Best linguistics reference books according to redditors
We found 1,077 Reddit comments discussing the best linguistics reference books. We ranked the 452 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
8. Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages
9 mentions
Picador USA
To all the people talking about telomeres:
Turns out telomeres isn't the answer. Most cells don't divide enough times to get to their Hayflick limit, and those that divide indefinitely (stem cells, germ cells) express telomerase. Current frontrunning theories deal with oxidation from damaged mitochondria and resulting dysregulated metabolism. The body doesn't really have any evolutionary incentive to live much longer than enough time to raise your kids. See the disposable soma theory. For more information check out this book
As a side note, not everything is replaced every 7 years. Neurons are permanent, elastin in skin isn't replaced (hence, wrinkles), etc.
George Lakoff will help you understand conservatives (and swing voters) better than any pundit ever could.
He also does a great job of explaining the moral nature of politics, and how liberals can formulate better moral arguments to persuade what he calls "bi-conceptual" voters.
Edit: The poll referenced in this very post is one of many examples I've seen in recent years of actual data backing up Lakoff's theories. When combined with recent studies showing the differences between the parts of the brain liberals and conservatives use to process political/moral issues, Lakoff's concepts are dead-on.
It actually is. Excellent book called Oxygen: The Molecule that made the World by Nick Lane details how life came about and ends due to our reliance upon oxygen.
He also wrote Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life which I would also highly recommend. Basically, it details how eukaryotic cells developed through the Hydrogen Hypothesis.
In my opinion, the most convincing explanation of why economically-disadvantaged whites vote for a political party contrary to their economic interests (and why rich, city-dwelling intellectuals vote Democratic) is in Moral Politics by cognitive linguist George Lakoff.
The argument is essentially that the two major ideologies in US politics are defined by deeply held worldviews about morality, not economic self-interest or sincere policy preferences. It was a lot more convincing to me than Frank's "they vote Republican because they're dupes" thesis. The argument is too complicated for me to break out in detail here, so I'd recommend the book, even though it was written during the 1990s, so its examples are a little out of date.
I think we should also be careful when analogizing past political parties to our own. The "Progressive movement" around the turn of the century is most definitely not the same as today's left-liberal "Progressives" in the Democratic party. Many pet causes of the Progressive Movement (e.g. temperance) would be considered very conservative today. Politics was sufficiently different 100 years ago that even drawing left-right analogies simplifies things way too much. The issues were far different in that time, as was the composition of the electorate.
EDIT: added a link
I wrote a quick script to search the full text of HPMOR and return everything italicized and in title case, which I think got most of the books mentioned in the text:
Book title|Author|Mentioned in chapter(s)|Links|Notes
:---|:---|:---|:---|:---
Encyclopaedia Britannica| |7|Wikipedia|Encyclopaedia
Financial Times| |7|Wikipedia|Newspaper
The Feynman Lectures on Physics|Richard P. Feynman|8|Wikipedia|Full text is available online here
Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases|Amos Tversky|8|Amazon|
Language in Thought and Action|S.I. Hayakawa|8|Amazon Wikipedia |
Influence: Science and Practice|Robert B. Cialdini|8|Wikipedia|Textbook. See also Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making|Reid Hastie and Robyn Dawes|8|Amazon |Textbook
Godel, Escher, Bach|Douglas Hofstadter|8, 22|Amazon Wikipedia|
A Step Farther Out|Jerry Pournelle|8|Amazon|
The Lord of the Rings|J.R.R. Tolkien|17|Wikipedia|
Atlas Shrugged|Ayn Rand|20, 98|Wikipedia|
Chimpanzee Politics|Frans de Waal|24|Amazon|
Thinking Physics: Understandable Practical Reality|Lewis Carroll Epstein|35, 102|Amazon|
Second Foundation|Isaac Asimov|86|Wikipedia|Third novel in the Foundation Series
Childcraft: A Guide For Parents| |91|Amazon|Not useful if your child has a mysterious dark side
Also, this probably isn't technically what the OP was asking, but since the script returned fictional titles along with real ones, I went ahead and included them too:
Book title|Mentioned in chapter(s)
:---|:---
The Quibbler|6, 27, 38, 63, 72, 86
Hogwarts: A History|8, 73, 79
Modern Magical History|8
Magical Theory|16
Intermediate Potion Making|17
Occlumency: The Hidden Arte|21
Daily Prophet|22, 25, 26, 27, 35, 38, 53, 69, 77, 84, 86, 108
Magical Mnemonics|29
The Skeptical Wizard|29
Vegetable Cunning|48
Beauxbatons: A History|63
Moste Potente Potions|78
Toronto Magical Tribune|86
New Zealand Spellcrafter's Diurnal Notice|86
American Mage|86
As others mentioned, TVTropes has a virtually-exhaustive list of allusions to other works, which includes books that aren't explicitly named in the text, like Ender's Game
He wrote a book called, "Don't Sleep there are Snakes". It was a tough read because he's a linguist and goes into great detail about it.
Edited for werds: thanks Timmetie.
"Don't Sleep, there are snakes" by Dan Everett - it's a fascinating book about a linguist/missionary who went to work with a tribe of Piraha speakers in the Amazon. Loses his religion, and discovers a language that doesn't really fit into the orthodox view of linguistics and is causing a whole lot of debate.
The Drunkard's Walk - is a great book on how misconceptions of probability rule your life. It's a fun introduction to probability theory and has all sorts of WTF moments in it.
Edit: oh and possibly my favorite book I've read all year is David Attenborough's autobiography A life on air - it's full of all sorts of amazing, hilarious, and insightful anecdotes of Attenborough's 40-odd years of making nature documentaries, and contains lots of interesting info about the state-of-the art in TV making over time (e.g. "we could only run that type of camera for 20 seconds, or it would overheat and catch fire"). Great stuff.
I don't know the correct term for this, or even much about it at all, but I do know that other languages to this to a far greater extent than English. For example, I remember [reading about] (http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0375425020) an Amazonian tribe that can apparently have entire conversations using only pitch.
I also know that people in the Canary Islands used to use [whistles to communicate] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbo_Gomero_language), which I assume is the same phenomenon.
Try this little experiment: Browse around reddit for a bit. Note how you seem to be talking to yourself - commenting on things, remembering to add milk to your grocery list, etc. If you actually sat down and transcribed every little thought you were having, using complete sentences, I bet a couple of days later you still wouldn't be done. Personally, when I think something like, "Oh, I should run down the the 7-11 later to get some milk," the words "oh" and "run" might pop up in my head, but I simply visualize a 7-11 and maybe some milk, and I just "know" within about a second that the concept of "out of milk" and "needing" and "buying" (and maybe "buying extra things like ramen") and "coming back home" are all implied. I don't need to actively think about those concepts separately, since my brain has already thought them. This is very much like how babies think.
There are some theories going around about the concept of mentalese (which is separate from the concept of language) and universal grammar that discuss this concept that all human beings have a universal way of thinking about things, which get "translated" into language when we think or speak.
You may be interested in reading The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher. It goes into how language may have started out, and how it evolved into the complex communication system we have today. (It's written for people who don't know anything about linguistics, so you won't get bogged down with technical terms.)
There's a way, sort of, J.R.R.Tolkien has left all his linguistic writings on the Elvish Languages in 7 big boxes, (thousands of pages per box) and Christopher Tolkien has later referred to them naming as Quenya A, B, up to Quenya G, for they can be specifically identified. Yes, not a couple of boxes, but even 7, my mellyn (PE: 22, p. 141).
Be aware, though, that if you do not have a particular background, these pages will be likely not understandable, sadly...
Regarding what you can hear/read online:
In real life it is simple. If you do not follow the rules of English grammar you are not writing or speaking in English. If you don't follow Tolkien's rules you are not writing his elf! Anyone who visits the websites dedicated to Elvish languages (Eldalie, Quenya.101, Ardalambion, etc.) or reads the books dedicated to them (those of David Salo, Ruth S. Noel, Pesch, Comastri, etc.) trying to learn Quenya or Sindarin, will be baffled by the array of many different and conflicting grammar rules. These sites and books never agree with each other. Why?
Because every author has invented his own rules.
We read from many writers (Drout, Pesch) and on the net that there are many “neo-elvish” languages: the neo-quenya and neo-sindarin. But it is not correct, neo-elvish languages do not exist or rather are not languages. Writing: Something wure mi expectatione [sic] does not mean that whoever wrote it is the creator of a neo-english language, the same with: Alaghioru saranno alboro dormirenene [sic] won’t make you the creator of a new neo-italian language. To create a neo-language one must first of all be a linguist, know the rules of a Tolkien elven language well and from there build a new elven language. What a job! Those who build what they call neo-Sindarin and neo-quenya only rarely mention Tolkien's grammars and almost never explain what they do (for example, I change this thing written by Tolkien, because I invented a certain new rule). What they build are not languages. They distort the little of what they understand about Tolkien's logopoeia at will.
>When a legal distinction is determined ... between night and day, childhood and maturity, or any other extremes, a point has to be fixed or a line has to be drawn, or gradually picked out by successive decisions, to mark where the change takes place. Looked at by itself without regard to the necessity behind it, the line or point seems arbitrary. It might as well be a little more to one side or the other. But when it is seen that a line or point there must be, and that there is no mathematical or logical way of fixing it precisely, the decision of the legislature must be accepted unless we can say that it is wide of any reasonable mark.
–Oliver Wendell Holmes, quoted from here
I believe that gives some perspective on this situation. Yes, there may be an apparent contradiction with the law. However, because a written rule can't precisely cover all possible situations in the world, our legal system may use discretion when applying rules to specific events.
In that way, you may see that the contradiction isn't as blatant, but rather an exposure of the way our system works.
Hmm .. try Shapiro's Thinking about Mathematics. It's very good and accessible, and Shapiro is quite eminent.
If you like learning about how languages develop and change, this book will probably have a big effect on the way you see language shifts. It's an entry-level summary of the basic language evolution principles that allow, for example, modern linguists to reverse engineer ancient languages with scant records.
The book jumped to mind because, if you understood some of these concepts, you'd never argue that people will descend to pointing and grunting. Using intense words to describe relatively mundane phenomena (e.g. "awesome") is something people often bemoan, but as those words become banal people continually seek new ways to make their communication - their very voices - stand out from the crowd in its intensity. That's a bit of a treadmill, but it's not necessarily one that actively lacks virtue.
Using "lazy" language like contractions, malapropisms, nonstandard spellings, metatheses, and so on isn't necessarily "destructive" to a language in a holistic sense, either. If certain terms or formations lose their specificity in a miasma of misuse, the need for that specificity doesn't necessarily go away. As long as people have need to communicate with specificity, they will reach for ways to do so when the moment requires it. Language is the tool we all use to convey meaning, and we're tool-makers at the very core of our collective being.
There are some "errors" I actively object to because they interfere with my speedy comprehension of written material in a jarring way. Some of that, I'm sure, is my own conditioned outrage. (For example, a sentence like "it's suppose to be this way," is jarring to me, but it's tough to make a sound semantic argument why "supposed to" and "intended to" should have identical meaning that precludes the use of "suppose to" without feeling like you're throwing good linguistics after bad.) Some of it I feel has genuine utility in easing comprehension, e.g. they're/there/their, its/it's.
Some corrections, such as less/fewer and further/farther, I feel are pedantic. As you might gather from my username, I have a certain appreciation for the pedantic, and I'm aware that I'm not alone in that capacity. I don't think that's any great sin, in and of itself! I will often correct people on matters of pedantry on the off chance that they, too, appreciate a good bit of pedantry. Overall, I try to control the image and tone of that communication carefully, though, because of something my Aunt, a professor of linguistics at University of Texas, told me a long time ago:
"One person can't hurt a language, but they can hurt feelings. Act accordingly."
This is a professor whose career's work was in recording and preserving endangered languages in the Yucatan.
So yeah - lighten up, there, son. Ain't none of these people gonna hurt English none, so long as folks've got stuff to say and use English to do it. If something trips you up, decide if it's because of a specificity/fluency barrier or just a learned "correctness fetish," and then do the needful.
edit, amazon explained it better than I did kind of
Well....shit. Never knew that the random book on linguistics I was reading would actually come in handy on reddit some day.
I'm reading a book called "Through the Language Glass" that attempts at forming an argument for the underdog theories in linguistics. I don't remember the premise of the chapter, but there was a section that used Literature to prove that human beings evolved the ability to distinguish colors differently only in the past thousands of years.
It started off by analyzing Homer's poems, and noting he described the sea as "wine colored" as well as the sky. There was also no mention of green throughout his work and only used Reds, Blacks, and Whites to describe colors of things that really weren't the same color at all. Thus one could conclude that maybe Homer himself was colorblind.
