logo for Georgetown University Press
Advanced Media Arabic
El Mustapha Lahlali
Georgetown University Press, 2008

Amman and Russia call for immediate ceasefire

French riots extend to immigrant communities

Lawyers call for fair trial of Guantanamo prisoners

China aims at increasing trade with Russia

20 casualties in an earthquake in Pakistan

Headlines—print and broadcast—have gone global. As a result, news and information from authentic sources make a useful resource for foreign language learners.

Advanced Media Arabic systematically introduces authentic texts and audio files from a wide variety of media sources. This textbook helps students develop analytical and translation skills in Arabic and expand their reading, writing, listening, and speaking capabilities. The book emphasizes the semantic and stylistic aspects of media Arabic rather than its grammar and aims to equip students with the ability to listen to and converse about current events.

Organized by theme, each of the ten chapters covers current issues like:

o Diplomacyo Electionso Trade and Industryo Violence and Disordero Law and Ordero Economyo War and Military Actiono Natural Disasterso Terrorismo Arabic television talk shows

Each chapter provides important vocabulary; examples of language in context; exercises for reading and listening comprehension, writing, and translation; and a section for discussion and debate.

The listening material—60 minutes of spoken material—is available for free online at www.press.georgetown.edu.

Downloading Audio Files from press.georgetown.eduPlease click on the link under “Sample Content” to download a compressed zip file of all ten MP3 audio tracks that accompany the book. Files can be downloaded using a Mac or a PC. We recommend playing the files using iTunes or Windows Media Player. Please note that Georgetown University Press does not provide technical support for audio downloads.

For Mac, files will automatically be saved to your “Downloads” folder. (For older Macs, you may need to unzip the files using Stuffit.) To add files to iTunes, open iTunes, and click File>Add to Library and navigate to your file location.

For PC, save the compressed file to your desktop. Once the file has downloaded, go to the folder location on the desktop. Double-click the .zip file icon to unzip the file. Another folder will appear on the desktop. Open to reveal “Lahlali audio” folder. Open that folder to see all ten MP3 files. Import the files in to your music player from your file location by selecting all ten audio tracks, right-click and select Add to Playlist.

PLEASE NOTE: There are no audio files for lessons 6 and 7. Those lessons have reading passages only.

[more]

logo for Georgetown University Press
Advanced Media Arabic
Second Edition
El Mustapha Lahlali
Georgetown University Press, 2017

Headlines—print and broadcast—have gone global. As a result, news and information from authentic sources make a useful resource for foreign language learners.

Advanced Media Arabic, Second Edition systematically introduces authentic texts and audio files from a wide variety of media sources. This textbook helps students develop analytical and translation skills in Arabic and expand their reading, writing, listening, and speaking capabilities. The very successful first edition has been updated in a variety of ways, including:• New texts and audio for each module, including radio as well as TV materials • A new module on “The Language of Revolutions” and another on “Language andCulture” • New and more extensive exercises • New audio and vocabulary lists• Updated color design for the interior

Each chapter provides important vocabulary; examples of language in context; exercises for reading and listening comprehension, writing, and translation; and a section for discussion and debate.

The listening material—more than 80 minutes—is available for free online at www.press.georgetown.edu

[more]

front cover of Building Your Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary
Building Your Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary
Learning Words by Frequency and Cognate
George M. Landes
SBL Press, 2001

A classic resource for beginning Hebrew students

First published over thirty years ago under the title A Student's Vocabulary of Biblical Hebrew, this classic work has been completely revised, updated, and expanded by the author to assist a new generation of students in naturally developing a basic Biblical Hebrew vocabulary. Designed to help beginning Hebrew readers acquire vocabulary quickly, this valuable teaching tool focuses on words that occur most frequently in the Hebrew Bible, while arranging them by roots and cognates allowing students to naturally expand their working vocabulary. Vocabulary lists have been kept to a manageable size; extensive cross-references document when words appear frequently with different meanings, and an index allows rapid location of every word encountered. As a result, students who master this volume will remember words more easily, consult a lexicon less frequently but more intelligently, and translate the Hebrew Bible at sight more readily and enjoyably.

