Exploring the vibrant tapestry of Manchester, this memoir offers a unique glimpse into suburban life through diary entries. It captures the essence of Northern culture, featuring the wisdom of older locals and the dynamic queer art scene, infused with humor and candid observations. The narrative blurs traditional storytelling, presenting a modern take on the diary format as it celebrates the complexities of identity and community. Through its vivid imagery and playful tone, it becomes a love letter to the everyday experiences that shape our lives.
Numbers and the Making of Us examines the origins and effects of numbers--words and other symbols for quantities. It focuses on the influence that numbers have had on human thought. As a result of this influence, the book claims, numbers transformed the human narrative. This transformation is supported by data from many disciplines: archaeology, linguistics, psychology, and primatology. The book surveys the types of number systems that have been innovated independently in languages around the world, most of which (like our own decimal system) owe themselves in one way or another to the shape of our hands. Furthermore, the book examines evidence from anumeric humans, such as those the author has conducted research with in Amazonia, as it advances the following claim: Numbers served as a pivotal cognitive invention, an underappreciated tool whose usage ultimately resulted in the societies most of us now live in. In short, the book suggests that verbal and written numbers served as a cognitive foundation of sorts, helping to establish the ground floor of all sorts of distinctly human behaviors. These include elaborate agriculture, writing, the telling of time, and many other aspects of the human experience that are all ultimately dependent on the simple invention of numbers.--
Exploring breakthroughs in language and cognition research, Caleb Everett
finds that fundamentals of human perception are culturally encoded by the
words and sentences we use. The experience of time, space, color, odor, and
taste is substantially influenced by language, so that basic interactions with
the world vary greatly across peoples.
The claim that crosslinguistic disparities foster differences in nonlinguistic thought, often referred to as 'linguistic relativity', has for some time been the subject of intense debate. For much of that time the debate was not informed by much experimental work. Recently, however, there has been an explosion of research on linguistic relativity, carried out by numerous scholars interested in the interaction between language and nonlinguistic cognition. This book surveys the rapidly accruing research on this topic, much of it carried out in the last decade. Structured so as to be accessible to students and scholars in linguistics, psychology, and anthropology, it first introduces crucial concepts in the study of language and cognition. It then explores the relevant experimentally oriented research, focusing independently on the evidence for relativistic effects in spatial orientation, temporal perception, number recognition, color discrimination, object/substance categorization, gender construal, as well as other facets of cognition. This is the only book to extensively survey the recent work on linguistic relativity, and should serve as a critical resource for those concerned with the topic.