But then the author takes it further. He looks at literature over the course of time in several different parts of the world, and they all seem to distinguish colors at different times in their literature. There is no word for certain colors up until a certain point.
The thing is, the way we slice up the visible spectrum is not the way others slice it up. They point out one culture that uses the same word for both Blue and Green. Strange huh ? But consider this. Think of "Sky Blue" and "Navy Blue" - they are both shades of the same color to us. But there was another culture that saw these two as two distinctly different colors and did not consider them to be different shades of the same color. Likewise, the culture that saw both "Blue" and "Green" as the same color saw Blue and Green as being different shades of the same color.
Basically, the pattern that was distinguished by the linguist after looking at works of literature over time was that Black and White were the first colors to be distinguished. Then Red and Green or Yellow. Blue was the last one to be distinguished, and other colors like Orange and Purple didn't come until later.
One reasoning behind this could be that over time our eyes evolved to see different colors of the spectrum, or see the contrast better. So back then, we could not differentiate as well between all the different colors we can differentiate between today.
Another theory, however, is that people did not have uses for particular colors until they learned how to produce dyes. Once dyes were invented and we could pick out the color of what we were making, our language began to adapt to that change and we had to come up with a color for new things that once did not need to be distinguished.
So I believe in both theories. It is interesting to believe that there is the possibility that people thousands of years ago could not distinguish the color of the Sky or the Sea from the color of Wine, which maybe appeared to them as very Dark Red. It is also possible that our ability to distinguish contrast improved over time. Imagine a dark room, can you tell if things are different colors as easily? No. So it is a possibility that people long ago could see all the colors in a dimmer light which made them appear less vibrant.
It is also interesting to consider that people did not necessarily care if something was Red or Orange or Yellow because these colors did not have any practical use to them as separate entities. So back in hunter-gatherer times, we did not need to "pay attention" to the colors of things so we did not register them as separate colors and were able to lump them together under one color category umbrella.
TL;DR Two possible reasons exists for this question, one being that we did evolve over time the ability to distinguish different colors, as evidenced by literature's lack of words for certain colors for extended periods of time until the words were invented. Or the other explanation is that we were always able to distinguish the entire spectrum, but the need to have words for different colors did not arrive until we had a need to distinguish different colors as separate. Either way there is no way of knowing for sure what people thousands of years ago saw, but there is a possibility their world looked nothing to them like ours does to us.
You're asking a few different questions here, all of them interesting.
You may be interested in reading The Everyday Language of White Racism, which has excellent chapters on mock AAVE and mock Spanish.
>which also features the critique of people getting the slang wrong, which seems a bit prescriptivist.
I understand the sentiment, and to a certain extent agree, but there's a power structure at play. I'm a native speaker of AAVE because of my childhood speech community. I'm also white. When I hear other white people 'misusing' borrowed AAVE, it's cringeworthy.
It's also important to note that all of the borrowing you're thinking of is going to be 99% lexical. White people, in general, don't be borrowing things like habitual be (with the exceptions of one meme, which I'm convinced they don't fully understand). They don't be using the phonology of AAVE either - in fact, there's excellent research that suggests that in general, when they do borrow AAVE phonology, they still don't fully commit; so Philadelphians who borrow th-fronting don't do so in all the environments in which it's productive in AAVE in Philly (I wanna say Sneller et al 2014?). So, it's understandable to me that people feel like suburban, middle-class white people saying 'ratchet' just doesn't feel right, especially when there's the perception they're fucking up the phonology, don't understand the appropriate grammar, and in general aren't really interested in borrowing AAVE in a way that doesn't feel like it's being made fun of. Shit, they're busy trying to make on fleek sound French now.
> I'm wondering if there's any information on how slang generally propagates
This is a different question. I'm currently developing an agent-based model approach to the lifecycle of slang, but it's not yet publication ready. I'll definitely post it here when it's more complete. My approach is one using evolutionary game theory, treating use of slang as a bayesian signaling game with different (and opposing) incentives and payoff structure by player type. Translated: people have different goals in how they use certain terms, and how they want to see them used, and that use (or avoidance) signals something about the person.
> I'm not Jewish but having grown up in North London I say stuff like "Do you expect me to schlep all the way to Enfield?" - I'm not pretending to be Jewish, it's literally just in my idiolect.
You're also using it in a way that would make my Jewish friends, speakers of NYC (Yiddish-) English, mildly confused. For Yiddish speakers and those who have had contact with Yiddish (i.e., New Yorkers) schlep is ditranstive, and the obligatory argument is a theme/patient, not a goal - you don't schlep somewhere, you schlep something (somewhere). For instance, "I schlepped my books around all day, and never got a chance to even sit down and read any of them." You can also describe a tediously long trip as "a bit of a schlep."
The point, however, that you have a lexical item, schlep, meaning to go somewhere (far), is important, though. You're absolutely right that the fact you have the word natively is important, and often overlooked.
>At the behest of some friends I've tried to excise certain phrases like "throwing shade" or "thirsty" from my speech but if someone who ostensibly "owns" the slang uses it with me enough, it's hard not to also use it.
The interesting question for me is where you draw the line with slang. I think what people are reacting to is that it's slang that comes out of one dialect, and when it's used by people who don't speak that dialect, with the 'wrong' phonology, and often with not-quite-right meaning, it's disconcerting. When there's a power imbalance, I understand how it's upsetting to people. When that power imbalance is tied up with systemic racism, it ends up becoming a big deal.
I think /u/pb9o linked some excellent stuff as well, that demonstrates the difference between loving appreciation, and something that feels like theft.
There's a pretty good reader on the subject called Thinking about Mathematics that I used for a reading course in undergrad. I don't know much about the technical literature beyond that level, though, as my formal philosophy career went on hiatus when I entered my Ph.D. program. Since then, I've been more or less an armchair philosopher.
The part I remember most from Everett's book Don't Sleep, There are Snakes, is when he is describing to the Piraha people how his step-mother committed suicide. The group he was talking to immediately bursts into laughter:
>When I asked them why are you laughing, they said: “She killed herself. That’s really funny to us. We don’t kill ourselves. You mean, you people, you white people shoot yourselves in the head? We kill animals, we don’t kill ourselves
Maybe someone on the verge could benefit from this book. The Piraha live in what most Westerners would consider 'a shit-hole', yet they are described as some of the happiest, carefree people on earth.
No problem, it was fun. :D
If you're interested in IE Historical Linguistics, you might want to check out Ben Fortson's awesome Introduction, though this is much more focused on the reconstructed language itself and the development of the individual daughter languages than in the history and culture of the original Indo-Europeans.
For more of a broad cultural history, you might want to check out Mallory's book, which is written in a very easy to read style.
Every EFL/ESL teacher should have a copy of Practical English Usage by Michael Swan. It is the ultimate language analysis of English.
Here's an abbreviated excerpt of a section from that book that addresses the issues in that above example sentence you gave:
>281 infinitives (3): without to
section 2: after let, make, hear, etc
>Certain verbs are followed by object + infinitive without to
>They include let, make, see, hear, feel, watch, and notice.
>ex: She lets her children stay up very late. NOT
She lets her children to stay up very late.ex: I made them give me the money back. NOT
I made them to give me the money back.>...
>For more information about structures with make, see 335.
If you can't get the book, you're looking for when to use to or not with infinitive verbs, which should be very easy to find online material for.
Nah, Russell was somewhat biased and did interpret a lot of philosophers just wrong. Also, he smears his positivist opinion all over the place. Anthony Kenny's [A New History of Western Philosophy] (https://www.amazon.com/New-History-Western-Philosophy/dp/0199656495/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1500643240&sr=8-1&keywords=a+new+history+of+western+philosophy) fits you way better.
Get hold of Fortson's
Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction: it's the best possible introduction from the linguistic angle.
>increase my likelihood of getting hired abroad
Getting hired doing what? Where abroad?
Why do you want a minor in French? There are at least a few million other Haitians who are bilingual in French, so how are you bringing extra value to the marketplace with that minor? Wouldn't a Spanish/German/Russian/Chinese/etc. - Haitian bilingual be a rarer commodity?
This all really depends on where you want to go and what you want to do.
As for books:
My intro to ling. class used the book Language Files.
The Language Instinct is pretty good.
I really liked The Unfolding of Language.
The Power of Babel doesn't get too technical, but is an introduction to language change.
Well this one's kind of an interesting possible case of language change. See, lol started, of course, meaning "laugh out loud". Eventually, though, it's taken on its own status as a general term to indicate something is funny. It no longer necessarily means the person is actually "laughing out loud". One piece of evidence for this includes that it has its own pronunciations (/lɑl/ as in "lawl" or /lol/ as in "lohl" or approximately "Lowell", where the vowel rhymes with "pole") apart from pronouncing the initialism (that is, "ell oh ell"). Another piece of evidence is that it has its own derivations relating to this more general concept, as in doing it for the lulz. Applying the original literal meaning to this idiom would suggest this be read as *doing it for the laugh out louds or *doing it for the laughs out loud or something else that is just essentially nonsensible.
So, how does this apply to lol out loud? Consider the relatively famous case of the evolution of the word "today" from Latin to French. The Latin word for "today" is hodie (similar to hoy in Spanish). hodie is reduced from hoc ("this") + die ("day"). Derived from this, in Old French people thus said hui for "today", which more or less meant "this day". Eventually, though, this wasn't enough, and people eventually came to say au jour de hui, which literally means "on the day of this day". This was reduced to aujourd'hui. Finally, in modern times, some people now apparently colloquially say a jour d'ajourd'hui, or "on the day of on the day of this day". (source, see also Deutscher's Unfolding of Language for more details). So, hopefully you can see a connection: even though lol may in some cases literally mean "laughing out loud", it is not out of the realm of language change for people to eventually start saying lolling out loud unironically, as the original form gets reduced and/or loses its original literal connotation.
This is a nicely annotated compendium that teaches the history of Ancient Greek through reading. You will find a huge assortment of dialects and genres represented:
https://www.amazon.com/Historical-Greek-Reader-Mycenaean-Koine/dp/0199226601
Combine with an historical grammar and you should be good to go. This is a recent introduction by a great scholar:
https://www.amazon.de/Historische-Grammatik-Griechischen-Laut-Formenlehre/dp/3534206819
Anything by Pierre Chantraine is highly recommended if you can read french. Both his treatment of Homeric, his historical grammar and his dictionary.
Another good dictionary to consult for individual glosses is the one by the late Robert Beekes. It's not perfect but very accessible:
https://brill.com/view/title/17726?lang=en
I would recommend you to consult Fortson and Ringe if you have little previous experience with diachronic linguistics. Ringe for methodological questions and Fortson for Proto-Indoeuropean. Proto-Greek contains many morphological archaisms inherited from Proto-Indoeuropean. You can focus on inner greek developments, but not everything you encounter can be analyzed in a meaningful way within Greek, so it's good to know where to look if the greek data is insufficient:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/historical-linguistics/6722029555C7DB845251785673A48B4C
https://www.amazon.com/Indo-European-Language-Culture-Benjamin-Fortson/dp/1405188960
If you want an in depth introduction to Ancient Greek dialects for students at graduate level and above this tome by Gary Miller should come in handy along with Buck's classic work on the subject, but it's not necessary if you only want to brush up on the fundamentals:
https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Greek-Dialects-Early-Authors/dp/1614514933
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-greek-dialects-9781853995569/
Oxygen. All books by this author are AMAZING (yes in caps).
As with all thoughts, there will always be people who co-opt them for their own ends, regardless of the actual substance of them. Both Capitalism and Communism were/are exploited to enrich very few despite promising prosperity for all. All religions have been abused in so many ways to justify so many atrocities throughout history. Monarchism, Feudalism, Racism, Sexism, Fascism, Anti-Semitism, and so on. Even ideologies which focus entirely on freedom like Libertarianism or Anarchism can and have been used to control and manipulate.
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Social Constructivism is an idea. It's a theory that attempts to explain aspects of human societies and behaviours. It is used by stupid people stupidly, and smart people smartly. It can be used to control or free people. It seems to be an inevitable aspect of human nature to tend towards oppressive hierarchy. It takes concious effort to fight it. That is what these people, for the most part, believe they are doing. And, if we're being honest with ourselves here, they actually are. They have the stats to prove that these negative outcomes are ongoing even in rich developed Western countries. You say that they are deliberately employing a divide-and-conquer strategy as if they are waging a war on everyone else. As if it's you and them. But it isn't. All they want is a good and just society, which I think is something you want too. I know I do.
