towards filling that gap. Using a variety of data sources and approaches, the book zooms in on some of the “funky features” that set teen language apart. In this interview, we discuss several of the words and structures featured in the book: “just”, “stuff”, “weird”, “awesome”, and the much-maligned “like.” We also discuss the special ecological niche that teen language has in the process of language change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recent controversies surrounding sexual harassment and assault on college campuses have sparked heated discussions surrounding the everyday experiences of women on college campuses. Female students and faculty members have often felt at odds with their institutions and other members of their workplaces when sexual harassment and assault enter the work environment. What is one to do when experiencing gender-based discrimination in the academic workplace? Ellen Mayock in her recent book Gender Shrapnel in the Academic Workplace (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) seeks to put a name to the phenomenon that many women in academia face as well as provide solutions to institutional failures that allow for these experiences of harassment and assault to occur. Drawing upon feminist theory, linguistics, and the power of personal narratives, Mayock discusses how gender shrapnel occurs in the academic workplace. The later chapters of the book provide very tangible solutions to gender shrapnel that individuals and institutions ca

According to the blurb, Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics (Oxford University Press, 2016) “explores the ways in which linguistic diversity mediates social justice in liberal democracies.” This is true, but tends to understate the force of the arguments being put forward here. Ingrid Piller presents a powerful case for how language is variously overlooked or misunderstood as a factor that entrenches disadvantage and inequality in a globalized society. She argues that discrimination based on language persists, often justified by appeal to the false premise that individuals exercise complete control over their own linguistic repertoires, and reinforced by tacit assumptions embedded in our cultural practices. In this interview, we talk about some of the relevant domains, and ask how a better-informed approach to linguistic diversity can potentially help in addressing persistent forms of social injustice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adcho

From its opening fragment on “Fragments” to its “Possibly dolorous tropical lyrical coda,” Simon Critchley‘s new book is a pleasure to hold in the hand and the mind. ABC of Impossibility (Univocal Publishing, 2015) is a collection of fragments and a catalog of “impossible objects”: poetry, America, emptiness, indirection, money, and more. Thoughts and jokes and quotes and small essays ranging from one line to several pages are arranged in a sequence that plays with unusual juxtapositions and acts as a form of “counterpoint,” riffing on and playing off of the work of Pessoa and Augustine and Rousseau and Blake and Heidegger and others. This is a thoughtful and playful book about time, and the sea, and humor, and loss, and slavery, and the importance of unlearning. Highly recommended! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My instinct as a researcher is usually to shy away from confrontation about foundational issues in the philosophy of language, which is probably why I do what I do (that is to say, from a generative perspective, not linguistics). With a few notable exceptions, it’s my impression that researchers tend either to keep quiet about their skepticism about some foundational matters, or to gravitate towards fields in which those issues are moot. In this respect,Prakash Mondal‘s approach inLanguage, Mind and Computation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) is an interesting and perhaps somewhat unusual one: his work attempts to interrogate rather closely the consequences of adopting some rather innocuous and widespread assumptions or axioms about the nature of language. In doing so, Mondal finds much to criticise, and ultimately argues for quite substantial departures from these assumptions. In this interview we only scratch the surface of his arguments, but I hope we get a decent impression of how his approach relates to the

Aviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking family, reading the Bible in the original Hebrew and debating its meaning over the dinner table. She knew much of it by heart–and was later surprised when, while getting her MFA from the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, she took the novelist Marilynne Robinson’s class on the Bible and discovered she barely recognized the text she thought she knew so well. From differences in the Ten Commandments to a less ambiguous reading of the creation story, the English translation often felt like another book entirely from the one she had grown up with. Kushner’s interest in the differences between the ancient language and the modern one gradually became an obsession. She began what became a ten-year project of reading different versions of the Hebrew Bible in English and traveling the world in the footsteps of the great biblical translators, trying to understand what compelled them to take on a lifetime project that was often considered heretical and in some cases

In The Definition of Anti-Semitism (Oxford University Press, 2015), Kenneth L. Marcus, the President and General Counsel of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, explains what it is at stake in how we define anti-Semitism. “Nowadays virtually everyone is opposed to anti-Semitism although no one agrees about what it means to be anti-Semitic,” Marcus writes (p. 11). Marcus discusses the global rise in anti-Semitism; in the United States, Marcus tells us, college campuses are frequently sites of frequent anti-Semitic–and anti-Israel–incidents. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s not always been clear how the study of written language fits into linguistics. As a relatively recent historical development, it’s tempting to see it as a sideshow in terms of questions about the innateness of language. But at the same time, humans’ aptitude for literacy seems remarkable and could be said to merit study in its own right as a window into the mind. It’s easy to enjoy Geoffrey Sampson‘s Writing Systems, 2nd edition (Equinox, 2015) without getting into these questions, because the social and historical story that unfolds over its pages is itself fascinating. This new edition benefits from advances in classical and anthropological scholarship, and offers a meticulous and elegantly explained account of the emergence of some of the world’s predominant writing systems. But the author also continues to make a strong case for the relevance of written language to linguistic study, and draws substantially upon psycholinguistic research (which itself has motivated a reappraisal of how reading ‘works

Literary practices are often associated with specific social groups in particular social settings. Kate Pahl‘s Materializing Literacies in Communities: The Uses of Literacy Revisited (Bloomsbury, 2014) challenges these assumptions by showing the varieties of literary practice in Rotherham, England. The book engages with the locally particular to draw out a variety of general findings, relevant to methodological reflection and material culture debates. The book draws on a wealth of projects from the AHRC funded Connected Communities programme, including Fishing as Wisdom, The Imagine Project, and Language as Talisman. The book represents an important intervention into how we understand community, literacy and identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Babel in Zion: Jews, Nationalism, and Language Diversity in Palestine, 1920-1948 (Yale University Press, 2015), Liora R. Halperin, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, argues that multilingualism persisted in Palestine after World War I despite the traditional narrative of the swift victory of Hebrew. Halperin looks at the intertwined nature of language, identity, and nationalism, and how language was a key factor in Jews’ relationships with Palestinian Arabs, the British, and others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do we learn our first words? What is it that makes the linguistic intentions of others manifest to us, when our eyes follow a pointing finger to an object and associate that object with a word? Chad Engelland addresses these and related questions in Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 2015).  Engelland, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas, explores the way in which ostension crosses the Cartesian boundary between body and mind. Drawing on historical and contemporary figures and continental and analytical traditions, he defends an embodied view of ostension in which we directly perceive intentions in ostension rather than infer to them, and gives an account of how we are able to disambiguate gestures through the joint presence of objects in a shared environment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices