New Books in Language

Incivility in our public discourse is limiting our ability to get things done as a nation and preventing us from expressing ourselves in workplaces and classrooms for fear of offending those with real or imagined historical grievances or even merely strongly held views. If you agree with that, then Adam J. MacLeod’s book The Age of Selfies: Reasoning About Rights When the Stakes Are Personal (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020) is the book for you. Alternatively, if you think such fears are overblown and just a nefarious argument advanced by a self-serving elite to justify a return to establishment rule this is likewise the book for you. Why both audiences? Because this important volume is all about how to go about thinking and reasoning and the role morality plays in those processes.In his book, MacLeod argues that due to the decline in moral education young people he dubs “selfies” have entered academia and the workplace without moral cores and are so riven with narcissism and a sense of entitlement that they are unable to think of the common good and are quick to take umbrage at any sort of questioning of their own personal preferences.According to MacLeod, a return to a larger place for openly moral arguments will enrich American life and enhance governance. To MacLeod, the misguided view of past decades that morality should play no part in policy making and that strict neutrality should be observed in the public square has only resulted in an acrimony-generating impoverishment of ideas and options. He suggests that the legal and philosophical concept of natural law can heal the ailing body politic and help soften divisions--or at least clarify, in a civilized way, what is at stake.In short, he wants us to learn how to “disagree well.” Give a listen.Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day.The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education.Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia).Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Chelsea McCracken talks about her new book A Grammar of Belep (Walter de Gruyter, 2019). McCracken is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at Dixie State University and Senior Research Analyst of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education. She became involved in the homeschool reform movement as a result of the abuse and educational neglect experienced by her homeschooled family members.A Grammar of Belep is a reference grammar that provides a full grammatical description of the previously-undocumented Austronesian language variety known as Belep. Belep is spoken by approximately 1600 people in New Caledonia, primarily in the Belep Isles. This is the first full-length grammar of the language, describing the sounds, morphology and syntax of Belep.A Grammar of Belep also describes the importance of culture for Belep speakers, including la coutume (from the French) or ‘the custom.’ Interestingly, there is no Belep word for this, as la coutume is a cover term for many interrelated Belep cultural practices. This book is an important addition to our knowledge of Austronesian languages and languages as a whole.Carrie Gillon is a linguist, editor and writing coach, working in the academic and healthcare sectors. She’s the author of The Semantics of Determiners (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2103) and the co-author of Nominal Contact in Michif (Oxford University Press, 2018). She is also the co-host of the podcast The Vocal Fries, a biweekly podcast about linguistic discrimination (or why judging language is not OK). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

On this episode of New Books in Language, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Dr. Amy Koerber (she/hers), Professor at Texas Tech University, on the groundbreaking book From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History (Penn State University Press, 2018). Filled with fresh takes on classical rhetorical theories, From Hysteria is an engaging exploration of the study of “women’s problems” (take the air quote seriously there). Dr. Koerber shows that the boundary between older, nonscientific ways of understanding women’s bodies and newer, scientific understandings is much murkier than we might expect. From womb to brain to hormones, the book links our contemporary understanding of women’s bodies to antiquated roots, illuminating the ways in which the words we use today to discuss female reproductive health aren’t nearly as scientifically accurate or socially progressive as believed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy (MIT Press, 2020), Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts―and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction.The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world―and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Andrew Ollett, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, argues in his book, Language of the Snakes: (University of California Press, 2017), that Prakrit is “the most important Indian language you’ve never heard of.” In this book, subtitled "Prakrit, Sanskrit, and the Language Order of Premodern India," Ollett writes a biography of Prakrit from the perspective of cultural history, arguing that it is a language which challenges modern theorizing about language as a natural human development grounded in speech. Rather, he claims, Prakrit was "invented" and theorized as a self-consciously literary language, opposed to Sanskrit, but yet still part of the Sanskrit cosmopolis and not a vernacular. His book draws on unpublished manuscripts, royal inscriptions, poetry, as well as literary and grammatical texts.Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Indonesia is home to one of the world’s largest Chinese-descended populations. Their historical impact is often measured in economic terms but was equally important in the realm of language and literature. The majority of Chinese-Indonesians originally spoke Southern Min dialects, better known in Southeast Asia as “Hokkien”. They also quickly gained knowledge of Malay, the lingua franca of Indonesia and beyond. It was in Java’s vernacular Malay variety that most Chinese-Indonesians acquired literacy. Through their transregional connections and plurilingual competencies, they pioneered in the printing industry of romanized Malay newspapers and books. This foray into print capitalism served the group’s commercial and political interests, but also gave rise to fascinating expressions of a hybrid (Chinese-Indonesian-European) culture.Dr Tom Hoogervorst spoke to Mr Jarrah Sastrawan about the Sino-Malay literary tradition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Tom Hoogervorst is a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV). One of his main interests is language contact in Southeast Asia, which can be reconstructed through a combination of historical linguistics, archival research, and philology. He has primarily worked on Malay and Javanese and their relation with other languages. At present, he focuses on the language history of Indonesia’s Chinese communities, including the unique variety of Malay in which they produced innumerable novels, newspapers, poems, and educational works from the 1870s.For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Today Dennis Baron talks about his new book What's Your Pronoun?: Beyond He & She (Liveright, 2020). Baron is professor emeritus in English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and has written many books about language and its connection to culture. What’s Your Pronoun addresses an important cultural question about women’s rights and the rights and identities of non-binary people, and reveals how we got from he and she to zie, hir, and singular they. Pronouns have sparked a national (and international) debate, prompting new policies about what pronouns to use in schools, workplaces and even prisons. Baron describes the historical context of singular they, how the use of generic he was both used to assert women’s suffrage and to deny it, and the use of neo-pronouns throughout the centuries. What’s Your Pronoun? chronicles the role that pronouns play in establishing our rights and identities. Indeed, the relevance of the question “what’s your pronoun” throughout English’s history may surprise you.Carrie Gillon is a linguist, editor and writing coach, working in the academic and healthcare sectors. She’s the author of The Semantics of Determiners (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2103) and the co-author of Nominal Contact in Michif (Oxford University Press, 2018). She is also the co-host of the podcast The Vocal Fries, a biweekly podcast about linguistic discrimination (or why judging language is not OK). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

Since World War II, the fate of the Marshal Islands has been tied to the United States. The Marshalls were a site of military testing, host a US military base, and many Marshallese migrate to the US to pursue education and economic opportunity. Yet there are few books about Marshallese culture which are short and readable. In Talking Like Children: Language and the Production of Age in the Marshall Islands (Oxford University Press, 2019), Elise Berman shows us the complexities of Marshallese life and reveals the way that age, a central part of Marshallese culture, is not biologically given but culturally constructed. It's an accessible, short book that will appeal to both academic and nonacademic audiences with an interest in Marshalls or Micronesian culture more generally.In this podcast host Alex Golub talks with Berman about being an American doing fieldwork in the Marshalls, what age is and how it is achieved through interaction, the differences between American (and broadly Western) approaches to language and power and Marshallese approaches, and how Elise turned her dissertation into a short and accessible book.Elise Berman is a linguistic, cultural, and psychological anthropologist engaged with the interdisciplinary fields of education and communication. She has worked with the Chabad-Lubavitch, the K’iche’ Maya in Guatemala, and the Marshallese in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI). She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is the editor of a special number of Anthropological Forum on "The Politics of Order in Contemporary Papua New Guinea". Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language