In On Saving Face: A Brief History of Western Appropriation (Hong Kong UP, 2022), Michael Keevak traces the Western reception of the Chinese concept of “face” during the past two hundred years, arguing that it has always been linked to nineteenth-century colonialism. “Lose face” and “save face” have become so normalized in modern European languages that most users do not even realize that they are of Chinese origin. “Face” is an extremely complex and varied notion in all East Asian cultures. It ...
Oct 21, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 469
In this episode from the Vault, we hear from historian Eric Hobsbawm, a frequent visitor at the New York Institute for the Humanities. His talk, Literacy and the Tower of Babel, took place in November 1984. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language
Oct 10, 2022•23 min•Ep. 46
Today I spoke with Carles Prado-Fonts on his recently published book Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation (Northwestern UP, 2022). This transcultural study of cultural production brings to light the ways Spanish literature imagined China by relying on English- and French-language sources. Carles Prado-Fonts examines how the simultaneous dependence on and obscuring of translation in these cross-cultural representations created the illusion of a homogeneous West. He a...
Oct 07, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 42
Yan Ge and Jeremy Tiang are both writers who accumulate languages. Sitting down with host Emily Hyde, they discuss their work in and across Chinese and English, but you’ll also hear them on Sichuanese, the dialect of Mandarin spoken in Yan Ge’s native Sichuan province, and on the Queen’s English as it operates in Singapore, where Jeremy grew up. Yan is an acclaimed writer in China, where she began publishing at age 17. She now lives in the UK. Her novel Strange Beasts of China came out in Englis...
Oct 06, 2022•50 min•Ep. 28
Contributors to Philosophy of Language, Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy, edited by Bo Mou, professor of philosophy at the San Jose State University, bring together work on the syntax and semantics of the Chinese language with philosophy of language, from the classical Chinese and contemporary analytic Anglophone traditions. The result is an anthology which explores what Mou calls “the constructive-engagement” model for doing philosophy. In this wide-ranging interview, we talk about the book...
Sep 22, 2022•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 81
Having a "good" sense of humor generally means being able to take a joke without getting offended—laughing even at a taboo thought or at another's expense. The insinuation is that laughter eases social tension and creates solidarity in an overly politicized social world. But do the stakes change when the jokes are racist? In The Souls of White Jokes: How Racist Humor Fuels White Supremacy (Stanford UP, 2022), Raúl Pérez argues that we must genuinely confront this unsettling question in order to ...
Sep 19, 2022•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 246
A novelist, a translator and a theorist of translation walk into a Zoom Room......Alejandro Zambra, Megan McDowell, and Kate Briggs provide the perfect start to Season 4 of Novel Dialogue. Our first themed season is devoted to translation in all its forms: into and out of English and also in, around, and over the borders between criticism and fiction. We talk to working translators, novelists who write in multiple languages, and we even time travel to discover older novels made new again in tran...
Sep 08, 2022•59 min•Ep. 26
Digital discourse has become a widespread way of communicating worldwide, WhatsApp being one of the most popular Instant Messaging tools. A Linguistic Overview of Whatsapp Communication (Brill, 2022) offers a critical state-of-the-art review of WhatsApp linguistic studies. After evaluating a wide range of sources, and seeking to identify relevant works, two major thematic domains were found. On the one hand, references addressing WhatsApp linguistic characteristics: status notifications, multimo...
Sep 05, 2022•36 min•Ep. 88
One of the most fiercely debated issues of this era is what to do about "bad" speech, hate speech, disinformation, propaganda campaigns, incitement of violence on the internet, and, in particular, speech on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. In Social Media, Freedom of Speech, and the Future of our Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2022), Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone have gathered an eminent cast of contributors--including Hillary Clinton, Amy Klobuchar, Sheldon Whi...
Sep 01, 2022•44 min•Ep. 163
In his dense yet delightful new book Palimpsests of Themselves: Logic and Commentary in Postclassical Muslim South Asia (University of California Press, 2022), Asad Ahmad examines in layered detail the textual and commentarial tradition on the discipline in logic in early modern and modern South Asia, while constantly connecting his study to broader Muslim intellectual currents beyond South Asia. Focused on the seventeenth century text Sullam al-‘Ulum (The Ladder of the Sciences) by Muhibullah a...
