The unfolding of language pdf

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Per le Scuole sup International re Student's book. Per la Scu Per l Running with the Kenyans: Discovering the secrets But how can a vowel-less group of three consonants ever mean anything, if it cannot even stand up on its own three legs and be pronounced unaided? The answer is that such roots do not have to be spoken by themselves, because the root is an abstract notion, which comes to life only when it is superimposed on some templates: patterns of mostly vowels, which have three empty slots for the three consonants of the root.

The Semitic verbal architecture may already seem pretty scary, but please fasten your seat-belt, because the cells in the table above represent only a handful of around a hundred different such nuances in Arabic. And if all that were not enough, each of these cells can actually contain up to thirteen different forms for the different persons I, you, she, etc.

Again, merely to give the gist of what's involved, here are the forms for the different persons in just one of the cells above the top left corner , the simple present tense. But since we do not need to sweat over the details, let's just sit back and reflect on the principles involved. Think for a moment about all the meticulous planning which must have gone into developing such a system — it almost defies belief that such an algebraic scheme could have been conceived in any other way except through the inspiration of a gifted designer.

How else could the abstract idea of a purely consonantal root have been devised? Is it really possible that the templates that produce a whole network of nuances could have arisen of their own accord? Cracking the Semitic verb poses a serious challenge, one which will be taken up in Chapter 6. Needless to say, there is a great deal more to the structure of language than what we have seen. There are whole expanses of language that have not been mentioned, and those areas that were touched upon were only sketched in rough outlines.

Nevertheless, even the few examples above should have left little room for doubt as to the sophistication of language's structure and the ingenuity of its designers. For wherever one finds impressive edifices in language, one is also likely to find scores of imperfections, a tangle of irregularities, redundancies and idiosyncrasies that mar the picture of a perfect design.

English, for example, is renowned for the irrationality of its past tense verbs. Native speakers may be blithely unaware of the chaos that reigns in the English verbal system; not so anyone who has had to learn it at school.

Here is a rhyme I wrote in memory of my frustrations: The teacher claimed it was so plain, I only had to use my brain. She said the past of throw was threw, The past of grow — of course — was grew, So flew must be the past of fly, And now, my boy, your turn to try. The teacher frowned at me and said The past of feed was — plainly — fed. With raging anger out she broke: Your ignorance you want to hide?

Tell me the past form of collide! Oh damn these English verbs, I thought The whole thing absolutely stought! Of English I have had enough, These verbs of yours are far too tough. Bolt upright in my chair I sat, And said to her 'that's that' — I quat.

Another area where languages often display erratic behaviour is what linguists call 'gender', by which they don't necessarily mean distinctions based on sex, but any classification imposed on nouns according to some of their essential properties. Which class humans then fall into depends, of course, on local custom. While the idea behind such gender distinctions sounds quite sensible, the problem is that in most languages reality doesn't match up to the theory, and so it is often difficult to discern any logic behind the actual classification.

The American author Mark Twain came across such a capricious classification system for the first time when he was trying to master the German language. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has.

Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. So after a few more pages of rant, he went on to recount the following touching 'Tale of the Fishwife and its Sad Fate', purportedly translated literally from the German: It is a bleak day.

Hear the rain, how he pours, and the hail, how he rattles; and see the snow, how he drifts along, and of the mud, how deep he is! Ah the poor fishwife, it is stuck fast in the mire; it has dropped its basket of fishes; and its hands have been cut by the scales as it seized some of the falling creatures; and one scale has even got into its eye.

And it cannot get her out. It opens its mouth him, alas he to cry for help; but if any sound comes out of is drowned by the raging of the storm. And now a tomcat has got one of the fishes and she will surely escape with him. No, she bites off a fin, she holds her in her mouth — will she swallow her? No, the fishwife's brave mother-dog deserts his puppies and rescues the fin — which he eats, himself, as his reward..

But despite his protestations, there is really nothing special about German in this respect. And if Twain had tried wrestling with Russian, Latin or a long list of other languages, he would have encountered similar idiosyncrasies. A stone, for instance, may be an 'it' in English, but it is most definitely a 'he' in German, Norwegian, Polish, Albanian, Russian or Lithuanian, and unquestionably a 'she' in French, Italian, Irish or Hebrew.

Classical Greek and Akkadian the language of Ancient Babylon and Assyria came up with something even better, since in these languages, a stone was a 'he' or 'she' depending on one's fancy. So I will mention just one more example of particularly eccentric behaviour, from a North American Indian language of the Kiowa family, called Jemez, spoken by about 2, people who live near Albuquerque in New Mexico.

Jemez has an ending -sh which is placed on nouns in order to change their number, as can be seen below: It seems, then, that the Jemez ending -sh performs exactly the same function as the English plural ending -s. And what could be more sensible than that? But now consider what happens when the ending -sh is added to a different group of nouns in Jemez: On these nouns, the ending -sh has quite the reverse effect, as instead of marking plurality, it indicates a reduction in number.

When it is added to nouns like weeds or trees, which tend to come in quantities, the ending -sh marks them as few one or two. It seems that even Jemez speakers themselves were not entirely comfortable with this polarity between the two groups, so on a third set of nouns they decided to opt for the middle ground: It would appear, then, that language strongly bears out Napoleon's dictum that it is but a small step from the sublime to the ridiculous.

To understand what has brought about this mix of grandeur and folly, we will have to uncover much more of the forces that shape, batter, and renovate linguistic structures. The following chapters will set out to do exactly that, and the first challenge will be to solve a simple-sounding problem: what is it that makes language change? And yet it does move! Galileo Galilei, There is a story about an Englishman, a Frenchman and a German who are debating the merits of their respective languages.

The German starts by claiming: 'German is off course ze best language. It is ze language off logik and philosophy, and can communicate viz great clarity and precision even ze most complex ideas. In French, we can convey all ze subtletees of romance weez elegance and flair. But just think about it this way. Take the word spoon , for instance. Now you French call it a "cuillere". And what do you Germans call it? But in English, it's simply called a "spoon".

And when you stop to think about it. Somewhere ,. But one day, shortly before Charlemagne's death, the bridge was destroyed by such a conflagration that within three hours, 'nought oon spone' was to be seen floating above water. Not one spoon'. Well, the Polychronicon wasn't really concerned with cutlery. Initially, it seems odd that the meaning of 'spoon' has managed to change so much over a relatively short period of time.

What is more, such somersaults in meaning may appear alien to the very purpose of language, namely providing a stable system of conventions that allow coherent communication. It may therefore come as even more of a surprise that the leap in meaning that 'spoon' has accomplished is by no means a rare event.

When one inspects the history of a language — any language — one soon.. This chapter will set out to expose what drives the transformations in all areas of language, and reveal how the changes can proceed without causing severe damage to effective communication. And ultimately, the motives behind language's perpetual motion will point us on the right track for understanding the mechanisms of linguistic creation.

But strangeness can be found much closer to home, by wandering in time instead. So the Lord said: 'I will wipe the human beings I have created off the face of the earth, people together with animals and reptiles and birds of the air, because I regret having made them'..

And God said to Noah. Make yourself an ark of gopher wood. For my part, I am going to bring a flood of waters on the earth, to destroy all flesh in which there is the breath of life.

Forty-seven scholars laboured on the text for the suitably biblical period of seven years, until finally, in , what has come to be known as the King James Version was published: From English around i King James Version It repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth. And the Lord said: 'I will destroy man whom I haue created from the face of the earth, both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the foules of the aire, for it repenteth me that I haue made them. And behold, I, euen I, doe bring a flood of waters vpon the earth, to destroy all flesh wherein is the breath of life.

But if one only ventures further back in time, to two centuries before King James commissioned his group of scholars, the going soon gets a little tougher. The first translation of the entire Bible into English was undertaken towards the end of the fourteenth century by a group of heretical scholars led by John Wycliffe, a forerunner of the Protestant Reformation who challenged the authority of the Church.

Se, I shal lede to watres of a flood vpon the erthe, and I shal slee al flehs in the which spiryt of lijf is. One of the first English translations was made at the turn of the first millennium, by iElfric, Abbot of Eynsham. Efne ic gebringe flodes w2eteru ofer eorOan, bxt ic ofslea eal flxsc on Sam Oe is lies gast.

At the time, it was pronounced more like the ch in Scottish loch or German Buch. The letter 8 corresponds to th in modern orthography. And as if to prove the point, Chaucer's and Wycliffe's English — from just over half a millennium ago — already looks 'wonder nyce and straunge'. But go back a full 'thousand yeer', and iElfric's English is not merely strange — it sounds like double Dutch.

Within a span of only about thirty generations, 'English' has undergone such a thorough overhaul that what is supposed to be one and the same language is barely recognizable. Perhaps the most surprising feature of iElfric's English is that, like Latin, it had a complex case and gender system, so that nouns and even the definite article 'the' had an array of different forms depending on their role in the sentence and on their gender and number.