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The French revolutionary philosophers, along with British ones, together formed the rights-based natural-law freedom-focused philosophy that founded the United States and dominates the Anglosphere, and the rest of the Western World. It is a rich and varied body of work I'd encourage you to look into since you seem quite interested in it. Here's some good starting points: Jean-Jaques Rousseau, and this is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Positive and Negative Freedom. The latter is excellent and has articles on everything you can think of. A really good book is a New History of Western Philosophy by Anthony Kenny. If you can only read one thing, read that. It's like 1000 pages but it breezes by; his style is so good and engaging. The reasons why these ideas came about was in the pursuit of freedom. Even Marx. He and Adam Smith were actually very much cut from the same cloth. It's all very interesting.
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China is not as monolithic or united as you seem to think it is. It has suffered and continues to suffer from frequent unrest and dissent. We rarely hear about it over here in the West. But remember: everyone in China is basically just like you. The country is as mixed as you'd expect over 1.5bn people to be, it's just relatively cut-off from the rest of the world.
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There are a number of books that I think you ought to read to get a better understanding of office politics and how to cope/deal with them. All offices have politicking going on, and any company that claims otherwise is lying to you. Any time more than 2 people get together, there will be some sort of jostling for power and attention. When that happens at work, we call it "office politics".
Your library may have these, and if you get them, read them at home. Don't ever bring them into the office.
Corporate Confidential. HR is your enemy, not your friend. Gives a number of examples of what will destroy your career with companies, many of which you (and I) probably do without realizing the consequences.
The Passionate Programmer. The first edition of this book was called "my job went to India". While aimed at programmers, the points are to keep your mind and skills up to date as technology and business move too rapidly to let things get rusty.
To Be or Not to Be Intimidated.
Looking out for number one.
Million Dollar Habits. I feel that these 3 by Robert Ringer are very important. If you think his first book was about to intimidate others, you only read the press coverage. If you think his books are about real estate, then you only skimmed them. There are a lot of people in the world who will try to intimidate you into giving up what is yours, and he shows you what some of them are like, and what countermeasures you can use.
The Art of Deception. Bad title - it is about arguments, how to make them, win them and tell if you're hearing a bad one. Used to be called "rhetoric" when Plato and Aristotle taught the subject.
Snakes in Suits. There are some evil people out there. You'll work for some of them. You will be stabbed in the back by some of them.
Bullies, Tyrants, and Impossible People. One book on office politics and dealing with some of the worse sort.
The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense at Work. Some folks are very good with verbal manipulation, this book and the others in the series, cover how to deal with such people.
Winning with People. Most of the books this author writes are about managers and leadership. This book is more about people skills. It will be focused more at managers, but I think it is a good one.
The 48 Laws of Power. They have it. You want some. Light read with anecdotes. I like his other books as well.
Games At Work. Office politics.
It's All Politics. Yes it is.
Moral Politics. Liberals and conservatives, why do they think that way? You'll work with some of the opposite persuasion some day, so understanding where they come from is a reasonable idea. Most books on this subject are insulting and degrading, but I think this one is pretty much judgement-free.
> When I walk by him going to the bathroom, he will stop talking until I walk by.
Do the same. When they come to your desk, always brush them aside with "I'm sorry, I can't talk now, I'm busy working".
I'll add my two cents since this is something I've put some thought into, and will point to some other works you can check out.
I'll go a step beyond McCarthy here by saying I'm a fan of Zapffe's idea that self-awareness might be a mistake, a evolutionary trap:
>Such a ‘feeling of cosmic panic’ is pivotal to every human mind. Indeed, the race appears destined to perish in so far as any effective preservation and continuation of life is ruled out when all of the individual’s attention and energy goes to endure, or relay, the catastrophic high tension within.
>The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by overevolving one ability is not confined to humankind. Thus it is thought, for instance, that certain deer in paleontological times succumbed as they acquired overly-heavy horns. The mutations must be considered blind, they work, are thrown forth, without any contact of interest with their environment.
>In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground.
I am very interested in the historical cases of feral children, and the reports of the attempts to re-integrate them after years away from other people. It seems there is a age past which the mind loses a certain plasticity of infancy and learning speech is no longer possible. Though of course the cases are rare and the reports often hobbled by the perceptions of their time, it is also of great interest to me that these children appear to stay at about the same general level of intelligence as the animals that raised them for the rest of their lives (if they were rescued after a certain developmental period). I wonder about the relationship between language and self-awareness and to what degree they depend upon each other. You could learn so much with just a handful of EXTREMELY UNETHICAL experiments.
Other fun notes:
Peter Watt's Blindsight is a recent sci-fi novel with aliens who work entirely "subconsciously" (without self-awareness) and are able to be much more efficient as a result.
People who speak languages with more colors are able to distingush more colors
There is a ton of interesting work out there that has been done about the ways that limited language can lead to limited thought, if you're interested.
I also recommend The Spell Of The Sensuous if this is interesting to you. One of my favorite books. Hopefully we can get to it in the book club some day.
Unfortunately, there's not really one standard way to learn Tolkien's languages, so some courses disagree with each other, and it's important to watch out for what the author of any given course decided vs. what Tolkien intended.
That being said, I'm a huge fan of Ardalambion – the Quenya courses they have are fantastic, though a bit dense with linguistic concepts (but he teaches terminology as he goes, and the ideas are worth knowing).
For Sindarin, I've had some good experiences with Your Sindarin Textbook but it's not nearly as detailed or as easy to follow. You may also hear about David Salo's Gateway to Sindarin. Salo's the linguist who worked on the Jackson movies – his work is good if you're looking for movie Sindarin, but it's pretty non-standard regarding the Sindarin of the books.
Of course, there's also /r/Quenya and /r/Sindarin, both of which have excellent resource lists.
I've only taken one module in philosophy of mathematics (also the only actual philosophy class I've taken) but Shapiro has a good book we used as a go-to text. Link below bc I don't know how to format on mobile. As far as prerequisite knowledge, you shouldn't need much beyond set/model theory and some mathematical logic, and even that isn't necessary depending on how far your studies are.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thinking-About-Mathematics-Philosophy/dp/0192893068
Gives a good overview of various topics in PoM, mainly questions of either:
• Ontology - Do mathematical objects exist? If so, in what sense?
• Epistemology - How do we have mathematical knowledge? How does it apply to the real world?
Aside from the book mentioned above, just do a quick Google and see what you can find in your library catalogue! Ayer, Kant, and Quine are some prominent authors.
Hope that helps some :)
Allora vai su /r/askphilosophy e nelle faq troverai molti link interessanti, tra cui un manuale consigliato. Penso sia quello di Kenny.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhilosophyFAQ/comments/4ifqi3/im_interested_in_philosophy_where_should_i_start
In generale https://plato.stanford.edu è una risorsa ottima.
Poi comunque dipende da cosa ti interessa di più. Se metafisica, etica, epistemologia o un po' di tutto.
Edit: https://www.amazon.com/New-History-Western-Philosophy/dp/0199656495/?pldnSite=1
Questo è il manuale.
150 - the book you want is Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language, by Robin Dunbar. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0674363361?cache=08ffb2ca2125067bdd4dc6a42f6ffdb5&pi=SY200_QL40&qid=1405090172&sr=8-1#ref=mp_s_a_1_1
No, but funnily enough you're the second person to ask that.
It's from here.
edit: Just realised you're both people.
Try Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language. Beautifully written as well as expert.
I highly suggest you read the book The Unfolding of Language
It is one of my favorite books, readable to a layman yet delving into some pretty complex stuff in terms of grammatical complexity, phonology etc. It is basically an introduction to linguistics and morphology class nicely encapsulated in one very well-written book.
And it deals specifically with your question.
The author of the book analyzes linguistic creative destruction, that is, what we perceive to be the "erosion" of grammatical structures actually helps to build new ones over time. A good example he gives is the latin verb conjugation giving way to that in the romance languages. Latin loses the structures like amavero, I will love, whereas French takes the infinitive amare --> aimer and adds the verb avoir, have. So we get the complex French conjugation system wherein the future is denoted by "aimerai", "i will love", for example.
Anyway, I highly recommend that book if you ever have a few lazy days to read through it.
I originally heard about it on RadioLab:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/211213-sky-isnt-blue
They link this book as their source:
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/080508195X/radiolabbooks-20/
As to "westerners view sex the way saudis do"... I mean, we have, historically? For purposes of this conversation, I'm defining the "Saudi view of sex" to mean "women are the property of their closest male relative, and have minimal choice in spouse. Women are sequestered from public life."
Into the early 20th century, public toilets for women were not really A Thing, because women were expected to stay in the home: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_toilet#Social_hierarchies_(access_for_women)
Into the 20th century, it was considered inappropriate for a reputable woman to be out and about without a male escort (or older woman). Women belonged in the home, and their society was focused in the home; they did not have a role in public life. In my grandmother's professional career, she was forced out of her job when she was married, because there was the expectation that married women belonged at home; they shouldn't be out of the house working.
Among rich folks, again into the early 20th century, there was the whole idea of a girl being "out", which signaled they were available on the marriage market, and men could make offers for their hand in marriage. The idea of a daughter as a piece of property to be sold to uphold alliances or strengthen bonds between families has absolutely been part of western culture.
Up until the late 20th century, marital rape was still legal in some US states, because "a husband can't rape his wife, he's entitled to sex from her",which is treating the wife as property.
In my own mother's adult lifetime, married women couldn't open bank accounts or have credit cards because they were seen as just an extension/property of men.
That's kind of drifting from the idea of sex, but it's the ingrained idea that women are property, not people, and thus objects to be acted upon.
And while many of those things I cited above were 100 years ago, that doesn't mean we have cultural amnesia and the values of prior generations have no effect on us.
In the modern day, "Purity Culture" is going strong. You have the trope of the Dad with a shotgun or rifle, scaring off his daughter's suitors. Or purity balls, in which teen women make pledges of virginity-until-marriage, often to their father. Again, it casts women as property, and men as the owners of women's sexuality.
Rosetta Stone sucks donkey dong. Use Tae Kim's guide, Remembering the Kanji, and Genki. For listening, Pimsleur's and Japanese Pod 101 are quite good.
https://www.amazon.com/Essential-Chomsky-New-Press/dp/1595581898
You might want to check out George Lakfoff's book "Don't Think of an Elephant," it has some insight into the mindset of the modern conservative. He does a good job of explaining why using facts, logic or other tenets of the enlightment are not successful with conservatives. As baffling as that is to most Americans, conservatives just don't value those things because their worldview has never really bought into the enlightenment and the sequence of ideas it spawned. If someone puts every piece of information through a very old world filter of right-wrong, good-evil, then you end up with conservatism. It helped me to understand the inherent contradiction of the conservative mindset.
My favorite conservative contradiction: only the strong succeed, you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps...then turn around and complain about Mexicans taking their jobs. Hold on there buddy! I thought you are a rugged individual who will succeed no matter what, why are you blaming Mexicans because you fucked up your shot at a union electrician gig and are still working the stock room of a country feed store. Fuck!
Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic is a classic "primary text" that advocates a specific point of view (that arithmetic can be reduced to logic in some sense).
These are a couple of contemporary introductory books that provide decent surveys of some major views:
http://www.amazon.com/Philosophies-Mathematics-Alexander-George/dp/0631195440
http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-about-Mathematics-The-Philosophy/dp/0192893068/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_z/181-3737012-4965247
EDIT: If I had to choose, I would pick the Velleman/Alexander book.
My attempt to intervene in this discussion with examples of unconscious change:
Short answer: Have a triliteral for "speak", then answer questions like
Some cautionary advice: give some thought to the shape of the language before triliteral roots developed and what sound changes created the sense in the speakers' minds that three letters chosen from within the word would carry meaning as opposed to a whole root - your language will come out better for it. The Unfolding of Language has a pretty good overview of the process in Semitic - if you're not careful you'll end up creating something not interestingly different from Arabic.
Most definitely! I'm a Hebrew speaker, and this happens all the time. Also, in Guy Deuthscher's book Through the Language Glass he gives a nice example of a poem by Heine where this comes through. Look at the original poem, alongside several translations. The German song hinges on the fact that "pine" is a masculine noun, while "palm" is feminine, and the English translations choose various ways to accommodate this. In Deutscher's book (I read the Hebrew version of it) there's also a Hebrew translation of the poem, using Hebrew's gendered nouns in a way analogous to that of the original.
A good general resource is this site (particularly the 'links of interest' section if you're looking at the real world history). It should be more than enough if you're writing a typical high school paper or low level college paper. You'll probably need more for a hardcore research paper though.
I'm assuming your prior knowledge is pretty limited if you even think you can write much about Dwarvish or Black speech. Dwarvish has the most vague of grammar outlines less than a page of vocab, and Black Speech has less than that. You could talk about Elvish all day though.
