Revealing the resiliency of Nahua culture and language while highlighting the adaptations and changes they have undergone over the centuries, The Nahua demonstrates that Nahuatl remained a vibrant and central language well after European contact and into the twenty-first century, and its characteristic features can provide insight into nuanced aspects of Nahua culture and history.
 
During the colonial period, Nahuatl became a means of empowerment, oppression, and indoctrination. In modern times, Nahuatl continues to serve as an ideological lightning rod for both the Mexican government and Indigenous communities. Contributors to this volume focus on Nahua intellectual production from the sixteenth century to the present; contact and the negotiation of meaning; adaptations of Christian lore that show how representations of creation, hell, and the Passion of Christ reflected Nahua perceptions and understandings; Nahua cultural expressions, including poetry, healing rituals, and even running; language and geography; Nahuatl place-names; and the transformation of Nahuatl speakers from antiquity to the present.
 
Showcasing how Nahuatl’s cultural resilience permanently shaped the region’s social geography, The Nahua engages the field’s interest in the nonhomogenous character of the language, with regional and subregional dialects and pronunciations that reflect the history of pre-Columbian migrations and modern-era influences. Bridging the study of Nahuatl as a “historical” Indigenous language tradition with the study of modern-day speakers and their experiences, this work is of significance to students, scholars, and speakers of the languages as well as those studying colonial New Spain, Indigenous resilience, or Indigenous linguistics.
 

Naming the Local uncovers how Koreans domesticated foreign medical novelties on their own terms, while simultaneously modifying the Korea-specific expressions of illness and wellness to make them accessible to the wider network of scholars and audiences.

Due to Korea’s geopolitical position and the intrinsic tension of medicine’s efforts to balance the local and the universal, Soyung Suh argues that Koreans’ attempts to officially document indigenous categories in a particular linguistic form required constant negotiation of their own conceptual boundaries against the Chinese, Japanese, and American authorities that had largely shaped the medical knowledge grid. The birth, decline, and afterlife of five terminologies—materia medica, the geography of the medical tradition, the body, medical commodities, and illness—illuminate an irresolvable dualism at the heart of the Korean endeavor to name the indigenous attributes of medicine.

By tracing Korean-educated agents’ efforts to articulate the vernacular nomenclature of medicine over time, this book examines the limitations and possibilities of creating a mode of “Koreanness” in medicine—and the Korean manifestation of cultural and national identities.

Frequently cited and just as often disputed, Elizabeth Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) and “The First Person” (1975) are touchstones of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Though the arguments Anscombe advances in these papers are familiar to philosophers, their significance remains widely misunderstood, says James Doyle.

No Morality, No Self offers a fresh interpretation of Anscombe’s still-controversial theses about ethical reasoning and individual identity, specifically, her argument that the term “moral” (as it occurs in such contexts as “moral obligation”) is literally meaningless, and that “I” does not refer to some special entity called a “self”—a pair of claims that philosophers have responded to with deep skepticism. However unsettling Anscombe’s conclusions may be, Doyle shows the underlying seriousness of the British philosopher’s reasoning, exposing with clarity and concision how the counterarguments of Anscombe’s detractors are based on a flawed or incomplete understanding of her ideas.

Doyle zeroes in on the central conundrum Anscombe posed to the referentialist school: namely, that it is impossible to give a noncircular explanation of how “I” refers to the person who utters it. He shows where the refutations of philosophers including Lucy O’Brien, Gareth Evans, and Ian Rumfitt fall short, and throws light on why “I” developed features that make it look as if it functions as a referring expression. Reconciling seemingly incompatible points of view, Doyle argues that “I” does refer to a self, but not in a way anyone suspected—a surprising conclusion that is entirely à propos of Anscombe’s provocative thought.

North American Icelandic evolved mainly in Icelandic settlements in Manitoba and North Dakota and is the only version of Icelandic that is not spoken in Iceland. But North American Icelandic is a dying language with few left who speak it.North American Icelandic is the only book about the nature and development of this variety of Icelandic. It details the social and linguistic constraints of one specific feature of North American Icelandic phonology undergoing change, namely Flámæli, which is the merger of two sets of front vowels. Although Flámæli was once a part of traditional Icelandic, it was considered too confusing and was systematically eradicated from the language. But in North America, Flámæli use spread unchecked, allowing the rare opportunity of viewing the evolution of a dialect from its birth to its impending demise.