In this work of impressive scholarship, Sheldon Pollock explores the remarkable rise and fall of Sanskrit, India's ancient language, as a vehicle of poetry and polity. He traces the two great moments of its transformation: the first around the beginning of the Common Era, when Sanskrit, long a sacred language, was reinvented as a code for literary and political expression, the ...(展开全部)

Coomaraswamy Book Prize, Association for Asian Studies 32nd Lionel Trilling Award, Columbia College and Flora Levy Foundation of Lafayette, La. 2006 Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division Awards for Excellence in Literature, Language, & Linguistics, The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division (PSP) of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) In this work of i...(展开全部)

Dazzling...Pinker's big idea is that language is an instinct...as innate to us as flying is to geese...Words can hardly do justice to the superlative range and liveliness of Pinker's investigations' - "Independent". 'A marvelously readable book...illuminates every facet of human language: its biological origin, its uniqueness to humanity, its acquisition by children, its gramma...(展开全部)

Oaths play an essential part in the political and religious history of the West as a ′sacrament of power′. Yet despite numerous studies by linguists, anthropologists and historians of law and of religion, there exists no complete analysis of the oath which seeks to explain the strategic function that this phenomenon has performed at the intersection of law, religion and politic...(展开全部)

An introduction to the art of decorative patterning, of equal value to craftworkers, collectors and students of art history. Trilling analyzes the historical importance of ornament across the world, whether in the monumental architecture of Mycenean Greece or the inlaid vessels of Zhou Dynasty China, in the bronze mirrors of early Celtic Britain, or the carved and woven ornamen...(展开全部)

Essays discuss science, mythology, language, style, history, semiotics, literature, and meaning.

The Rustle of Language is a collection of forty-five essays, written between 1967 and 1980, on language, literature, and teaching--the pleasure of the text--in an authoritative translation by Richard Howard.