If you're able to get your hands on A Gateway to Sindarin then half your paper is finished already. (Disclaimer, David Salo seems like a decent author and linguist to my amateur eyes, but he has a nasty habit of making educated guesses and treating them as fact. But as a general introduction to a complete beginner it's an amazing book.)
Other than that it's hard to recommend any singular sources that can help much beyond having complete familiarity with Tolkien's world and published books. Stay the hell away from lotr.wikia and related sites, but honestly Wikipedia itself gives a decent overview here. Just be sure to only get ideas from there and back them up yourself from the source material.
If you have not already done so, I would strongly urge you to read A Secret Vice, the book not just the essay. The book was published only a few years ago, I think. It serves as an insight into Professor Tolkien’s views on languages, both real and invented.
I would also recommend reading the Professor’s essay English and Welsh, published in the book The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays.
Another recommendation is David Salo’s A Gateway to Sindarin, though it is primarily a grammar of his Neo-Sindarin for the LOTR movies, he does explore Tolkien’s methods for inventing languages and his inspirations.
Well I'm no expert on IE but I don't see what other methods you could use other than the comparative method. There are books on IE linguistics.
>How do linguists determine how/when a particular phonetic shift was likely to occur?
Let's start with the when, since that is easier to answer. Now one thing that linguists cannot do is give a specific time when a sound change occurred, based solely on comparative linguistic evidence (of course this might be possible with historical or archaeological evidence). What linguists can do is put sound changes in the sequence in which they occurred.
For example, if you know that a language reflects two protophonemes t and k as k and ʔ respectively, then you know that k>ʔ must have occurred earlier than t>k. Why? Because if t>k had happened first, then the k>ʔ change would have then affected the /k/s resulting from this change and you would have a change that looks like this: t>ʔ. Incidentally, these changes I just described actually happened in Hawai'ian.
Now onto how, there's a couple of ways this question can be interpreted and it's not clear to me exactly which you mean. Are you asking why sounds change? How linguists choose a proto-phoneme to reconstruct? Whether we can predict a future sound change?
You are probably beyond this stage, but I would generally suggest Shapiro, https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-about-Mathematics-Philosophy/dp/0192893068, to a student interested in that topic as a good starting point.
I'd recommend reading a book on the history of philosophy. That way, you'll have a working understanding of all the major philosophers, and you will probably find someone's philosophy interesting enough to pursue them further. A classic is Samuel Enoch Stumpf's Socrates to Sarte. A friend of mine also recommended a more contemporary book that he said is becoming more standard today. A New History of Western Philosophy by Anthony Kenny.
Other standards works many students start with include Rene Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy. Also, Plato is a good starting point. The Five Dialogues are some of his earlier works. These include the Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, and Phaedo. I personally started with Plato's Republic, which a former professor informed me that you must read in order to consider yourself educated in today's world (Interestingly enough, he's only ever said that about books he's read).
Following along with this comment, I strongly recommend the book Through the Language Glass. He is also one of the sources for the Radiolab episode you mentioned.
In the text Deutscher goes into detail on why, as /u/edXcitizen87539319 mentions, the whole idea that Homer couldn't see blue is very, very wrong. He suggests that the common trend in the development of color words (red, ochre, green, violet, yellow, blue) is more likely due to linguistic interaction between the groups of interest, and the simple fact that some colors are more important to specify (red can mean fire, or poisonous, and so on, while before the invention of dyes blue was really only useful for the sky and the water). There are also counter-examples of tribes in Africa and the Americas that followed a completely different order of color word development.
However, Deutscher goes on to describe some of the experiments that do show a connection between a society and its language. For example, languages with more speakers tend to have less grammatical complexity (this is a statement backed up by statistics performed on linguistic databases). Also, if a language makes a distinction (such as the light blue/dark blue distinction) native speakers are often faster to make that distinction in practice (such as separating slightly different shades of blue napkins quickly).
It is a very interesting topic of research, but, as is often the case when comparing different cultures, interpretations of the data are often prone to extremes when reality is typically quite mundane.
I read a great Linguistics/Travelogue book called Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes about living with an Amazonian tribe and studying their language, and he came up with a similar conclusion.
Haha you are echoing my own thoughts and worldview that began with reading the PEAR, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research
experiments, onto Ayahuasca experiences, animism and shamanism and realising archetypes are an actual thing, then hefty doses of Jung, and the books of David Abram (Spell of the Sensous especially).
https://www.amazon.com/Spell-Sensuous-Perception-Language-More-Than-Human/dp/0679776397
Then on to the occult driven by this pondering over the role of language in shaping reality and the seeming power of words, symbols, sounds to alter... your perception of reality? Except sometimes they alter objective reality, and the psychological model of Spirits was shattered conclusively for me one night suddenly throwing a whole ecosystem of beings into the mix.
And now I am back where I started, pondering the role of the world of symbols, archetypes and spirits and hidden forces and the implications for, as the guys at Princeton named it, anomolous engineering.
This is the missing key. What humanity and science lacks in order to bring forth, as you say, the Golden Age, is what we today call the occult. It's like mainstream civilization is missing half the picture.
That means we need to apply science to the occult, and the occult to science. We already know that a experiment is affected by the experimenters expectations. We know that the cat is in limbo till the box is opened. We know the placebo effect is better then pretty much every drug at healing. We know that random number generators are affected by crowds. And statistics tell us weather is not behaving like normal on holidays. The mountain of evidence is tall enough and has been for decades.
Now we need theorists, both scientists and occultists to come up with the why, and a new class of engineers to figure out the how and the applications thereof.
As to the spirits, and their nature? Some might be natural universal forces, spontaneously birthed by every complex system you could think of, from stars to planets to animals to plants, to that bend in the brook with a rock that creates a bit of turbulence.
Some might be man made or indeed, once men and women. Some might be current or long dead terrestrials and extraterrestrials, some might be AI's the size of planets built by long gone aliens, some might be interdimensional visitors from each category above. There be multitudes.
As far as I am concerned the first non human contact happened tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago and is ongoing every day all around the world. The norm throughout human history was probably much more contact then we have today. That might be a problem.
I actually asked this exact question, using your exact examples. And as per the other people in this thread, languages simplify and increase in complexity simultaneously, although there are particular trends of simplification and complexity, and they deal predominantly with increasing proximity between languages.
The book that will answer all your questions, is this one.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Unfolding-Language-Evolutionary-Invention/dp/0805080120/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370377912&sr=8-1&keywords=the+unfolding+of+language
Read this and this. Those two books are probably why I decided to major in linguistics. Both well written, and not at all dry
I loved Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action. Well written and covers a lot of topics. Might be what you're looking for! http://www.amazon.com/Language-Thought-Action-Fifth-Edition/dp/0156482401
Practical English Usage is a grammar bible, but not exactly a text book. If you want exercises maybe murphy.
Bonus tip - trying to get the students to speak English can be a struggle, but there are ways to motivate them. One method I use is to have a yellow and red card to hand, like a football referee. If a student uses their first language too much, they get the yellow card. If they do it again, they get the red card and have to do a forfeit - something like singing a stupid song or press-ups. Perhaps let the class take a vote on what the forfeit should be - that way no-one can really complain if they have to do it.
If you've learnt Spanish and Hindi then you probably will know more than many others on your course. Also, it's more important in many ways to be able to demonstrate difference in meaning rather than analysing things grammatically.
For example: How would you explain / demonstrate the difference between 'I saw the thief climbing through the window' vs. 'I saw the thief climb through the window'.
Having said that, it never hurts to brush up. I'm personally not a fan of Azar I think she tends to split and complicate things where there is no need.
Instead I'd recommend Raymond Murphy (it comes in both a British and American English version. If you get the British version it includes American grammar in the appendix and vice versa): http://www.amazon.com/English-Grammar-Use-Answers-Intermediate/dp/0521532892
and Teaching tenses: http://www.amazon.com/TEACHING-TENSES-PRESENTING-PRACTISING-ENGLISH/dp/0175559201
Most importantly, get a copy of the TESOL bible, Swan's 'Practical English Usage': http://www.amazon.com/Practical-English-Usage-Michael-Swan/dp/0194420981/ref=pd_sim_b_1
The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills
https://www.amazon.com/Power-Elite-C-Wright-Mills/dp/0195133544
Check out Kenny's A New History of Western Philosophy, especially book IV, which covers way more of the 20th century than Russell's book.
Russell's history is great, but Anthony Kenny's updates it for the 21st century:
http://www.amazon.com/A-New-History-Western-Philosophy/dp/0199656495
Anthony Kenny's A New History of Western Philosophy is very good. Kenny has compared it to both Russel and Copleston, saying he wanted to be as readable as the former and as accurate as the latter. Each volume is divided into historical survey and analysis. It looks like the one-volume edition is what's currently available.
It does stop in the 1970s, and some have complained that Derrida gets the short shrift. But I found the writing accessible and the work thorough. Augustine and Wittgenstein, in particular, get some very good attention.
I am positive I read something very similar to that quote in "Though the language glass", a book I read just last year. Wether that is the origin of that quote or if the author was, in turn, quoting somebody else I don't know.
I loved The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher.
Recommended these a while back, great, assessable reads.
The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker
http://www.amazon.com/The-Language-Instinct-Mind-Creates/dp/0061336467/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343383543&sr=8-1&keywords=the+language+instinct
Patterns in the Mind by Ray Jackendoff
http://www.amazon.com/Patterns-Mind-Language-Human-Nature/dp/0465054625/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343383561&sr=1-1&keywords=patterns+in+the+mind
And if you are into etymology, check out
The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, by Bill Bryson
http://www.amazon.com/Mother-Tongue-English-How-That/dp/0380715430/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343383614&sr=1-1&keywords=the+mother+tongue
The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour Through Mankind's Greatest Invention, by Guy Deutscher
http://www.amazon.com/The-Unfolding-Language-Evolutionary-Invention/dp/0805080120/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343383676&sr=1-2-fkmr0&keywords=guy+deucher+language
Again, all superb books.
Two resources that a majority of folks here will (without doubt) plug to you:
Kanji Damage
Heisig's Remembering the Kanji
Both of these are based around learning the components that comprise the Kanji (radicals) as opposed to learning each Kanji stroke by stroke. Make some flash cards and drill! I would suggest writing them out, but others seem content using an SRS like Anki. Some people also advise following Heisig's method and NOT learning the Japanese pronunciations until you've learning a hefty majority of the common use kanji, while others say you should learn the readings while you go (the Kanji Damage way). I've been chugging through Heisig's book at twenty kanji a day and it's been pretty easy.
Overall, as has been said over and over in this subreddit, do whatever you need to do to make learning it easy for you! Try stuff out and if it doesn't stick, move on to the next resource. Best of luck!
EDIT: I'd also like to add how even though kanji will seem really intimidating at first, once you get in the groove you'll find it's incredibly easy. Seriously. I'm at over 300 Kanji after three weeks of studying and can easily retain 90% of that when I'm studying and reviewing. If you approach it from the right angle, it shouldn't be too bad! :)
Remembering the Kanji and Mnemosyne
And of course read this
Studying PIE isn't really like studying a modern language or ancient languages with an extant corpus. Courses in Proto-Indo-European linguistics are often very technical and a lot of it involves getting to grips with the principles behind reconstruction (so, sound change laws etc). Most people who specialize in PIE academically learn ancient IE languages to facilitate their research, not the other way round.
EDIT: if you are interested though this textbook is a good place to start
I assume you mean Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction by Benjamin W. Fortson IV?
>Is there a good book I could read to learn more about (proto-)Indo-Europeans and all those subgroups you mentioned?
For the Proto-Indo-Europeans, you can read Beekes, Mallory, or Fortson. For the Pre-Indo-European people, there has yet to be a book addressing all of them (and there's a good chance there will never be a book, because so little is known about them). You can see my blog, which I linked in my first post, to see a survey of all the Pre-Indo-Europeans. From there, you must google search. If you have any questions about specific Pre-IE people, just ask.
>I'd like to learn more about this stuff too. In a way, it seems to parallel the old (and probably wrong?) legends about the ancient history of India.
Yes, well, the linguistic conquerors of Europe were the same conquerors of India: the Indo-Europeans. A lot more of the Pre-IE cultures of India survive than do in Europe.
edit: A side-note, my list on my blog is incomplete. There is a bounty of Pre-IE studies of tribes in northernmost Europe: the Baltic strip, the higher reaches of Sweden, Finland, and Norway, and the expanse of northern Russia. These tribes are often called Pre-Proto-Uralic tribes, because those lands were displaced by the Urals rather than the Indo-Europeans. Unfortunately, the good majority of stuff being written on it is in Finnish, which I can't read.