To give an idea of the labyrinth of different forms in the English of i'Elfric's day, the set of endings for one class of nouns is shown below: It is the case system, perhaps more than anything else, that makes iElfric's language appear so outlandish, whereas Wycliffe's English seems much less peculiar, largely because by the case system had almost entirely disintegrated.

But while the collapse of the case system was an enormous upheaval in the history of English, it was by no means the only change. One only need compare a short phrase from the four biblical passages above to appreciate that no area of English stood still for very long: — woo: me ofthingth displeases sothlice soothiy thcet that ic i hi them worine mado forsothe it othenki-th displeases me to haue maad hem them — for it repenteth me that I haue made them "' because I regret having made them 50 PERPETUAL MOTION The first thing one notices is how words come and go over the centuries, with older words like worhte 'wrought' dying out, and being replaced by new ones maad.

The expression of displeasure, for instance, seems to have been particularly moody. Wycliffe could still expect his readers to understand it othenkith me, but by this verb had long been forgotten, and it repenteth me was used in its stead. Today, the verb 'repent' is still easily recognizable, but it nevertheless seems quite out of place in this particular context.

Since the seventeenth century, 'repent' has undergone a complete role reversal: what the King James translators understood by it repenteth me is what we would render with 'I repent or regret it'. But it is not just the meaning of words that changes over time. Some of the basic features in the structure of English, such as the conventions of word order, also seem to have been rather unstable.

We saw earlier that word order plays a crucial role in modem English, as it is the only means of distinguishing the subject which comes before the verb from the object which comes after. But consider the order of words in iElfric's passage: me ofthingth 'me displeases' for 'it displeases me' , and ic hi worhte 'I them made' for 'I made them'.

Clearly, iElfric's idea of which words should go where was different from ours. Finally, the pronunciation of English words has also erred and strayed over the centuries, but these wanderings are only partially mirrored in the passages above, because of the conservative nature of the writing system. Only in a few cases, such as the word ic in jElfric's passage, can the changes in pronunciation be glimpsed from the spelling. In the writing system, 'I' has looked the same ever since, but the actual pronunciation of has continued to meander.

During the fifteenth century, there was an upheaval in the pronunciation of many English vowels, which linguists call 'The Great English Vowel Shift'. Most of the changes in pronunciation, however, are masked by the spelling. For cultural reasons that are extraneous to spoken language itself, the system of spelling we use today has remained pretty much frozen for at least years, even though the pronunciation continued to drift during this time.

So if one compares the King James passage with the modern translation, one could easily fall under the impression that for some reason changes in pronunciation came to an abrupt halt after But this is just an illusion.

Take, for instance, the phrase 'flood of waters to destroy all flesh'. The King James translators spelt this phrase precisely as we do or more accurately, we spell it precisely as they did. But in fact, most of the words in this phrase would have sounded quite different then.

The frozen spelling system also conceals changes in pronunciation that occurred even more recently. When reading Jane Austen or George Eliot, for example, one is tempted to assume that their characters sounded just like actors in BBC costume dramas. The reality was rather different, however. In , the art critic Charles Eastlake reminisced about the speech of 'old fellows' forty years before, those people born around i the generation of Darwin and Disraeli , who would have been in their teens when Jane Austen's novels first appeared.

Men of mature age can remember many words which in the conversation of old fellows forty years ago would sound strangely to modern ears. They were generally much obleeged for a favour. They referred affectionately to their darters; talked ofgoold watches, or of recent visit to Room; mentioned that they had seen the Dook of Wellington in Hyde Park last Toosday and that he was in the habit of rising at sidle o'clock.

They would profess themselves to be their hostess's 'umble servants, and to admire her collection of clmayney, especially the vase of Prooshian blue.

And it is precisely for this reason that English spelling is so infamously irrational. Just have a go at reading the following poem out aloud as quickly as you can: I take it you already know Of tough and bough and cough and dough? Others may stumble, but not you, On hiccough, thorough, lough, and through? Well done! And now you wish perhaps, To learn of less familiar traps? Beware of heard, a dreadful word That looks like beard and sounds like bird.

And dead — it's said like bed, not bead — For goodness sake, don't call it 'deed'. Watch out for meat and great and threat They rhyme with suite and straight and debt : A moth is not a moth in mother, Nor both in bother, broth in brother. And here is not a match for there Nor dear and fear for bear and pear. And then there's dose and rose and lose — Just look them up — and goose and choose, And cork and work and card and ward, And font and front, and word and sword, And do and go, and thwart and cart — Come!

