A01=Alexandra Aikhenvald
Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
Amazonia
anthropology
Australian
Author_Alexandra Aikhenvald
Category=CBX
Category=CF
culture
David Crystal
dialects
Director of the Language and Culture Research Centre
diversity
Don't Sleep
environment
eq_bestseller
eq_dictionaries-language-reference
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
How Gender Shapes the World
Inuit
James Cook University
Japanese
language
linguistics
men
native American
New Guinea
Polynesian
society
speak
There are Snakes
women
Product details
- ISBN 9781781257715
- Weight: 340g
- Dimensions: 134 x 218mm
- Publication Date: 08 Apr 2021
- Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Every language in the world shares a few common features: we can ask a question, say something belongs to us, and tell someone what to do. But beyond that, our languages are richly and almost infinitely varied: a French speaker can't conceive of a world that isn't split into un and une, male and female, while Estonians have only one word for both men and women: tema. In Dyirbal, an Australian language, things might be masculine, feminine, neuter - or edible vegetable.
Every language tells us something about the people who use it. In I Saw the Dog, linguist Alexandra Aikhenvald takes us from the remote swamplands of Papua New Guinea to the university campuses of North America to illuminate the vital importance of names, the value of being able to say exactly what you mean, what language can tell us about what it means to be human - and what we lose when they disappear forever.
Alexandra Aikhenvald is a professor at the James Cook University in Australia. Born in the USSR, she has lived and worked in the Amazon region of Brazil and Papua New Guinea, and speaks (among others) Estonian, Hebrew, Portuguese, Tariana, French, German, Yiddish and Tok Pisin, a Papuan language in which she occasionally dreams.