It didn't begin decades after Nixon. It started when they lost to Kennedy, so before Nixon. Read Don't think of an elephant by George Lakoff. Excellent and informative.
Conservative ideology is fundamentally about keeping existing hierarchies in place. They believe God is on top, and the believe men belong above women, parents above children, whites above non-whites. They believe that this is righteous and endowed by god, and that if you disrupt it, if you putting "the wrong people" in the "wrong places," that would allow the evil in the world to win.
Even more so, hidden in this belief, is the idea that hierarchies are inevitable. They think that disrupting the hierarchy does not destroy it but merely re-arranges it. Thus, by moving black people from "their place," that will inevitably result in white people being slaves. This is why they feel threatened. They never even entertained the possibility that people can be equal.
Thankfully, these are just ideas. They can be hard to unlearn, but it's why Fox News is so dangerous, reinforcing these beliefs at a substantial profit. If you want to know more, check out Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant: https://www.amazon.com/ALL-NEW-Dont-Think-Elephant/dp/160358594X/ref=dp_ob_title_bk which I found quite illuminating in this regard.
Then you've got to work on framing, and making your comments shorter.
Use line breaks.
And don't go over three sentences.
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PS - Always directly link to something you want someone to check out.
Are you asking for fiction or nonfiction?
https://www.amazon.com/The-ALL-Dont-Think-Elephant/dp/160358594X/ref=pd_sim_b_7?ie=UTF8&refRID=0DJR12FT9DCWA0MR341Z comes to mind for non-fiction
It’s a fundamental personality trait. Some people are drawn to this this “strong father” archetype and enjoy authoritative leaders and a social hierarchy based on social darwinian justice. Others, i.e. educated people (seriously, look it up), prefer egalitarianism and freedom of choice, with a solid social safety net. These are less likely to believe that the people that happen to be “on top” morally better than those currently on the bottom. Whereas the authoritarian thinker finds comfort in believing that everyone is getting exactly what they deserve.
So this explains, for example, some of the defense of the current president. He is the president, thereby he deserves to be the president. He is “wealthy,” thereby he is better than those who are not, and has moral authority. It doesn’t matter what he says or does, because authoritarian people rigidly respect the power structure, because it makes their world make sense.
This is mostly coming from this book (and some psych papers that I can’t recall at the moment):
https://www.amazon.com/ALL-NEW-Dont-Think-Elephant/dp/160358594X
Language in Thought and Action
An engaging introduction to thinking about language and communication. I recommend it if you were interested in how Ben Franklin's little rules about communication helped him achieve all he did. (It wasn't intuitive to me).
I also recommend it if you ever make little jokes about the dumb things people say, or have ever puzzled over why we bother with ritualized greetings.
I think you'll love the book "Language in Thought and Action"
http://www.amazon.com/Language-Thought-Action-Fifth-Edition/dp/0156482401/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
Here are some recent introductory books on the subject:
https://smile.amazon.com/Historical-Introduction-Philosophy-Mathematics-Reader/dp/1472525671/
https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0521533414/
https://smile.amazon.com/Thinking-about-Mathematics-Philosophy/dp/0192893068
https://smile.amazon.com/Philosophy-Mathematics-Princeton-Foundations-Contemporary/dp/0691161402
This is a really good book that I had to use in my philosophy of mathematics course. It's very accessible, and gives you a great introduction to philosophy of mathematics. It keeps things in perspective and reminds you what's at stake, the main questions, all in historical context: http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-about-Mathematics-The-Philosophy/dp/0192893068
Here's a professional review of the book attesting to its awesomeness: http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/mbalagu/papers/Review%20of%20Stewart%20Shapiro%27s%20Thinking%20About%20Mathematics.pdf
To understand the general history of math, you won't need to understand what you most likely consider to be math. You will, however, need to understand how to put yourself in the shoes of those who came before and see the problems as they saw them, which is a rather different kind of thinking.
But anyway, the history of math is long and complicated. It would take years to understand everything and much of it was work done on paths that are now basically dead ends. Nevertheless, here are some other resources:
Of course, let's not forget what is possibly the most complete single resource available today:
This is a huge area and I applaud you for being interested in it. If you decide to look into it seriously, you WILL find yourself confused, bored, and annoyed at times. Yet it's a beautiful history and one that will illuminate much of the apparently meaningless gibberish in calculus, as well as many other areas.
Read like, the first page of each of these books.
http://www.amazon.com/Power-Elite-C-Wright-Mills/dp/0195133544/
http://www.amazon.com/Corporation-Pathological-Pursuit-Profit-Power/dp/0743247469/
http://www.amazon.com/Realm-Hungry-Ghosts-Encounters-Addiction/dp/155643880X/
http://www.amazon.com/Globalization-Addiction-Study-Poverty-Spirit/dp/0199588716/
Look at how many people voted in 2014.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/opinion/the-worst-voter-turnout-in-72-years.html?_r=0
http://bipartisanpolicy.org/library/2012-voter-turnout/
"Some 93 million eligible citizens did not vote."
http://www.nonprofitvote.org/documents/2013/09/america-goes-to-the-polls-2012-voter-participation-gaps-in-the-2012-presidential-election.pdf
Look at dem numbers.
You are the next generation. Great tv series, btw. You are part of the hope that casts a light upon the world.
https://openlibrary.org/
Also, sorry, skimmed through your post history to perhaps glean what ails you, but perhaps your anxiety/stress stemming from these surrounding issues are increasing the occurrence of a lack of proper airflow/air intake during sleep, and disrupting the process of healing that's supposed to occur during the night, leading to long-term damage to your heart?
Your parents love you for a reason, and you shouldn't feel that resources or money are even a factor in their considerations. They love you, period, and you'll have plenty of time to repay your family/society/whoever you want just through the act of living well.\
Also, there's a lot of technology coming around the corner where organ fabrication/replacement/etc. is going to be a very common/real thing, but that's not to say that you can't still work with your doctor to mitigate symptoms/risks for now.
Take care, friend. Life is a strange journey indeed, but it can be rewarding if you let it be.
Edit: I would say that it's a nice poem, but I cannot agree that the best way to get back at those you feel have slighted you is to cease one's own existence. That would be tantamount to a full surrender. You still have some fight left in you, don't you? Fighting back is the best way to give the bird to all the turds.
I hadn't seen this answer yet, so I will throw it out there. Like most of the other ideas here this is a hypothesis. Life has made various evolutionary innovations over history and one idea is that woody bark/stems were first evolved sometime immediately proceeding the carboniferous. Woody stems are stronger and more resilient because there are protein cross links between cellulose strands. Cellulose being a long strand of linked sugars. Woody stems are very difficult to digest, which is why pretty much nothing eats it. When it first evolved, literally nothing ate it because it was so new and no organism had the tools to break it down. So, during the carboniferous trees and plants with woody stems proliferated because they had few or no natural predators, and probably also because they could grow taller than their competitors thanks to the strong stems and thus had better access to sunlight. They did still die of old age however, and that woody material would just sit there without decaying. Eventually it would be buried and millions of years later we would dig it out of the ground as coal or oil.
Well, the process plants use to grow is they take CO2 out of the atmosphere to build cellulose and other structural molecules and release oxygen. So what was happening in the carboniferous was that this was a very one way process. The carbon was being fixated and nothing was breaking it down to re-release it.
That all changed when fungi, think mushrooms and molds, eventually evolved the enzymatic equipment to break down woody stems. Sometime at the end of the carboniferous presumably. With this second innovation, the woody part of plants didn't just sit around waiting to be buried, it was broken down the fixated CO2 was released back into the atmosphere. Obviously this added a new variable to the equation and the oxygen level in the atmosphere struck a new and lower balance.
I suggest "Oxygen" and "power, sex, suicide" by nick lane if you are really interested in this subject.
https://www.amazon.com/Power-Sex-Suicide-Mitochondria-Meaning/dp/0199205647
https://www.amazon.com/Oxygen-Molecule-World-Popular-Science/dp/0198607830
The data showing that a lot of the coal was originally deposited as charcoal is quite recent, but it's also completely solid. Something about getting identical spectroscopic results between modern day charcoal and Carboniferous coal. However, there's no reason why peat and charcoal wouldn't get along perfectly well - something must have been deposited in between the forest fires. See this: http://www.amazon.com/Oxygen-Molecule-World-Popular-Science/dp/0198607830
When it comes to the oxygen levels, I realize that I leaped to far too broad conclusions. About half a dozen people posted overnight showing data asserting that whatever was going on with oxygen through the Mesozoic was more complicated than I'd thought it was. I responded to OmniHippo's post regarding this.
In response to your third paragraph, I'm pretty sure that you're talking about the Snowball Earth episodes, which mostly happened LONG before the Carboniferous.
In response to your first and second paragraph, thanks. Nice catches.
> The History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell - You'll learn a lot about how bad ideas never seem to die, but keep coming back. It will also sharpen your logical skills. Poor Nietzsche though.
No, this is a bad recommendation. Russell may have had a few interesting thought but this work of his is troublesomely biased to a number of ideas he did not agree with. His understanding of Kant in particular gets a lot of heat.
Anthony Kenny's "A New History of Western Philosophy" is a far better and more neutral source if you want a survey of western thought.
Sir Anthony Kenny's "A New History of Western Philosophy"
https://www.amazon.com/New-History-Western-Philosophy/dp/0199656495
In my experience subject histories are a wonderful way to learn the major epochs and gain an deep understanding of historical advancement without focusing solely on dates an events.
The fundamental question that we're really fighting over is "How can society best be organized?"
And believe it or not, it's REALLY REALLY GOOD that we're fighting over it. Well, maybe not fighting, but definitely that we're debating...well, maybe we aren't debating, but WE SHOULD BE.
I hate to perpetuate the political dichotomy that seems to permeate the public sphere, but the truth is that we really are pretty evenly split into two fundamental camps based on answers to that fundamental question:
1.) The "conservative" answer is "Society is best served by individuals taking care of themselves." From this ethic, you get memes like:
a.) "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps."
b.) "Greed is good/let the markets decide."
c.) "Small government/don't depend on government."
d.) "Freeloaders/welfare queens/etc."
2.) The "progressive/liberal" answer is "Society is best served by individuals taking care of each other." From this ethic, you get memes like:
a.) "From each according to his own effort, to each according to his need."
b.) "Income inequality is bad for everyone."
c.) "Government is good/government protects us from corporations."
d.) "Affirmative Action/Hate Crime Legislation/ect."
For more information, I highly recommend George Lackoff's tome on the subject. You can get it used on Amazon for ~$7 including shipping.
Moral Politics by George Lakoff, and The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. Both are solid books on why conservatives and liberals think differently, though the first is a little dated with its references.
Try this book called Through the Language Glass http://www.amazon.com/Through-Language-Glass-Different-Languages/dp/0312610491
Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher is about if and how our perception of the world depends on our language and whether languages are more influenced by nature or culture. Blew my mind quite a few times.
It's easily one of my favourite non-fiction books.
I don't have an answer for you, but your question reminded me a book I heard about a while ago. I think it's this one. Seems like the book talks about this issue in the context of colors and direction words. It might be a place to start or have an appendix with some recommended reading.
Have you looked at this recent book by Josh Katz? You should be able to get some ideas from it. The easiest thing for a survey is lexical choices, like pail/bucket.
https://www.amazon.com/Speaking-American-Youse-Visual-Guide/dp/0544703391/
This is the best coffee table book I own. It's fun to get the family together, ask how they say things, and then read about how regional it is.
They have a whole section for Boston stuff.
I would add to that the argument by Robin Dunbar he makes in his book: accents help to quickly recognize if someone else is part of your in-group (family, community, region, etc.). As such, accents are deemed to be a mean to establish trust between people on a certain level.
You would probably really enjoy reading this book - http://www.amazon.com/The-Spell-Sensuous-Perception-More-Than-Human/dp/0679776397
https://www.amazon.com/Spell-Sensuous-Perception-Language-More-Than-Human/dp/0679776397
favorite non-fiction book, warped my perception of the world for weeks after reading it
The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher
if you're interested in book recommendations, I've been been reading the unfolding of language, which has some good discussion about the sort of processes that cause inflections to appear and disappear. I've found it to be a very easy and interesting read!
If you are a serious learner of the language, then this is site all you need IMO: All Japanese All The Time. I stumbled across this site while in college and in the course of three years (one of which was spent abroad in Japan), I learned Japanese to a very high level. If you are still a student, it will be even easier for you to take on this method.
One more thing. This is also a part of the AJATT method, but deserves separate recognition: Remembering the Kanji. In all my years of learning Japanese, this book was the single most useful text I've ever encountered.