Features

  • Vocabulary groupings based on frequency, roots, and cognates
  • Separate listing for nouns without verbal roots in the Hebrew Bible
  • Appendices including proper names and the forms and meanings of pronominal suffixes
[more]

front cover of Cree Legends and Narratives from the West Coast of James Bay
Cree Legends and Narratives from the West Coast of James Bay
Simeon Scott
University of Manitoba Press, 1995
This is the first major body of annotated texts in James Bay Cree, and a unique documentation of Swampy and Moose Cree (Western James Bay) usage of the 1950s and 1960s. Conversations and interviews with 16 different speakers include: legends, reminiscences, historical narratives, stories and conversations, as well as descriptions of technology. The book includes a detailed pronunciation guide, notes on Cree terms, informants' comments, dialect variations, and descriptions of cultural values and customs. The introduction describes and compares the various genres in traditional and popular culture. Cree and English, with full glosssary.
[more]

front cover of Dictionary of American Regional English
Dictionary of American Regional English
Frederic G. Cassidy
Harvard University Press, 1985

Dip into the Dictionary of American Regional English and enter the rich, endlessly entertaining, ever-changing world of American speech. Learn what a Minnesota grandma is making when she fixes lefse, what a counterman in a Buffalo deli means by kimmelweck or a Hawaiian baker puts into a malassada. Find out what kids on the streets of New York are doing when they play Johnny-on-the-pony or off-the-point, what Southerners do when they use their tom walkers, what the folks in Oklahoma and Texas celebrate on Juneteenth and those in some parts of Wisconsin at a kermis.

Like its enormously popular predecessors, this volume captures the language of our lives, from east to west, north to south, urban to rural, childhood to old age. Here are the terms that distinguish us, one from the other, and knit us together in one vast, colorful tapestry of imperfect, perfectly enchanting speech. More than five hundred maps show where you might be if you looked in a garden and saw moccasin flowers, indian cigars, or lady peas; if you encountered a bullfrog and cried, "jugarum!"; or came upon a hover fly and exclaimed, "newsbee!" And here, at long last, is an explanation of what the madstone and the money cat portend.

Built upon an unprecedented survey of spoken English across America and bolstered by extensive historical research, the Dictionary of American Regional English preserves a language that lives and dies as we breathe. It will amuse and inform, delight and instruct, and keep alive the speech that we have made our own, and that has made us who we are.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Dictionary of American Regional English
Joan Houston Hall
Harvard University Press, 1985

With this fifth volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English, readers now have the full panoply of American regional vocabulary, from Adam's housecat to Zydeco. Like the first four volumes, the fifth is filled with words that reflect our origins, migrations, ethnicities, and neighborhoods.

Contradicting the popular notion that American English has become homogenized, DARE demonstrates that our language still has distinct and delightful local character. If a person lives in a remote place, would you say he's from the boondocks? Or from the puckerbrush, the tules, or the willywags? Where are you likely to live if you eat Brunswick stew rather than jambalaya, stack cake, smearcase, or kringle? What's your likely background if your favorite card game is hasenpfeffer? bid whist? sheepshead? Whether we are talking about foods, games, clothing, family members, animals, or almost any other aspect of life, our vocabulary reveals much about who we are.

Each entry in DARE has been carefully researched to provide as complete a history of its life in America as possible. Illustrative citations extend from the seventeenth century through the twenty-first. More than 600 maps show where words were collected by the DARE fieldworkers. And quotations highlight the wit and wisdom of American speakers and writers. Recognized as the authoritative record of American English, DARE serves scholars and professionals of all stripes. It also holds treasures for readers who simply love our language.