I've hardly made a start! From the Manchester Guardian, So really, it is unfair to say that English spelling is not an accurate rendering of speech. It is — it's only that it renders the speech of the sixteenth century. It is clear, then, that no corner of the English language has remained protected from changes: sounds, meanings and structures all seem to have suffered from a curious inability to stay still.

Alas, the reason is much more prosaic, as there is nothing special about English in this respect — cosi fan tune. When one traces the records of any other language with a sufficiently long history, a similar picture unrolls.

The dramatic changes in languages will prove important, first and foremost because they will provide the major clues for how complex linguistic structures can arise. But as an added bonus, language's perpetual motion also solves another problem: the babble of Babel. It transpires that languages did not need any divine intervention in order to proliferate, for given half a chance and sufficient time , they multiply quite happily of their own accord. Just imagine two groups living in two neighbouring villages, speaking similar varieties of one language.

With the passing of time, their language undergoes constant transformations, but as long as the two communities remain in close contact, their varieties will change in tandem: innovations in one village will soon spread to the other, because of the need to communicate. Now suppose that one of the groups wanders off in search of better land, and loses all contact with the speakers of the other village. The language of the two groups will then start wandering in different directions, because there will be nothing to maintain the changes in tandem.

Eventually, their varieties will have strayed so far apart that they will no longer be mutually intelligible, and so turn into different languages. Incidentally, the decision about when to start calling such varieties different 'languages', rather than 'dialects' of the same language, often involves factors that have little to do with the actual linguistic distance between them. So ultimately, the decision about whether something is a language or a dialect relies on what the speakers themselves consider it to be.

But from a purely linguistic perspective, and as a rule of thumb, when two varieties of what used to be the same language are no longer mutually intelligible, they can be called different languages.

Linguistic diversity is thus a direct consequence of geographical dispersal and language's propensity to change. The biblical assertion that there was a single primordial language is not, in itself, unlikely, for it is quite possible that there was originally only one language, spoken somewhere in Eastern Africa, perhaps ioo, years ago.

But even if this were the case, the break-up of this language must have had much more prosaic reasons than God's wrath at Babel. When different groups started splitting up, going their own ways and settling across the globe, their languages changed in different ways.

So the huge diversity of languages in the world today simply reflects how long languages have had to change independently of one another. The different periods of separation between languages also explain why some languages are much more closely related than others. English and the Germanic languages are themselves related — more distantly — to many other languages of Europe and Asia. This ancestral prehistoric tongue, probably spoken around 6, years ago, is called by linguists ProtoIndo-European, because in the first few millennia BC the descendants of its speakers spread over an area stretching all the way from India to Europe see map on pages vi-vii.

So although it may not be immediately apparent to the naked eye, the second group of languages in the list above Polish, Albanian, Punjabi, and Persian are all related to English, albeit somewhat distantly, and are descended from the same forebear.

So to the naked eye, the Persian or Albanian sentences above do not look much more similar to English than the ones from Turkish or Yoruba, which are not descended from Proto-Indo-European. There should be little room left for doubt by now that mutability is not a secret vice of English or any other language in particular, but an epidemic of universal proportions.

Nonetheless, the realization that change is a chronic condition that all languages suffer from only sharpens a fundamental question — why? Why are languages constantly on the move, and why can't they simply pull themselves together and keep still? The first reaction might be that the answer is glaringly obvious. The world around us is changing all the time, and naturally, language has to change with it.

Language needs to keep pace with new realities, new technologies and new ideas, from ploughs to laser printers, and from political-correctness to sms-texting, and that is why it always changes.

This line of argument may seem appealing at first, but when one looks at the actual changes close up, the picture becomes far more complicated. Or let's look at the question the other way round, and consider a language not burdened with any mod cons or even with ploughs, for that matter.

Mbabaram was once the language of a small Aboriginal tribe in north-east Queensland, Australia, about fifty miles south-west from Cairns. In the os an anthropologist recorded a list of a few words in Mbabaram, which seemed entirely different not only from all the neighbouring languages of the region, but from all other Aboriginal languages on the Australian continent — it was as if the Mbabaram tribe had somehow been parachuted into the north Australian rainforest from some faraway place, and there was even a theory that the Mbabaram were related to the extinct Tasmanians, thousands of miles to the south.