Good luck!
He's not kidding. Mnemonics are the shit.
I'm learning kanji at the rate of 20 per day with the help of this book's mnemonic system. I spend at most five minutes per character, and after studying them and writing them down only once, I am able to remember them incredibly easy.
With the help of anki for review, it only takes me about four separate reviews spaced over a week or two to remember a character, essentially, permanently. According to my anki history, I've never failed a card that the system considers "memorized", and my success rate for cards a week or less old is 82%.
Before I came across that book I linked a little bit above, I was trying to memorize them by rote, writing each character down dozens and dozens of times every day until it stuck. I could only do maybe three or four characters each day, and I almost always half-forgot them three days later.
This is essentially the method (but with illustrations) behind Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, which is excellent.
If you really want to learn Japanese for real you should buy Remembering the Kanji, Vol. 1 and use this site until you have learned enough kanjis. Then proceed with SRS'ing sentences. After a year or so doing it everyday you will be able to get around Japanese websites and such!
EDIT: my sentence didn't made sense.
Potentially helpful: https://www.amazon.com/Gateway-Sindarin-Grammar-Language-Tolkiens/dp/0874809126
Lojban:
Grammar: https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Lojban-Language-John-Cowan/dp/0966028325
Course: https://www.amazon.com/Lojban-For-Beginners/dp/1257372874
Dictionary: http://www.lulu.com/shop/llg/lojban-english-dictionary/paperback/product-14709640.html
Ithkuil:
Grammar: https://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Ithkuil-Language-John-Quijada/dp/B071G1XDKT
Vulcan:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/mark-r-gardner-and-the-vulcan-language-institute/the-vulcan-language/paperback/product-54300.html
Siwa:
Course: http://www.lulu.com/shop/%C3%A9tienne-l-poisson/a-beginners-course-in-modern-siwa/paperback/product-22931582.html
Grammar: http://www.lulu.com/shop/%C3%A9tienne-l-poisson/siwa-a-descriptive-grammar-2nd-edition/paperback/product-22931574.html
Na'vi:
http://eanaeltu.learnnavi.org/dicts/NaviDictionary.pdf
Dothraki:
https://docs.dothraki.org/Dothraki.pdf
Valarian:
http://wiki.dothraki.org/High_Valyrian_Vocabulary
Sindarin:
http://sindarinlessons.weebly.com/uploads/8/0/1/0/8010213/sindarin-english_dictionary_-_3rd_edition.pdf
http://www.ambar-eldaron.com/english/downloads/sindarin-english.pdf
Gateway to Sindarin: https://www.amazon.com/Gateway-Sindarin-Grammar-Language-Tolkiens/dp/0874809126
A Fan's Guide to Neo-Sindarin: A Textbook for the Elvish of Middle-earth https://www.amazon.com/Fans-Guide-Neo-Sindarin-Textbook-Middle-earth/dp/1546961259
Elvish Dictionary: https://www.amazon.com/Elbisches-Wörterbuch/dp/3608939199
Quenya:
http://www.ambar-eldaron.com/telechargements/quenya-engl-A4.pdf
I haven't read The Horse, the Wheel and Language. I will look out for it now, I'm very interested in Indo-European history and the reconstruction of Indo-European ur-culture.
I can't really claim to be an expert on linguistics. But Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction, while not exactly a riveting thrill-ride, does set out the whole basis of linguistic change and development over time, and explains the way in which languages can be reconstructed. I studied philology as a part of history (you can track cultural changes through vocabulary, for example, or date sections of a manuscript using word changes), and this kind of guide is very helpful. It does help with understanding how Tolkien managed to create a language, too.
Also: The Essential Chomsky, another good compendium.
This compilation looks good. There's also the classic Chomsky Reader which was my introduction.
Chomsky can be a lttle tough to read, especially the later stuff. The earlier books are quite readable, but starting in the mid-80s it get a bit tougher. He's really at his best in spontaneous interviews. Here is a transcript of an early talk he gave, it lays out his personal political philosophy and its roots very clearly.
This book is my own personal favorite, a big collection of transcripts covering just about everything, even some linguistics.
Kyle did a nice job there. The framing pressures at Fox News are at such full force that you have to be very active in counteracting them. Otherwise you will fall into any of a long list of games they play with their average viewer to gain support for their conclusions. I would suggest a book by George Lakoff called Don't Think of an Elephant, as it's about that very subject
This book is the go-to if you're interested in political messaging.
Everyone interested should read or re-read "Don't think of an elephant." by Lackoff. I just re-read my 2004 version and noticed that there was an updated version in 2014. Amazon Link
130597304| > United States Anonymous (ID: YsAOjqlH)
>>130596498 →
I'll throw this in for free:
https://www.amazon.com/Language-Thought-Action-S-I-Hayakawa/dp/0156482401/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1497917429&sr=1-1
It was a textbook I had to get for an Advanced Writing course I took.
By the way /u/theorymeltfool, if you want a nice book about understanding human communication, I highly recommend Hayakawa (1939), Language in Action (amazon).
You should just read this book. It's extremely easy and still very useful, and written by the best philosopher of maths currently alive.
It might be helpful to read an introductory text first. My first philosophy of math course used Stewart Shapiro's [Thinking about mathematics] (http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-about-Mathematics-The-Philosophy/dp/0192893068/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1341687670&sr=8-1&keywords=stewart+shapiro) as a supplementary text. I didn't use it too much, but it is pretty good and quite approachable from what I recall. Shapiro is a very well regarded contemporary philosopher of mathematics.
You could also start with the [SEP article] (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/philosophy-mathematics/). This will give you an overview of the area, its history, and the various sub-disciplines. That can help you narrow down what in particularly you are interested in which will make it easier for you to find appropriate books.
I'm currently reading http://www.amazon.ca/Thinking-about-Mathematics-The-Philosophy/dp/0192893068 where these sorts of questions about the nature of mathematics are nicely outlined.
I too think that the approach offered is creative, but I don't understand argument tbh. Perhaps he will offer a more basic ontology of mathematics at a future point that will situate his argument within the larger reflections on the nature of math.
I'm also worried that Meillassoux has set up a bit of a straw man argument wrt to the arche-fossil and "correlationism." This is not how I read Kant's transcendental idealism, but I'm unsure at the moment.
Personal note: when I read about SR I went to SEP to try and learn more to see if it was worth pursuing in greater depth, but there were no entries for any of the figures associated with this line of thinking. This concerns me as I can't quite situate SR within a larger philosophical history.
This one: https://www.amazon.com/Practical-English-Usage-Michael-Swan/dp/0194420981
But this book is only necessary if you have students that have challenging questions about English usage (high school, uni, adults, etc.).
Because English is crazy like that.
Source: ESL teacher.
On a more serious note, if you're looking for a good reference, I highly recommend Practical English Usage by Michael Swan. This is the bible for people like me.
I like Micheal Swan's - Practical English Usage.
You probably could read it to learn grammar, but I teach ESL and find it's a great reference with clear explanations and examples.
That is not true at all. Those forms are found in nearly all registers of English, with only the 'going to' construction avoided in extremely formal usage.
They differ in aspect and intentionality. The time that the decision was made, and whether the action is part of a schedule (present simple) a plan (present continuous) or merely an intention (will) are some of the factors that predicate usage.
For a more thorough discussion see Swan: Practical English Usage, which is the standard text on this (https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/cka/Practical-English-Usage-3rd-Michael-Swan/0194420981)
Sorry, but I disagree with you.
> are living at or near the absolute apex of human history
This is an arrogant statement. This system of government has its merits, don't get me wrong. But corruption has clearly deeply rooted itself in our political process. I'm not going to ignore that. You can pretend as much as you want that this system is working, but I'm not going to. Because regardless of what issues you present that seem to hold a significant amount of importance to you, or the populace, it doesn't change the reality that regardless of which party is power, the only people who seem to benefit from it are the insanely wealthy. I'm not going to pretend like that doesn't happen.
>> And I feel the political class also views it as such. They don't care what the issues are as long as they get elected.
> Can you support that claim with anything?
The Power Elite
The reality is, dissenting voices aren't allowed. And because I refuse to pick a side and fly my team's flag, my opinion on how our political system operates instantly becomes invalid to those who disagree with me.
But that's okay. There are numerous people who feel the same way that I do, so I don't really need approval from anyone on the internet.
edit: wording/answered a question I missed from you with a comment by me from another conversation on this thread
> This is a fairly arrogant statement for you to make. "Sure, I admit, these things matter to the citizenry, but, in reality, they're trivial." How presumptuous of you to decide for everyone else what's actually important and what isn't.
My opinions are my own and I have the right to think however I please. I hate this phrase, but in the grand scheme of things, most of the issues the public concerns themselves with are trivial and would ultimately be non-existent in a truly free society.
Foucault? Marcuse? Fromm? Habermas? Horkheimer? C. Wright Mills? Friere? Fanon? (just spitballing... I can't remember one who specifically wrote a critique of the military-industrial complex or the effects of the military on capitalist economies).
In the other direction, are you perhaps thinking of Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies? (which I believe is 2-volume) or else Hayek's The Road to Serfdom?
EDIT: The closest book of the names listed above to what you seem to be referring to would be C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite, which is relatively big at 450 or so pages, but not massive and not multi-volume.
You should read " The Power Elite" by C Wright Mills (1956)
https://www.amazon.com/Power-Elite-C-Wright-Mills/dp/0195133544/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1498937538&sr=8-1&keywords=the+power+elite
I think you'd enjoy it, from one cynic to another.
Unfortunately, that's not really how it works.
I am somewhat puzzled. Do you mean books published by Academic Presses?
Peter Dale Scott had multiple works published by the University of California Press.
https://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520205192
C Wright Mills wrote the Power Elite, and it is published by Oxford.
https://www.amazon.com/Power-Elite-C-Wright-Mills/dp/0195133544
Domhoff wrote Who Rules America, and Works on the Bohemian Grove.
https://www.amazon.com/Who-Rules-America-William-Domhoff/dp/0139583637
https://www.amazon.com/Bohemian-Grove-other-retreats-ruling-class/dp/0060110481
These are all books by scholars, published by major presses.
For some good reading on this check out "The Power Elite" by CW Mills. Originally he warned of the Triumvirate which consists of Military, Industry, and Government. Later, the theory had been modified to include Media in this complex. Should be required reading. Edit: formatting.
I'm reading Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World. next up is Sullenberger's book
I assume you're looking for some pop sci books rather than papers? If so, I really enjoyed:
EDIT: I don't have as many books as I thought I did, I've been reading papers rather than books
Unfortunately my only source is this book... perhaps you find it on the internets or otherwise :P
http://www.amazon.com/Oxygen-Molecule-World-Popular-Science/dp/0198607830/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1347771712&sr=1-2&keywords=oxygen
I think you are unwisely dismissive of the chronological route.
Placing abstract and difficult ideas in historical context and threading a narrative is a great way to make those ideas more concrete and engaging.
A psychological sense of the historical roots of ones culture is also a fantastic bulwark against feelings of arbitrariness and absurdity of modern life.
I think any discipline, whether philosophy, mathematics, science, engineering or art is only enriched by the chronological approach. History is important and wonderful and learning the history of the development, evolution and progress of culture is a great counterpoint to learning history as one damned atrocity after another.
A book like Kenny's A New History of Western Philosophy is big and dense, but not impossible to "conquer". It took me about 6 months to finish. That required a bit of commitment on my part, yes, but don't assume OP is a slacker that can't even commit to such a elementary project as reading through a slightly long book.
There are shorter less dense historical introductions to philosophy too.
I think it's not the best for this particular goal. The section "general introductions" contains a lot of books that are mostly appetizers. If you have already decided to study systematically to build a solid foundation you can downright skip these.
All the books of the other sections are either classics in their own right (therefore, you will study the meat of them in your study of the history of philosophy, and you will do so in the context of what they were replying to, what kind of assumptions they made etc.) or famous but not essential books that have been chosen according to the tastes of the author of the list (therefore you don't need them for foundations; you can always choose to include them in your list if you decide they are valuable in their own right).
So I say skip all the list for now. A much better and much faster way would be to read Anthony Kenny's history of philosophy. If you work through it making sure you understand all the arguments, your focus, thinking, and comprehension skills will already be at another level.
After that, you can start grappling with the Critique of pure reason. Be warned that most of the "introductions", "guides", "explanations" and "companions" to the CPR are actually investigations of obscure points that manage to be harder to read than the actual CPR. The best two books that I found that are actually introductory guides to CPR are this and this.