[more]

front cover of Dictionary of American Regional English
Dictionary of American Regional English
Joan Houston Hall
Harvard University Press, 1985

This companion volume to the Dictionary of American Regional English vastly enhances readers' use of the five volumes of DARE text. Those who want to investigate the regional synonyms for a rustic, or a submarine sandwich, or that strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street can search through the five volumes and compare the distributional maps. Or, with this volume, they can open to a page with all those maps displayed side by side. Not only is it an extraordinary teaching tool, it is also a browser's delight.

The user who wants to know what words characterize a given state or region is also in luck. The Index to the five volumes not only answers that question but also satisfies the reader's curiosity about words that have come into English from other languages, and words that vary with the speakers' age, sex, race, education, and community type.

And those who simply love to explore the variety and ingenuity of American expression will be seduced by the lists of answers to the DARE fieldwork questions. Dust balls under the bed? Americans have at least 176 names for them. Names for a heavy rainstorm? There are more than 200, including the fanciful frog-strangler, goose-drownder, lightwood-knot floater, and trash-mover. More than 400 questions and all of their answers are included in this treasure trove of American linguistic creativity.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Dictionary of American Regional English
Joan Houston Hall, Chief Editor
Harvard University Press, 1985

Every page in this new volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English makes it wonderfully clear that regional expressions still flourish throughout the United States.

Depending on where you live, your conversation may include such beguiling terms as paddybass (North Carolina), pinkwink (Cape Cod), or scallyhoot (West); if you're invited to a potluck dinner, in Indiana you're likely to call it a pitch-in, while in northern Illinois it's a scramble; if your youngsters play hopscotch, they may call it potsy in Manhattan, but sky blue in Chicago.

Like the popular first three volumes of DARE, the fourth is a treasure-trove of linguistic gems, a book that invites exclamation, delight, and wonder. More than six hundred maps pinpoint where you might live if your favorite card games are sheepshead and skat; if you eat pan dulce rather than pain perdu; if you drive down a red dog road or make a purchase at a racket store; or if you look out your window and see a parka squirrel or a quill pig.

The language of our everyday lives is captured in DARE, along with expressions our grandparents used but our children will never know. Based on thousands of interviews across the country, the Dictionary of American Regional English presents our language in its infinite variety. Word lovers will delight in the wit and wisdom found in the quotations that illustrate each entry, and will prize the richness and diversity of our spoken and written culture.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Dictionary of American Regional English
Frederic G. Cassidy
Harvard University Press, 1985

Volume I of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), published to wide acclaim in 1985, captured the wondrous variety and creativeness of American folk words and expressions and tickled the imagination of lovers of language around the world. Decades in preparation, the DARE corpus reflects the liveliness of English as it is spoken on America’s main streets and country roads—the regional metaphors and similes passed along within homes and communities.

Like its popular predecessor, Volume II is a treasury of vernacular Americanisms. In Virginia a goldfinch is a dandelion bird, in Missouri an insufficient rain shower a drizzle-fizzle. Gate was Louis Armstrong’s favorite sender (a verbal spur to a sidekick in a band), a usage that probably originated from the fact that gates swing. Readers will bedazzled by the wealth of entries—more than 11,000—contained in this second volume alone. The two and a half pages on “dirt” reveal that a small marble is a dirt pea in the South. To eat dried apples, a curious rural euphemism for becoming pregnant, appears in the five pages on “eat.” Seven pages on “horn” and related words take readers on a tour of the animal and nether worlds: horned lark, horned frog, horned pout (look that one up), and that horned fellow, the devil.

Initiated under the leadership of Frederic G. Cassidy, DARE represents an unprecedented attempt to document the living language of the entire country. The project’s primary tool was a carefully worded survey of 1,847 questions touching on most aspects of everyday life and human experience. Over a five-year period fieldworkers interviewed natives of 1,002 communities, a patchwork of the United States in all its diversity.

The result is a database of more than two and a half million items—a monument to the richness of American folk speech. Additionally, some 7,000 publications, including novels, diaries, and small-town newspapers, have yielded a bountiful harvest of local idioms. Computer-generated maps accompanying many of the entries illustrate the regional distribution of words and phrases.

