Spanish is one of the great European languages, rich in heritage from its more than nine centuries of existence. This is the language that comes from the region of Spain that English-speakers call Castile. As Christopher Columbus and other Spanish explorers came to the New World, Spanish became the lan-guage of all the peoples from Florida to Tierra del Fuego (with the exception of Brazil, where Portuguese is spoken). When you go to places like Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Costa Rica, Panama, Honduras, or Nicaragua, you speak in or are spoken to in Spanish. If you visit cities like Santiago de Chile, Montevideo, Asuncion, Buenos Aires, Lima,...

Read more »

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

0 Comments

Tags: for dummies, spanish

  I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him. That’s what I say when the question isput.  I asked  my  brother,  who  has  taught  philosophy  at  Oxford,  Geneva,  and  theSorbonne, what he thought of such a statement, without revealing that it was my own.He replied with a single word: “ Soppy.”The person to begin with is my maternal grandmother, Nellie Louisa Scoltock,née Machin. She was a teacher in Shropshire until she married my grandfather, BertScoltock. Not Bertram, not Albert, just Bert: so christened, so called, so cremated. Hewas a headmaster with a certain mechanical  dash to him:  a motorcycle-and-sidecarman,  then owner of a Lanchester,  then, ...

Read more »

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

0 Comments

Tags: literature, no-fiction, prose

Whether you are too busy to take a class or merely want to supplement your language learningexperience with additional materials, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Learning Italian, Second Edition,was written specifically for the independent study of Italian.Any idiot can speak Italian, and lots of them do. The word “idiot” comes from the Greek rootidios and means “of a particular person, private, own.” In Latin, an idiota simply refers to a pri-vate person. You see this root in the words “idiom” and “idiosyncrasy.”Beware of the idiots! Lame and suffering from a speech impediment, Claudius (10 B.C.–54 A.D.)is remembered as a scholar and a competent administrator during the time he reigned. Againstall odds, this “idiot” rose up to become Roman...

Read more »

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

0 Comments

Tags: for dummies, italian, linguistics

  The Phonology of Italian offers an overview of the main characteristics of Italiansound patterns under consideration of regional variation and an analysis couched inthe framework of Optimality Theory.With regard to this goal immediately two questions arise. 1. What is Italian? 2. Whyis there a need for such a book? The first question might be raised by readers whoare aware of the complex linguistic situation of Italy and the Italian language—orlanguages, one might say. Section 1.1 will be dedicated to a clarification of this situation.The second question could be expected from anyone familiar with the literature onItalian phonology. Italian is by no means an understudied language. It has receiveda lot of attention in the linguistic literature,...

Read more »

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

0 Comments

Tags: italian, linguistics, oxford, phonetics