Despite the titles, they are not "Kant for dummies". They are actually dense expositions which require concentration, familiarity with terms used in philosophy, and knowledge of what came before Kant (both offer a quick overview, but if you don't already know what it's talking about it will just leave you dizzy). Of course, if you have already done step 1, this will be a breeze for you.
I suggest you read both before opening the real CPR, but if you only have patience/time for one: Rosenberg is more one-sided, more focused on certain aspects, and somewhat less clear on some points, but he will really get you excited on what the CPR can mean - it will become a great adventure that could possibly transform your whole understanding of yourself and the universe. Gardner is less exciting, but he is so clear, so exhaustive in predicting what kind of doubt can arise for the reader and in presenting the different interpretations, that it is scary.
> How is defending our own norms and values bigoted?
What you consider "white people" norms and values, aren't "white people" norms and values. You think they are because you are uneducated and you dont know how people come to believe/value what they do or what creates "culture" or the values you claim to extol. When you learn the answer to these questions you will then realize how you are currently uneducated and hold values are backwards and contradict the ACTUAL values/norms of western civilization which are enlightenment values.
These things aren't your "heritage". What you refer to as this are really just a form of antiquated Christian traditionalism that contradict western values. If you actually want to know the great history of western values and realize the actual legacy of white people(if you insist on racializing such a thing), I recommend you read Anthony Kenny's "The History of Western Philosophy". Below is the Amazon link and below that is part one.
https://www.amazon.com/New-History-Western-Philosophy/dp/0199656495
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.bibotu.com/books/2015/A%2520New%2520History%2520of%2520Western%2520Philosophy%2520-%2520Vol%25201.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwi63e3r5a_eAhVlRN8KHWo_CM0QFjAAegQIAhAB&usg=AOvVaw29a-DaxnCVryAbRYj2FGL9
You can find pdfs of parts 2, 3, and 4 online for free by Googling the name of the book and pdf.
When you learn the history of ethics, Christianity, political philosophy, and knowledge you will learn the actual legacy of western civilization and realize it has nothing to do with race, even though the philosophers who have advanced all the things I mentioned in the western world were generally white due to their privileged status in western civilization over the span of 2000+ years(a fact you want to blindly dismiss or are offended by for some odd reason).
I hope you will take this comment seriously, resist your temptation to confirmation bias your views and resist your temptation to look away and look into this book I recommended. This book I recommended will unequivocally change your mind and literally teach you how to think accurately, as that is the true subject of it. A detailed history of philosophy that shows its gradual development and advancement.
I will be happy to elaborate on any questions you may have.
u/JoeNiw, u/Belongs_To_The_Nords, u/Al_Shakir, u/HagridTheSoviet, u/Porphyrogennetos
https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/reading
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/5y49nz/as_a_hs_sophomore_i_would_like_to_venture_into/den54ll/
https://www.amazon.com/Law-Legislation-Liberty-statement-principles/dp/0415522293/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
https://www.amazon.com/Road-Serfdom-Documents-Definitive-Collected/dp/0226320553/ref=la_B000AQ6W60_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1503059047&sr=1-1
https://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-State-Utopia-Robert-Nozick/dp/0465051006/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1503059077&sr=1-1&keywords=nozick
https://www.amazon.com/Contemporary-Political-Philosophy-Will-Kymlicka/dp/0198782748/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1503059099&sr=1-4&keywords=contemporary+political
https://www.amazon.com/New-History-Western-Philosophy/dp/0199656495/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1503059282&sr=1-1&keywords=new+history+of+philosophy
http://econlog.econlib.org/
http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/
Perhaps you could start with a historical overview like this one?
This does a pretty good job of it: https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Politics-Liberals-Conservatives-Think/dp/0226467716
Strict father vs nurturing parents mentality.
If you are so inclined, it might be helpful to read Moral Politics by George Lakoff. He's a linguist and a progressive/democrat activist person, and some of his books are straightford political advocacy books. That one however, is more of a linguistics/ psychology book. In it he advances his theory that political positions (including on gay marriage) tend to stem from our tendency to consider political/societal level issues from the vantage point of our unconscious/ received assumptions about how families ought to work on an authoritarian-nurturing spectrum. Basically, on an unconscious level, we analogize. I found the book repetitive and boring at times, but his basic premise has been pretty useful way to think about these things for me.
Anyway, maybe thinking about this issue from some other perspectives-- sociology, gender politics, civil liberties, etc. could help you gain perspective on the ultimate source of your discomfort (as in, why is this a key religious belief for so many people? What does the status quo actually do-- who does it benefit, and why?). Once you understand your motivations a little better, maybe things won't feel the same anymore.
Google it, then read this book.
> should be Colours/Colors are
Yay sloppy editing.
Interesting how they interpret this 'green/blue' test differently, I'm having trouble finding the actual paper for the study.
Some people seem to think its that we simple didn't perceive blue, the radio lab article was based on stuff from through the language glass so its not like we actual didn't 'see' blue, its just that it didn't show up enough in experience to warrant a word to be created for it, in the Namibian tribe they studied, there were many many different words for green in their language though, and they found that even though we see them all the same colour, the Namibians could differentiate about 12 different shades as if they were completely different colours.
Interesting book, and sort of shows that how we perceive the world changes with how we communicate.
Give him a counter example written by someone with credibility.
Anybody interested in this stuff should read "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes" by Daniel Everett. The tribe isn't exactly uncontacted but it's an excellent insight into how a pre-agricultural culture lives. One of my favourite books in fact.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0375425020
Speaking American a book about American dialects.
“Lol, k-buddy.”
What a schmuck.
https://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_84.html
Speaking American: How Y’all, Youse , and You Guys Talk: A Visual Guide https://www.amazon.com/dp/0544703391/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_MjDCCbR9VX4XD
The above link is the actual survey results from which NYT pulled their information. As you can see, the two terms are used interchangeably in much of the United States. The original, peer-reviewed, quantitative survey was conducted by the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee.
The second link is the results of the 350,000 Americans who took the NYT survey as compiled into a visual guide. On the description section of the page you will actually see the map for roundabout vs traffic circle. Traffic circle is only almost exclusively Dallas, OKC, Louisiana, and the East Coast north of South Carolina. The rest of the country seems to use the term roundabout. Now, it only takes a very simple high school education in reasoning and a working middle school knowledge of geography and using maps to see that it is pretty clearly a regional difference to the tune of about 350,000 real data points deep.
But, as we all know, whatever one edition of one dictionary says is probably a better source for the growth and evolution of language than a research study involving living speakers of the language, so you should definitely just keep blindly citing the Oxford English Dictionary like it makes you intelligent. That’s why any time someone says they have “imposter syndrome,” I politely point out that word is not proper English since it’s not part of the 2017 Oxford English Dictionary, and that’s my preferred version on which to base all usage of language.
Tl;dr - you are a pedantic, condescending tool (and unfortunately not even a smart one) who thinks the stand up shots subreddit is the best place to flex your lack of intelligence, “buddy.”
I don't have an answer for all three of your questions, but here's a partial answer to one.
> What factors made the various American accents sound the way they do
So in North American English, a lot of the differences between accents are in the vowel sounds. Think of how a stereotypical white New Yorker might say the o in "coffee", how a Canadian might say about, or whether people have the cot-caught merger. There are some differences in how consonants are pronounced as well, such as how often you might say walking or walkin' or saying this as dis. There are some grammatical differences, such as using might could in the South, needs washed in the Midwest, or invariable be in African American English. And there are word choice differences, as in pop vs. soda, put up vs. put away, or roly-poly vs. potato bug.
If you have access to a university library, you might want to look up the Atlas of North American English by Labov, Ash, and Boberg. As a more coffee-table book that more intended for a general audience, try Josh Katz's book Speaking American
Blogspam to Amazon affiliate link, bypassing /u/AutoModerator rules.
Here's the actual link: https://www.amazon.com/Speaking-American-Youse-Visual-Guide/dp/0544703391
Grooming, Gossip, And The Evolution of Language written by Dunbar provides a lot of interesting insight and theory of our communication and relationship histories. I read it for an Anthropology of Communication class and highly recommend it to anyone interested by this topic!
> Wow, is this really true?
From what I've been told about current theory </disclaimer> Yes. Although it had less to do with hunting and more to do with climate change (migration). <disclaimer> I realize when talking about evolutionary forces, everything kinda comes down to hunting and mating. But more directly: climate.
Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language is an excellent, readable book that was required for anthropology.
One of my favorite books when it comes to Linguistic Anthropology, and it touches on language conservation issues:
We Share Walls
This is my favorite Linguistic Anthropology Reader, tons of articles that really make up the base of the field: Linguistic Anthropology Reader
A fun read even if you don't like Evolutionary Psychology: http://www.amazon.com/Grooming-Gossip-Evolution-Language-Dunbar/dp/0674363361
Alan Watts was an extraordinary human. Definitely one of the most insightful people in the English-speaking world. I can't recommend him highly enough.
I also strongly suggest David Abram. His major work is The Spell of the Sensuous. Watts points out that we've mistaken our map for the territory. Abram begins to teach us how to put the map down.
The Spell of the Sensuous?
By Guy Deutscher. Amazon link for the lazy. Ten bucks for Kindle.
This is one of the most informative and entertaining books I have ever read. It discusses how language has changed and keeps changing, and how the so-called "degradation" of language is actually what's responsible for its amazing complexity.
I read this in thinking of this question Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages
> That's absurd.
No. It isn't. And many have written about this subject.
“To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.” - Aldous Huxley
Yep, that's definitely true. This, incidentally, is what Heisig set out to do with Remembering the Kanji, to give an English speaker the same advantage in Japanese as a Chinese speaker (that is, know how to write each kanji and a rough approximation to its meaning).
> My knowledge of kanji is laughable at best.
Heisig's Remembering the Kanji has a very novel approach to learning the kanji, although It's not for everyone. The problem for me was that I was both being too lazy, but also that it works best with English as your primary language.
As for vocabulary training I'm not sure.
I like RTK. Some people have problems with it, but it worked for me. Also using anki with a kanji deck is very helpful.
Depends on what method of learning you subscribe to. The book you suggest is fine, and the Genki books are fine for the standard way of learning.
Learning Kana is easy...actually easier than English as there is no guessing, there is only one way to pernounce "ichi" as written in kana. The problem is Kanji, and oh what a problem it is.
I did not succeed as to learn any language takes a good amount of effort that you are willing to put in but here is a method I subscribe to. Using this book you would learn how to read Japanese using Kanji the quickest. The thing is, that what you are learning in this book isn't actually how to read, but more how to reckognize each kanji symbol. The idea is that once you learn how to recognize each Kanji, it will be 100x easier to put words to it. This book falls into the method that this guy http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/ follows. Which while crazy, I can see being effective.
Japanese is hard fyi
In case you're up to getting a book, I highly recommend David Salo's A Gateway to Sindarin. It's about $25 on Amazon.
This guy is the one that handled most of the elvish in the LoTR movies:
https://www.amazon.com/Gateway-Sindarin-Grammar-Language-Tolkiens/dp/0874809126
>While today's suburbs arose during a period when overtly White supremacist attitudes were still widely accepted in the United States, segregation was not an explicit goal of suburbanization. Instead, suburbanization was thought of as the pursuit of a better, healthier life for families. However, people of color were excluded from this pursuit, because even people who did not dislike or fear African Americans shared the view that their presence in neighborhoods "lowered property values." For this reason, until the 1964 Civil Rights Act, mortgages backed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) were not available to African Americans. By encouraging residential covenants that prohibited resale to people of color, the FHA policed the suburbs against African American residents even beyond the reach of the jurisdiction it had over the holders of it's primary mortgages.
Emphasis mine. The above is from the introduction to a great book focused primarily on sociolinguistics, I highly recommend just because it's incredibly interesting, called The Everyday Language of White Racism.
One of the first things the author does in the introduction is move away from Folk Theories of racism (the relevant one here is "people just prefer to be among their own kind," although the main big one is that 'racism' can only be individual acts by unrepentant, hateful bigots; and that systems of privilege that operate based on racialist assumptions do not lead to 'racist' social structures).
Here's an interesting fact, continuing the discussion of where people live: mortgage lending by private bankers was not regulated until the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and rigorous enforcement of anti-discrimination laws did not really get underway until the late 1980s (Massey, 2005).
I recommend reading this book. It might open your eyes to reasons that the facts you're stating mean more than you think they mean. For instance, why do Latin Americans practice baseball and black Americans practice basketball so much? Because of a free choice, or because of a lack of choices?
Especially on Greek literature German is very usefull as your second modern language. For native English speakers it's not that hard to learn either.
In Germany English and German are required for your bachelors (additionaly French or Italian for masters, and both for your doctorate at most universities).
> I was wondering if anyone who has experience in the major or something similar had anything to offer as far as advice and suggestions are concerned.