And it took some ingenuity to recognize that Mbabaram was indeed closely related to the languages of the neighbouring tribes, only that its affiliation had been entirely obscured by sweeping changes in pronunciation that the language had undergone at some stage in its history: whole syllables had been chopped off, and new vowels had sprung up, so that, just as one example, a word originally pronounced gudaga ended up in Mbabaram as dog which by sheer coincidence happens to mean But if a language is supposed to change only in order to keep up with ploughs and laser printers, then why should the language of a small tribe of hunter-gatherers, who have never moved beyond stone age technology, be so unstable?

It appears, then, that our first 'obvious' explanation for why language keeps on changing is not sc convincing after all. The main bulk of changes must stem from entirely different reasons.

There is a close runner-up in the list of 'obvious' explanations for why language changes so much, and that is the issue of contact. It is easy to imagine that languages change only because their speakers come into contact with speakers of other languages or dialects, and start borrowing words and expressions from one another. This line of argument seems especially tempting in the case of English, since although English is a Germanic language, about half of its vocabulary is not of Germanic origin but borrowed from various other languages, mostly Norman French and Latin.

But while contact, 'keeping up with the Joneses', so to speak, is undoubtedly the source of a great many changes, and thus a much better explanation than 'keeping up with laser printers', it still cannot be held responsible for the sweeping changes in absolutely all languages, even those whose speakers have had hardly any exposure to other languages.

Finally, a third 'obvious' explanation for why language should change so much is that people are progressive creatures who value novelty and improvement and thus set about trying to renovate and improve language.

But this idea is a complete non-starter. As we'll see in the next chapter, when people bother to think about changes, they generally portray them as a great danger to language as well as to society, if not the whole of civilization and condemn them as slack, slovenly or just plain wrong.

If anything, the weight of censure and authority conspires to prevent language from changing. And yet, it does move! All the obvious explanations, therefore, fall short of accounting for the sheer scale of the changes. It seems that languages need neither nudging from the Joneses nor the gadgetry of ploughs in order to be transformed, for they keep changing, even without the slightest provocation, and even in spite of people's best intentions.

But if all these external reasons fail to explain the changes, then there must be something in language itself which makes it so unsteady. The conundrum of change has been one of the enduring puzzles in the study of language, and it preoccupied linguists throughout the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. But only in the last few decades have linguists finally managed to make significant progress in cracking it. Like any respectable whodunit, the mystery of change turned out to have three main elements: a suspect — who is really behind the changes?

Tracking down the suspect may at first seem a rather difficult mission, since it's quite hard to think of anyone who is really trying to change language. Are you? But the identification turns out to be fairly straightforward, since although no one in particular is changing language, it is in fact all of us who bring about the changes, even if we never wish to.

There are a great number of things that people bring about without ever intending to. Just think of traffic jams. Nobody has ever set out on their daily commute with the express purpose of creating one, and yet each driver contributes to the congestion by adding one more car to an overcrowded road.

But unintended changes don't always have to be harmful. Imagine two public buildings with an overgrown field lying directly between them. The only road connecting the buildings winds its way lengthily around the field, so people who have to walk from one building to the other start crossing the field as a short-cut.

The first person to do so tries to make his way through the long grass, and people who come afterwards find the track which the first person has made the most inviting way through, because some grass and bracken have already been trodden down. As more and more people cross the field, more and more vegetation is trampled, so that eventually the track turns into a nice clear footpath.

The point is that no one in particular created this footpath, and no one in particular even intended to. The path did not emerge from some project of landscape design, but from the accumulated spontaneous actions of the short-cutters, who were each following their own selfish motives in taking the easiest and quickest route. These actions must stem from entirely selfish motives, not from any conscious design to transform language.

But what could these motives be? This is a rather more involved question, and doing justice to it will occupy us in the next few chapters. But in essence, the motives for change can be encapsulated in the triad economy, expressiveness and analogy. Economy refers to the tendency to save effort, and is behind the shortcuts speakers often take in pronunciation. As we shall see in the following chapter, when these short-cuts accumulate, they can create new sounds, just like the new footpath cutting through the field.

Expressiveness relates to speakers' attempts to achieve greater effect for their utterances and extend their range of meaning. One area where we are particularly expressive is in saying 'no'. A plain 'no' is often deemed too weak to convey the depth of our unenthusiasm, so to make sure the right effect is achieved, we beef up 'no' to 'not at all', 'not a bit', 'no way', 'by no means', 'not in a million years', and so on.

