Gift Books that Fit Language Lovers, Lay Linguists, and Young Readers

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Martha, I’ve been thinking about giving books as gifts.

If you know me, that’s all you get.

Right.

I mean, you might get a ticket.

Pamphlets.

If I really love you, you might get a ticket to Paris, but probably not.

You’re going to get books.

And so I’ve got a stack of books at home.

I’m looking at these and figuring out who gets what and how many copies I need to buy.

And a few of them kind of rose to the top, and I thought I’d share those.

Sure.

At the top of my stack is this book called Through the Language Glass.

It’s by Guy Deutscher, that’s D-E-U-T-S-C-H-E-R.

And the subtitle is Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages.

And this is a book where he takes the latest research in theory, in linguistics and language,

And he explains it in a way that’s comprehensible to the layperson.

He talks about the interplay between people.

He talks about field research.

He talks about how the brain works.

Really interesting stuff.

And I would recommend this for anyone who isn’t necessarily a professional that’s interested in language,

But has a strong interest in it.

And again, that’s Through the Language Class by Guy Deutscher.

Also, I got this great little book.

I think I’ve also mentioned this before.

OK.

That’s all it’s called.

OK.

It’s about the word OK.

It’s by Alan Metcalf.

He summarizes what we know about the true origins of that great Americanism, OK.

One of our greatest exports ever.

It really is.

And the crazy thing is there’s all of these wrong theories,

But the right theories about the origins of OK are actually really incredibly interesting.

So he’s got it all here in this book.

This is by Alan Metcalf.

Very readable.

And then the third one, this is, I’d say, a juvenile book.

This is for, say, 11-year-olds, maybe through 15-year-olds.

This is called Lost in Lexicon.

It’s by Pendred Noyce.

And this is a kid’s book.

It’s a story about children who go missing in the land of lexicon.

And then the two heroes of the story, through their understanding of language, save the day.

It’s not too didactic.

It’s got some real instruction kind of hidden in this narrative.

And I think it really works.

Oh, I think I would have devoured it.

And that’s Lost in Lexicon by Pendred Noyce, N-O-Y-C-E.

Very cool.

Well, Grant, I have a recommendation for you.

Oh, please.

You know I’m a sucker for books in which someone goes to a foreign country

And tries to understand the culture by learning their language.

That’s why I moved to California.

It’s working, isn’t it?

It is working.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I talked on the show before about Dreaming in Hindi,

That wonderful book by Katherine Russell Rich.

Yes, yes, I remember this.

Who goes to Indian midlife.

Now I’m reading a book called Dreaming in Chinese,

Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language.

This is by Deborah Fallows.

Now she has a PhD in linguistics,

And she already spoke five or six languages

Before she went to China.

Yeah, hot, right?

Well, she went with her husband,

The writer James Fallows, to China several years ago.

And her book is a really personal take

On their life in China.

And being a linguist, she gets at that largely

Through trying to understand the language itself.

So you learn all these kinds of great things along the way,

Like the fact that Chinese has lots and lots of homophones,

Those similar-sounding words.

And what that means on a practical level is that if a couple is getting married,

You would never give them a clock as a wedding present.

Why?

Because the word for clock sounds an awful lot like the word for end.

So not a very auspicious beginning for a couple.

And you also learn that the Chinese avoid the number four the way we avoid the number 13.

So you’ll go into Chinese high-rises and there won’t be a fourth floor or a 14th floor or a 24th floor.

But they like the number eight.

They love the number eight.

They love the number eight.

But the number four sounds like the word for die.

How cool is that?

So she has all these different chapters on the grammar of romance and why Chinese hear tones and we don’t.

So it’s this great combination of personal memoir, but done through the eyes of a linguist who’s struggling to understand a foreign country.

Again, the name of it is Dreaming in Chinese by Deborah Fallows.

If you’ve got books to recommend to us or to your fellow listeners, send us an email to words@waywordradio.org or give us a call 877-929-9673.