Getting into the basics of Indoeuropean Studies is very helpful. I've seen many students who didn't do it and lack an understanding of grammar. They have memorized der neue Menge for composition, but couldn't get behind the concept of latin or indoeuropean grammar.
I'd recommend Clackson and/or Fortson. When you have learnt German pick up Meiser for Latin and Rix for Greek.
The Essential Chomsky - a selection of his most important work.
A lot. https://www.amazon.com/ALL-NEW-Dont-Think-Elephant/dp/160358594X
>which is just too absurd to even debate.
Both of us see the world differently. Our frameworks of understanding and interpreting the world stand in complete opposition on what we're talking about. That's why you don't understand what I'm saying. You should read George Lakoff. I think you'll find it informative... especially relating to this debate.
I recommend, The ALL NEW Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate
Oldie but a goodie, required reading to understand messaging: Don't Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff.
I've heard several Trumpians slip similar terms into conversations. Just yesterday a pro-Trump friend of mine, drew a comparison between family and nation by saying: "It's like mommy's gone and daddy isn't going to put up with the same bullshit as her."
I don't know if this metaphor emerged naturally or as a byproduct of a broadly distributed theme amongst the movement. In either case, it's been fairly well-described by George Lakoff as "strict-father" v. "nurturant parent" models of political thought. From [a 2004 SvN blog post](* https://signalvnoise.com/archives/000718.php):
> What the strict-father model attempts to accomplish is this: it is assumed children have to learn self-discipline and self-reliance and respect for authority. Now another important part of this model, in America but not in other countries, has to do with what happens when such children mature. The slogan, “eighteen and out,” is common. The mature children are supposed to be off on their own as soon as possible. Good parents don’t interfere in their lives. If the nation is the family and the government is the parent, in the strict-family model, the government shouldn’t meddle in their lives.
> When I looked at the liberal model of the family, I found it a very different model. It assumes the main thing a parent has to do is care for and care about his child. It is through being cared for and cared about that children become responsible, self-disciplined and self-reliant. The purpose is to make children become nurturers, too. Obedience for children comes out of love and respect for parents, not out of fear of punishment. Instead of punishment, you have restitution.
If you don't want to buy/read the books, here are some digestible references:
Longer reads for those more interested:
And this why it is REQUIRED reading of Lakoff. The one book. He nails it 100%.
Father figure, mother figure, etc.
Just buy the damn book (and read it) already!
\> In this updated and expanded edition, Lakoff, urges progressives to go beyond the typical laundry list of facts, policies, and programs and present a clear moral vision to the country―one that is traditionally American and can become a guidepost for developing compassionate, effective policy that upholds citizens’ well-being and freedom.
https://www.amazon.com/ALL-NEW-Dont-Think-Elephant/dp/160358594X/ref=sr_1_2_twi_pap_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1543501925&sr=1-2
&#x200B;
On Amazon. There's a free audiobook as well.
"Do you have any data to back up your claim that "While not all conservatives raise their children in this way, the vast majority do, and it is what I have experienced"."
http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Politics-Liberals-Conservatives-Think/dp/0226467716/
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarianism"
Those just from top of my head, but the study of conservative/authoritarian model vs empathetic model of parenting is deep and long. They even developed a pretty well establish and commonly applied measurement; the F-scale.
People, in the USA, who score high on it trend GREATLY towards conservative politics and the GOP and apply strict authoritarian models of parenting.
That all said, in reply to the OP "question" the reason Libertarians tend to shy away from liberal politics and positions, despite sharing far more of their political positions with them, is the Libertarian view empathy as a weakness and share the conservative fear of the their fellow man as something inherently evil. Liberal models involve a focus on empathy, nurturant parent modeling, and a belief the true nature of man is decent.
Or, Liberals tend to think we do better when we come together for our mutual benefit and Libertarians AND conservatives believe their fellow man is dangerous and destructive.
Ironically, at least conservatives understand we all must work together and accept the limitations on our freedoms that all societies bring. Libertarians seem to have either not read or understand basic foundational concepts like Hobbes Social Contract or just rather want the protection of the social contract but are unwilling to share the burden.
Really, a Libertarian is just a narcissistic (or extremely ignorant) conservative. The authoritative model is the "answer' to a conservatives basic mistrust of his fellow man. The Libertarian still fears/distrusts his fellow man but seeks some impossible worldview where he is "self-reliant" YET still benefits from all the positive features of a structured (authoritative or not) society.
In my experience the young Libertarian is just generally ignorant of basic social contract (and will often "grow out of it" as he learns and understands the world better) and the older Libertarian is just a ragging narcissist who believes the world has done wrong by him or else he would be fabulously wealthy and appreciated as he was clearly meant to be.
We view the world through the lens of the language in which we speak. Words are simply symbols of ideas which each language deals with differently depending on history and heritage. Some examples of untranslatable words from other languages
This is an interesting book about language shaping thought.
You're also completely misrepresenting grammar and language. Try looking into the field of linguistics. Here's a couple book suggestions for you. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0140260234 And http://www.amazon.com/The-Unfolding-Language-Evolutionary-Invention/dp/0805080120/ref=la_B001JOASIU_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1342795681&amp;sr=1-2
One of my fave authors too! Start here and this one is pretty on topic as well.
>every society has made up a religion
Actually, this isn't true
But even if it isn't, what about someone like me who never believed in the supernatural? I mean, I've been called "demon spawn" but I'd never thought it was accurate.
Well, first of all there's the question: What exactly makes the standard register (General American English if you're in America) the correct form? Who gets to decide that? I think we can both agree that it's an arbitrary standard that's just... a thing now. Now, I'm not at all saying standard english (or any standard language) doesn't have a place in the world, don't get me wrong here. It's, imo, very much important to have a standard for things like scientific papers or writing laws where it's important everyone interprets your things the same way. It's also, in our society, a (imo sad) truth that if you don't master the standard, you'll be regarded as stupid in some way. This is where I have a problem. Why? Let me elaborate:
As you grow up, you'll acquire the language of your peers. Children don't have any notion of standard languages, so if a kid grows up in a ghetto, they'll speak like the people surrounding them, even though in the higher classes there's a social stigma against speaking like the poor people. Does this make the child stupid? No, the kid did exactly what every human ever does when they learn their first language, imitate what's around them. And just because (on average) less educated people speak that way doesn't make the language any more complex either. For example, African American Vernacular English arguably has the most complex verb system of all modern Germanic languages (complex in this case meaning "makes the most distinctions explicitly") but is generally associated with the poorer social classes (and mostly black people) of america and thus stigmatized.
You mention that incorrectly pronouncing words is not a positive change. The question is then, how is the current status quo better than what the future holds? Let's make a practical example: Assume I started pronouncing t between two vowels like s. Water becomes waser, letter becomes leser. Are these new forms really objectively worse than the old ones? No, they're not. How could they be when the former were just as arbitrary as the latter? Also, as a note, that sound change I just illustrated happened in German many centuries ago, which is why Germans say Wasser with an s. So if you were to claim that people who were to undergo that change are stupid in some way, then you'd also be calling all Germans stupid.
Now onto the last point. Yes, I do completely embrace the chaos (it's a beautiful thing if you ask me, and very interesting to analyze). However I do realize that in our current societies, standardized languages have a place, and be it just so books have a somewhat uniform appearance. However, I see it so often that people get outright harassed for the way they speak and I find that absolutely unacceptable and on par with racism and classism for things that should just not exist in the world.
Sorry that took a bit to write out everything I wanted to say. If you want to learn some more about how language change actually works, I can wholeheartedly suggest the book The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher (Amazon link). It's an easy read and a very nice introduction into linguistics, with a focus on language change.
That's a very interesting question. I'm not sure specifically about "the black earth," though I have heard a lot about the use of color by Greek poets.
I found the most articulate answer in this segment from Radiolab.
Basically, the Greeks, and other ancient people, simply didn't have the color perception that we do. We don't think it had anything to do with the number of cones in their eyes, though. Rather, they didn't have names for some colors, and lacking labels they the lacked handles necessary for perception. A survey of texts across cultures showed that, for example, red is always the first color to appear in writing, and blue is always the last to be explicitly labeled.
There are several theories as to why. One hypothesis tells us that we only create words for colors we can produce ourselves — creating blue dye seems to come late to most cultures, for example, while humans have never had trouble making red messes wherever they go. But what about the blues in nature — such as water, or the sky? If you look at the works attributed to Homer, the sea is "wine-dark" and the sky is silver or grey, not blue.
There was a book written on the subject, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, by Guy Deutscher. The larger Radiolab episode from which the Homer piece is excerpted is also terrific.
I hope this leads you toward a reasonable and more specific answer to your question.
Edit: I neglected to bring it back around and say that lacking more subtle color labels, such as brown, it would make sense that they'd see the earth as simply black. But that's only my hypothesis.
Let me start by telling you to save yourself the trouble. Learning Japanese is a long hard road and once you get to the end you'll realize that the Anime or manga that spurred your desire to learn is actually juvenile and terrible. The economy here stinks and translation is one of the most boring, tedious jobs in existence. Furthermore, even after you achieve intermediate proficiency and can speak and understand a lot of Japanese, you'll realize that it doesn't matter because speaking Japanese requires being Japanese to a certain extent and you won't and can't ever be Japanese.
If that still doesn't persuade you to learn any other language, here are a few resources:
Reviewing the Kanji Forum - This is a site devoted to Heisig's Reviewing the Kanji which is a series of books devoted to learning the Kanji independently and then learning the readings later. I suggest you do this. It will take anywhere from 3 months to a year and you won't be able to read or write any Japanese at the end of it, but in my opinion, this foundation is of profound necessity. After you do this, acquiring vocabulary and understanding even complicated scientific terms in Japanese will be leaps and bounds easier.
Tae Kim's guide to basic Japanese grammar - This is a basic primer. Free and through. Study it and internalize it. It's no substitute for a class and instructors to drill you, but it's free and explains concepts in Japanese grammar in a way that will complement any classes you take and/or let you work at your own pace towards more complicated material.
Anki - Download Anki. It's a Spaced Repitition System (SRS) program. Make two decks. A sentences deck and a vocabulary deck. Whenever you learn a new word, put it into the vocab deck and put interesting sentences into the sentences deck. Finish your reviews every day. (Like braces, this is something that will be with you for the rest of your life, so learn to love it.) Time box your reviews to about 5 minutes at a time.
Kanji in Context - Start working through this series of books. I do something like 2 kanji a day in the vocabulary workbook, putting all the words into an Anki deck and obscuring the kanji I'm learning, such that the answer to the card is to write that kanji. This primarily enforces the readings I'm learning. Writing things increases your ability to dedicate them to memory. I put the sentences into the sentences deck. Prepare to get behind. Maybe you'll slag through it.
lang-8 - Once you've got some conversational Japanese under your belt, sign up at Lang-8 and write some or respond to other journal entries. Native speakers congregate here and will correct your Japanese, talk to you in Japanese, and generally have a conversation.
Buy or research ways to study for the JLPT and sign up for level 4. The goal is not passing this test (only level 1 and 2 really matter and even then, most people who get this certification are NEVER asked they took it) but simply setting a deadline. Level 5 (test changed this year) is crazy easy. Make this your goal. Even if you can't actually get to a testing site or don't have the money, convince yourself that you do and buy some JLPT study guides and work towards level X (again, probably 5). Once you feel confident you can pass level 5, start studying for level 4 and so on. Use the bi-annual deadlines to keep yourself studying. Watch Japanese stuff on Youtube, find a way to go to Japan and do all this in a native environment. Once you get to the end of the road, you'll probably end up discovering that it wasn't worth it.
My recommendation is to learn Mandarin if you're interested in learning an Asian language and something European if you're interested in History. (If you're interested in reading historic Japanese texts, good luck. You'll have to learn Japanese and then classic Japanese. (Most natives can't read pre-WWII newspapers easily or at all-- this is where you're headed.))
It is a jump, but people do think that, and they do say "no problemo" informally (even though it's not even how Spanish-speakers would say it; most would say "no hay problema," and some who are bilingual and have picked up on "no problem" might just say "no problema," but it ends with an a in Spanish).
What I'm saying is that our language uses reinforce unconscious beliefs and social structures. This book explains it better than I can. I'm sorry I don't have a free resource more eloquent than myself. If I did, I'd share it.
Here are the books listed as being part of the course. Maybe you should read them instead of pulling umptions out of your ass?
Or are you scared of being brainwashed?
Maybe those books, and any discussion about them should be banned or ridiculed to the margins (without even having read them-- to keep "our" thoughts pure, you know) to prevent toxic ideas from spreading?