But as we shall see later on, the results of this hyperbole can often be self-defeating, since the repetition of emphatic phrases can cause an inflationary process that devalues their currency. The third motive for change, analogy, is shorthand for the mind's craving for order, the instinctive need of speakers to find regularity in language.

The effects of analogy are most conspicuous in the errors of young children, as in 'I goed' or 'two foots', which are simply attempts to introduce regularity to areas of the language that happen to be quite disorganized. Many such 'errors' are corrected as children grow up, but some innovations do catch on. In the past, for example, there were many more irregular plural nouns in English: one bac book , many bec; one hand, two hend; one eye, two eyn; one cow, many kine.

So bec was replaced by the 'incorrect' Kokes books during the thirteenth century, eyn was replaced by eyes in the fourteenth century, kine by cows in the sixteenth. The following chapters will take a much closer look at the different motives for change, and explore their effects on language in much greater depth.

Economy and expressiveness will feature first, and the third part of the triad, analogy, will be the subject of Chapter 6. Different forces, powered by different motives, keep pulling and pushing language in different directions, and in such a complex system, these constant thrusts ensure that the whole never stays still. Having formed an idea of both the suspect and the motives, we are left with the third and trickiest part of the whodunit: how do speakers ever let language get away with it?

Why are changes not brought up short and stopped in their tracks? At first sight, there seem to be all the reasons in the world why society should never let the changes through. After all, the primary purpose of language is to allow effvtive communication, a flow of ideas and information between minds. And since the names we use for things are just arbitrary conventions a spade would be just as good a name for a spoon as a spoon would be for a spade , the only way to achieve coherent communication is if the system of conventions is agreed upon and adhered to by everyone.

It goes on to suggest that the emergence of finite complementation may be seen as 'adaptive' and related to the development of more complex communication patterns. This book will be of interest to both specialists and general linguists alike. For specialists it offers a contribution towards a badly-needed historical grammar of the Akkadian language. For general linguists this book will be of interest not only for the questions which it raises about the nature of complementation, but also for the window which it provides on to this little-known language.

Leading sixteenth-century scholars such as Martin Luther and Desiderius Erasmus used print technology to engage in dialogue and debate with authoritative contemporary texts.

By what Juan Luis Vives termed 'the unfolding of words,' these humanists gave old works new meanings in brief notes and extensive commentaries, full paraphrases, or translations. This critique challenged the Middle Ages' deference to authors and authorship and resulted in some of the most original thought - and most violent controversy - of the Renaissance and Reformation.

The Unfolding of Words brings together international scholarship to explore crucial changes in writers' interactions with religious and classical texts. The Unfolding of Words tracks humanist explorations of the possibilities of the page that led to the modern dictionary, encyclopedia, and scholarly edition. His study aims to persuade them to return to the poem and to examine it within the context of an Augustan tradition.

This study shows that Thomson found a personal idiom by means of which he created an artistic vision. It will appeal to those with an interest in English literature and in philosophy. In Through the Language Glass, acclaimed author Guy Deutscher will convince you that, contrary to the fashionable academic consensus of today, the answer to all these questions is - yes.

A delightful amalgam of cultural history and popular science, this book explores some of the most fascinating and controversial questions about language, culture and the human mind. Guy Deutscher,N. The life of Antonin Artaud was tormented by physical and mental illnesses. Already in his earlier works, Artaud tried to express his physical and mental suffering, but perceived, in describing his feelings, the obstructive and illness-inducing role of language.

This is the first book written in English that analyses the role of a healing language with which Artaud engaged in his later writings. Joeri Visser guides us through the years in which Artaud suffered increasingly from mental instability and considered the act of writing his only means of survival.

In doing so, Visser unfolds a literary and a philosophical analysis of how language and life work together and how a creative play with language can help us to reengage sustainably with the joyous as well as the terrible forces of life. Since energy is conserved, it is clear that a different concept is necessary to discuss meaningfully the problems posed by energy supplies and environmental protection. This book makes this concept, entropy, accessible to a broad, nonspecialized audience.

Examples taken from daily experiences are used to introduce the concept of entropy in an intuitive manner, before it is defined in a more formal way. It is shown that the entropy increase due to irreversible transformations or OC unrecoverableOCO energy simultaneously determines the level of fresh energy supplies of our society and the damage that it causes to the environment.

Minimizing the rate of entropy increase with advanced technologies and society organizations, and keeping it in check with appropriate energy sources, is the key to a sustainable development.