The entries contained in Volume II—from the poetic and humorous to the witty and downright bawdy—will delight and inform readers.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Dictionary of American Regional English
Frederic G. Cassidy
Harvard University Press, 1985

How do Americans really talk—what are their hometown, everyday expressions in the many regions and sections of this huge country? The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), twenty years in preparation, answers these questions. It gives visible proof of the diversity—and the vitality—of American folk language, past and present.

DARE includes thousands of words and phrases not found in conventional dictionaries, and out-of-the-way meanings for common terms. Here are local names for familiar objects, from old cars to frying pans to dust-balls under the bed (176 names for these); for plants, animals, and critters real and imaginary; for rainstorms and heat waves; for foods, clothing, children’s games and adults’ pastimes; for illnesses and traditional remedies. Here are terms—salty, sarcastic, humorous—by which people describe each other, their physical appearance, characters, emotions, states of mind. Here are metaphors and similes galore.

In Wisconsin a man whose motives are suspect “has beans up his nose.” In Georgia a conceited person is “biggity”; someone important or self-important in the Northwest is “bull of the woods.” A close friend may be “bobbasheely” (Mississippi) or an “ace boon coon” (New York City). West of the Appalachians the old saw “I wouldn’t know him from Adam” becomes “I wouldn’t know him from Adam’s off-ox” (or, in the South, “from Adam’s housecat”). These and some twelve thousand other expressions are identified and explained in the first volume of DARE.

While DARE is the work of many dedicated people, it owes its existence to Frederic G. Cassidy, who in 1963 agreed to organize the project, raise funds for it, and serve as Editor-in-Chief. Cassidy trained teams of fieldworkers and equipped them with a carefully worded questionnaire: 1,847 questions grouped in 41 broad categories ranging over most aspects of everyday life and common human experience. From 1965 to 1970 the fieldworkers conducted week-long interviews with natives of 1,002 representative communities in all fifty states. The two and a half million items gleaned from the fieldwork, coded and computer-processed, are DARE’s primary data base, a rich harvest of regional Americanisms current in the seventh decade of this century. Earlier collections have been drawn upon as well, notably the 40,000 expressions recorded by the American Dialect Society since 1889; and some 5,000 publications, including regional novels and diaries and small-town newspapers, have been combed for local idioms.

A unique feature of the dictionary is the computer-generated maps that accompany many of the entries to show the geographical distribution of the term. The base map is schematic, distorting the areas of the states to reflect their population density.

Volume I includes extensive introductory material on DARE itself and on American folk speech. Its entries, from Aaron’s rod to czarnina, cover nearly a quarter of the total DARE corpus.

[more]

front cover of The Dog's Children
The Dog's Children
Anishinaabe Texts told by Angeline Williams
Leonard Bloomfield
University of Manitoba Press, 1991
These are a collection of 20 stories, dictated in 1941 to Bloomfield's linguistics class, edited from manuscripts now in the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution, and published for the first time. In Ojibwe, with English translations by Bloomfield. Ojibwe-English glossary and other linguistic study aids.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare
Marvin Spevack
Harvard University Press, 1973

front cover of Insiders' French
Insiders' French
Beyond the Dictionary
Eleanor Levieux and Michel Levieux
University of Chicago Press, 1999
If you had been living in France in the 1990s, the language you would have heard on the radio and television or seen in the newspapers would be far removed from the French language of ten or twenty years ago. The country and its language have changed tremendously in a relatively short period of time, and, as a result, English speakers with a grounding in French can still find themselves struggling to understand terms commonly encountered in contemporary French society. Luckily, Eleanor and Michel Levieux now bring us up to date with their Insiders' French, an utterly entertaining and informative guide to the language of the "new France."

This "new France" is a country poised to experience the European single currency but uncertain about being part of Europe. It is hooked on fast food but ambivalent about the country where it originated. France today has record unemployment and an increasingly controversial immigrant population. Clearly, given the rapidly changing conditions and lifestyles, conventional French dictionaries alone cannot completely inform readers and visitors. Insiders' French offers a solution to the incomprehension, a unique handbook in which you'll find the language of European union, the space program, abortion and women's rights, high-tech industries, and health care, among other topics. Entries proceed by association of ideas and related terms, with extensive cross-referencing, while still being alphabetized for easy reference like a standard dictionary. Cartoons from major French journals add to your understanding and enjoyment.