Aug 26, 2022•45 min•Ep. 278
In Nobody Wants to Talk About It: Race, Identity, and the Difficulties in Forging Meaningful Conversations (Incognito, 2020), Michael Sidney Fosberg draws on twenty years of experience leading conversations about race to encourage readers to share their story, get comfortable with discomfort, and disagree without being disagreeable. Fosberg's one-man play Incognito is always followed by an open and honest conversation about race and identity. Fosberg provides time-tested strategies for bridging ...
Aug 25, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 107
Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present (University of Chicago Press, 2022) by Dr. Johanna Drucker provides the first account of two-and-a-half millennia of scholarship on the alphabet. Drawing on decades of research, Dr. Drucker dives into sometimes obscure and esoteric references, dispelling myths and identifying a pantheon of little-known scholars who contributed to our modern understanding of the alphabet, one of the most important inventions in human his...
Aug 17, 2022•59 min•Ep. 1255
Thinking about learning Modern Hebrew, but waiting for the perfect grammar? The Routledge Introductory Course in Modern Hebrew by Giore Etzion is an integrated language course adopting an eclectic approach. The course contains 90 lessons combining authentic texts, grammar explanations, and exercises with audiovisual materials on the companion website with links to Israeli websites, videos, and music. Tune in as we speak with Giore Etzion about the second edition of his Modern Hebrew course. Gior...
Jul 22, 2022•23 min•Ep. 304
Spoken by a quarter of the world's population, English is today's lingua franca--its common tongue. The language of business, popular media, and international politics, English has become commodified for its economic value and increasingly detached from any particular nation. This meteoric "rise of English" has many obvious benefits to communication. Tourists can travel abroad with greater ease. Political leaders can directly engage their counterparts. Researchers can collaborate with foreign co...
Jul 21, 2022•44 min•Ep. 1237
Abhishek Avtans talks about the apabhraṃśa, a word that refers to the middle stage of the Indo-Aryan languages, crucial links between ancient languages like Sanskrit, and modern South Asian languages such as Hindi, Bangla, Bhojpuri, Punjabi, Marathi, Nepali, and others. The first mention of apabhraṃśas is in Mahabhasya, a 2nd century BCE text by Patanjali, where the author refers to languages considered deviations from Sanskrit. However, research into apabhraṃśas, for the same reason, has become...
Jul 08, 2022•19 min•Ep. 76
Guns hold a complex place in American culture. Over 30,000 Americans die each year from gun violence, and guns are intimately connected to issues of public health, as is evident whenever a mass shooting occurs. But guns also play an important role in many Americans’ lives that is not reducible to violence and death—as tools, sporting equipment, and identity markers. They are also central to debates about constitutional rights, as seen in ongoing discussions about the Second Amendment, and they a...
Jun 15, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 138
In A Sociolinguistic History of Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), Dr. Robert McColl Millar presents the first sociolinguistic history of all languages spoken in Scotland. The book includes analyses from across the country including coverage of Gaelic, Scots, Pictish, British, Norn, Immigrant languages and Scottish Standard English. It also covers four case studies dealing with the birth of a dialect or variety: North East Scots, Scottish Standard English, Shetland Scots and Glasgow Sc...
Jun 15, 2022•42 min•Ep. 55
Listen to this interview of Jo Mackiewicz, Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Communication at Iowa State University and editor of the Journal of Business and Technical Communication. We talk about welds that hold and about sentences that stand. Jo Mackiewicz : "Oh, I'd definitely agree that people can be motivated in what they're learning when they appreciate the art of it. I mean, for instance in welding, you need to put in a certain number of hours in order to have your mind and your body...
Jun 06, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 71
In this episode Kim talks to Adrienne Raphel about crossword puzzles. For lots more about crosswords, check out Adrienne’s book Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them (Penguin Random House, 2021) For some of the historical puzzles she mentions in the episode, Adrienne recommends The Curious History of the Crossword: 100 Puzzles from Then and Now by Ben Tausig. If you’re inspired to start doing crosswords and looking for some guidan...
May 31, 2022•17 min•Ep. 48
Listen to this interview of Julia Molinari, lecturer in professional academic communication at The Open University (UK) and independent researcher. We talk her book What Makes Writing Academic: Rethinking Theory for Practice (Bloomsbury, 2022) and about the things people use academic writing for. Julia Molinari : "We need to ensure that teachers of academic writing have access to scholarship and can do the research that they need to do in order to sensitize themselves to the different ways of co...
May 31, 2022•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 69
Should academic scholars trust machine translation for the publication of their academic articles? In this episode, Avi Staiman and Ana Guerberof Arenas discuss how the evolution of machine translation and the most recent developments in machine translation technology. Ana shares her insight on the potential pitfalls of relying on machine translation for unpublished manuscripts as opposed to when getting the 'gist' suffices for understanding the research of others. She also shares the results of...
May 30, 2022•45 min•Ep. 66
The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names of Ireland (Oxford UP, 2021) contains explanations of over 3,800 family names, of any origin, that are established in Ireland, both in the Republic and in Northern Ireland. It provides an entry for every family name that has more than 100 bearers in the 1911 Census of Ireland. The entries bring together a variety of sources, medieval to modern, to uncover the histories, contexts, and transformations of surnames in Ireland. Research Assistant Professor of Dig...
May 27, 2022•51 min•Ep. 16
Sabdanugamah (Sanskrit Library, 2021) is the first of two volumes of studies in honor of Professor George Cardona, the preeminent authority on Paninian grammar and the linguistic traditions of India as well as one of the worlds leading scholars of Indo-European linguistics. These studies cover topics in Paninian grammar, other Indian linguistic traditions, issues in Sanskrit morphology and syntax, and theories of verbal cognition. Visit the Sanskrit Library here. The Sanskrit Library offers cour...
May 26, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 190
Listen to this interview of Roslyn Petelin, Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Queensland, Australia. We talk about her book How Writing Works: A Field Guide to Effective Writing (Routledge, 2021) writing well and knowing why. Roslyn Petelin : "My book caters for all kinds of writers: student writers, creative writers, technical writers, journalistic writers, corporate writers, all of whom need to be able to write well, write successfully, for either personal or corporate credibil...
May 20, 2022•28 min•Ep. 62
Dr. Sofia Stolk’s The Opening Statement of the Prosecution in International Criminal Trials: A Solemn Tale of Horror (Routledge, 2021) addresses the discursive importance of the prosecution’s opening statement before an international criminal tribunal. Opening statements are considered to be largely irrelevant to the official legal proceedings but are simultaneously deployed to frame important historical events. They are widely cited in international media as well as academic texts; yet have bee...
May 13, 2022•53 min•Ep. 1198
Journalist Mónica Guzmán is the loving liberal daughter of Mexican immigrants who voted—twice—for Donald Trump. When the country could no longer see straight across the political divide, Mónica set out to find what was blinding us and discovered the most eye-opening tool we’re not using: our own built-in curiosity. Partisanship is up, trust is down, and our social media feeds make us sure we’re right and everyone else is ignorant (or worse). But avoiding one another is hurting our relationships ...
May 09, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 64
Core Buddhist teachings are preserved in the ancient Indian language Pali. Listen in as Aleix Ruiz-Falqués speaks about its structure, its significance, and opportunities to study it with him online. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language
May 04, 2022•32 min•Ep. 191
Old English is the language you think you know until you actually hear or see it. Unlike Shakespearean English or even Chaucer’s Middle English, Old English—the language of Beowulf—defies comprehension by untrained modern readers. Used throughout much of Britain more than a thousand years ago, it is rich with words that haven’t changed (like word), others that are unrecognizable (such as neorxnawang, or paradise), and some that are mystifying even in translation (gafol-fisc, or tax-fish). In thi...
May 02, 2022•52 min•Ep. 40
Listen to this interview of Zhihui Fang, the Irving and Rose Fien Endowed Professor of Education in the School of Teaching and Learning at the University of Florida. We talk his book Demystifying Academic Writing: Genres, Moves, Skills, and Strategies (Routledge, 2021) and about how functional grammar can benefit the academic writer. Zhihui Fang : "Learning disciplinary content is primarily a linguistic process. When you learn the language that construes particular content, then you are learning...
Apr 22, 2022•56 min•Ep. 58
What does a Bengali intellectual and poet have in common with a British-Austrian logician and philosopher? In Language, Limits, and Beyond: Early Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore (Oxford University Press, 2021), Priyambada Sarkar explores the shared fascination both of these figures have with the limitations of language, the nature of the ineffable, and the role of poetry in our appreciatin both. While we know that the young Ludwig Wittgenstein read Tagore’s works to the Vienna Circle, Sarka...
Apr 20, 2022•59 min•Ep. 279