Insiders' French opens up the secret territory of French politics and culture that is often not understood by visitors or students, and it does so with wit and verve—qualities that remain in the French language despite its recent changes.

[more]

front cover of A Key into the Language of America
A Key into the Language of America
The Tomaquag Museum Edition
Roger Williams
Westholme Publishing, 2019
A New Edition of One of the Most Important Cultural Artifacts of European and Indigenous American Contact
Roger Williams’s Key into the Language of America, first published in 1643, is one of the most important artifacts of early Indigenous American culture. In it, Williams recorded the day-to-day experience of the Narragansett people of Rhode Island in their own words, the first documentation of an American Indian language in English. Williams’s Key can be read at many levels because of its historical, literary, political, and religious significance. Its greatest value, though, is its intimate portrait of the Narragansett and their linguistic neighbors in the early years of European colonial settlement, before disease, dislocation, warfare—in particular, King Philip’s War—and colonial interference had diminished their population and power in the region. An extraordinary achievement, Williams’s Key gives us a contemporary account of Narragansett family life, of their sociability and skill in business, their dress, foodways, and the farming, fishing, and hunting that formed the basis of their sustenance practices. 
This new Tomaquag Museum edition includes for the first time cultural commentary provided by the Narragansett Tribe as well as modern linguistic information provided by a leading authority in the study of American Indian languages. 
The Tomaquag Museum, located in Exeter, Rhode Island, is an Indigenous nonprofit organization dedicated to sharing the culture, arts, and history of the Narragansett and other tribal communities of southern New England.
[more]

front cover of Portage Lake
Portage Lake
Memories of an Ojibwe Childhood
Maude Kegg
University of Minnesota Press, 1993

front cover of Reading Ovid in Medieval Wales
Reading Ovid in Medieval Wales
Paul Russell
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
Reading Ovid in Medieval Wales provides the first complete edition and discussion of the earliest surviving fragment of Ovid’s Ars amatoria, or The Art of Love, which derives from ninth-century Wales; the manuscript, which is preserved in Oxford, is heavily glossed mainly in Latin but also in Old Welsh. This study, by Classical and Celtic scholar Paul Russell, discusses the significance of the manuscript for classical studies and how it was absorbed into the classical Ovidian tradition. This volume’s main focus, however, is on the glossing and commentary and what these can teach us about the pedagogical approaches to Ovid’s text in medieval Europe and Britain and, more specifically, in Wales.
 
Russell argues that this annotated version of the Ars amatoria arose out of the teaching traditions of the Carolingian world and that the annotation, as we have it, was the product of a cumulative process of glossing and commenting on the text. He then surveys other glossed Ovid manuscripts to demonstrate how that accumulation was built up. Russell also explores the fascinating issue of why Ovid’s love poetry should be used to teach Latin verse in monastic contexts. Finally, he discusses the connection between this manuscript and the numerous references to Ovid in later Welsh poetry, suggesting that the Ovidian references should perhaps be taken to refer to love poetry more generically.
 
[more]

front cover of Shells on a Desert Shore
Shells on a Desert Shore
Mollusks in the Seri World
Cathy Moser Marlett; Foreword by Richard S. Felger
University of Arizona Press, 2014
In Mexico’s western Sonoran Desert along the Gulf of California is a place made extraordinary by the desert solitude, the dynamic sea, and the people who live there—the Seris. Central to the lives of these people are the sea and its shores.

Shells on a Desert Shore describes the Seri knowledge of mollusks and includes names, folklore, history, uses, and much more. Cathy Moser Marlett’s research of several decades, conducted in the Seri language, builds on work begun in 1951 by her parents, Edward and Becky Moser. The language, spoken by fewer than a thousand people today, is considered endangered. Marlett presents what she has learned from Seri consultants over recent decades and also draws from her own childhood experiences while living in a Seri village. The information from the people who had lived as hunter-gatherers provides a window into a lifestyle no longer recalled from personal experience by most Seris today—and perhaps a window into the lives of other peoples who made the Gulf’s shores their home.

The book offers a wealth of information about Seri history, as well as species accounts of more than 150 mollusks from the Seri area on the central Gulf coast. Chapters describe how the people ate mollusks or used them medicinally, how the mollusks were named, and how their shells were used. The author provides several hundred detailed drawings and photographs, many of them archival.

Shells on a Desert Shore is a fresh, original presentation of a significant part of the Seri way of life. Unique because it is written from the perspective of a participant in the Seri culture, the book will stand as a definitive, irreplaceable work in ethnography, a time capsule of the Seri people and their connection to the sea.
[more]

front cover of Shem Pete's Alaska
Shem Pete's Alaska
The Territory of the Upper Cook Inlet Dena'ina
James Kari and James A. Fall
University of Alaska Press, 2016
Shem Pete (1896–1989), a colorful and brilliant raconteur from Susitna Station, Alaska, left a rich legacy of knowledge about the Upper Cook Inlet Dena’ina world. Shem was one of the most versatile storytellers and historians in twentieth century Alaska, and his lifetime travel map of approximately 13,500 square miles is one of the largest ever documented with this degree of detail anywhere in the world.
 
The first two editions of Shem Pete’s Alaska contributed much to Dena’ina cultural identity and public appreciation of the Dena’ina place names network in Upper Cook Inlet. This new edition adds nearly thirty new place names to its already extensive source material from Shem Pete and more than fifty other contributors, along with many revisions and new annotations. The authors provide synopses of Dena’ina language and culture and summaries of Dena’ina geographic knowledge, and they also discuss their methodology for place name research.
 
Exhaustively refined over more than three decades, Shem Pete’s Alaska will remain the essential reference work on the landscape of the Dena’ina people of Upper Cook Inlet. As a book of ethnogeography, Native language materials, and linguistic scholarship, the extent of its range and influence is unlikely to be surpassed.
 
[more]

front cover of Shem Pete's Alaska
Shem Pete's Alaska
The Territory of the Upper Cook Inlet Dena'ina
James Kari and James A. Fall
University of Alaska Press, 2003
Shem Pete (1896-1989), the colorful and brilliant raconteur from Susitna Station, Alaska, left a rich legacy of knowledge about the Upper Cook Inlet Dena'ina world. Pete was one of the most versatile storytellers and historians in twentieth-century Alaska, and his lifetime travel map of approximately 13,500 square miles is one of the largest ever documented in this degree of detail anywhere in the world.

This expanded edition of Shem Pete's Alaska presents 973 named places in 16 drainage-based chapters. The names form a reconstructed network from the vantage points of the life experiences of Shem Pete and other Dena'ina and Ahtna speakers. It is annotated with comments and stories by Shem Pete and more than 50 other contributors, plus historic references, vignettes, copious photographs, historic maps, and shaded-relief placename maps. The authors provide perspective on Dena'ina language and culture, as well as a summary of Dena'ina geographic knowledge and placename research methodology.

This beautifully produced edition is a treasure for all Alaskans and for anyone interested in the "personal connectedness to a beautiful land" voiced by Dena'ina elders.

From the foreword by William Bright: "Shem Pete's experience and wisdom as an elder of the Dena'ina Athabascan Indians shine through this work like the sun—as do the skill and devotion of James Kari, James Fall, and the other Dena'ina, Ahtna, Alaska Native, and Anglo-American people who contributed to making the book a reality. . . . We have a volume that offers a vivid picture of Native Alaskan culture, history, geography, and language, with added glimpses of oral literature and music. . . . All Native American Peoples, indeed, all traditional communities in the world would be fortunate and proud to have this kind of record of their life and culture."
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter