An engaging celebration of global linguistic diversity, with plenty of fascinating cases of cross-linguistic variation in each chapter.

Languages around the world organize their lexicons, or vocabularies, in a myriad of different ways. This book is a celebration of global linguistic diversity, bringing together fascinating cases from a wide range of languages to explore how and why this lexical variation occurs. Each of the thirty-six short chapters shows how different culturally-specific words, relating to a range of phenomena such as kinship, colour, space, time, objects, smells, and animals, vary across languages and geographical locations. It also explains the mechanisms of development in vocabularies, showing why this variation occurs, and how languages and cultures interact, to deepen the reader's understanding of one of the most important aspects of linguistics. Assuming little to no prior knowledge of linguistics, and introducing concepts in an accessible way, this book is an entertaining, informative read for anyone who wants to learn more about the incredible variation and diversity of the human lexicon.

What makes a nation happy? Is one country's sense of happiness the same as another's? In the last two decades, psychologists and economists have learned a lot about who's happy and who isn't. The Dutch are, the Romanians aren't, and Americans are somewhere in between... After years of going to the world's least happy countries, Eric Weiner, a veteran foreign correspondent, decided to travel and evaluate each country's different sense of happiness and discover the nation that seemed happiest of all. ·He discovers the relationship between money and happiness in tiny and extremely wealthy Qatar (and it's not a good one) ·He goes to Thailand, and finds that not thinking is a contented way of life. ·He goes to the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, and discovers they have an official policy of Gross National Happiness! ·He asks himself why the British don't do happiness? In Weiner's quest to find the world's happiest places, he eats rotten Icelandic shark, meditates in Bangalore, visits strip clubs in Bangkok and drinks himself into a stupor in Reykjavik. Full of inspired moments, The Geography of Bliss accomplishes a feat few travel books dare and even fewer achieve: to make you happier.

The reproducible lessons in this series focus on practical vocabulary terms, skills, and concepts in relevant situational settings. Struggling students learn over 3,000 high-utility words in 28 self-contained thematic lessons. Additionally, each lesson activates prior knowledge and continually reinforces fundamental language arts skills and concepts. These reproducible books include teacher notes and tips, answer keys, reference guides, lessons, unit reviews, and more. Lessons Include: Historic Turning Points, Leaders Then and Now, See The USA, Wonders of the World.

Have you ever wondered what a badland is? What about a gulch? Do you wonder what an isthmus is? Or a seamount? What about the difference between a plateau and a plain, or a knob and a knoll? Well, here are the answers! The sixty-three entries from A to Z describe the earth's features -- its physical geography -- from the highest mountain peak to the deepest ocean trench, in clear, concise terms. Each entry is beautifully illustrated in full color. This is a perfect introduction to the dramatic and fascinating face of the vast world around us. The author and artist of the best-selling MAPS & GLOBES team up again, this time to prove that geography can indeed be an adventure.

When we use language, we presuppose many different things. Context is another name for these presuppositions. But it also can be the name of all these different presuppositions ordered in a certain way. This study of context focuses on the differences since many studies of context focus excessively on usage found in the sciences and in everyday observations. Other uses such as promising, giving directions, evaluating (i.e., ranking) all sorts of things around us, expressing our feelings, and issuing declarations (e.g., “You are promoted”) are equally important. The analogy of ‘geography,’ as used in this study, suggests that one important way to study context is to attend to all, not just one, of the “continents” found in the “planet” that we call context. Once we learn our geography lesson, we come to a better understanding of how context can change, how it can be ordered, and how it can be examined. We also learn how layered, and thus how complicated it is.

Lucy lives on the twenty-fourth floor. Owen lives in the basement. It's fitting, then, that they meet in the middle -- stuck between two floors of a New York City apartment building, on an elevator rendered useless by a citywide blackout. After they're rescued, Lucy and Owen spend the night wandering the darkened streets and marveling at the rare appearance of stars above Manhattan. But once the power is back, so is reality. Lucy soon moves abroad with her parents, while Owen heads out west with his father. The brief time they spend together leaves a mark. And as their lives take them to Edinburgh and to San Francisco, to Prague and to Portland, Lucy and Owen stay in touch through postcards, occasional e-mails, and phone calls. But can they -- despite the odds -- find a way to reunite? Smartly observed and wonderfully romantic, Jennifer E. Smith's new novel shows that the center of the world isn't necessarily a place. Sometimes, it can be a person.

This book examines the scholarly genre of 'geographia sacra' in early modern Europe, tracing its contours, the outlooks and concerns of its practitioners, as well as the intersections of religion and geography in an age that saw dramatic revolutions in both fields.

In this engaging and spirited book, eminent social psychologist Robert Levine asks us to explore a dimension of our experience that we take for granted—our perception of time. When we travel to a different country, or even a different city in the United States, we assume that a certain amount of cultural adjustment will be required, whether it's getting used to new food or negotiating a foreign language, adapting to a different standard of living or another currency. In fact, what contributes most to our sense of disorientation is having to adapt to another culture's sense of time.Levine, who has devoted his career to studying time and the pace of life, takes us on an enchanting tour of time through the ages and around the world. As he recounts his unique experiences with humor and deep insight, we travel with him to Brazil, where to be three hours late is perfectly acceptable, and to Japan, where he finds a sense of the long-term that is unheard of in the West. We visit communities in the United States and find that population size affects the pace of life—and even the pace of walking. We travel back in time to ancient Greece to examine early clocks and sundials, then move forward through the centuries to the beginnings of ”clock time” during the Industrial Revolution. We learn that there are places in the world today where people still live according to ”nature time,” the rhythm of the sun and the seasons, and ”event time,” the structuring of time around happenings(when you want to make a late appointment in Burundi, you say, ”I'll see you when the cows come in”).Levine raises some fascinating questions. How do we use our time? Are we being ruled by the clock? What is this doing to our cities? To our relationships? To our own bodies and psyches? Are there decisions we have made without conscious choice? Alternative tempos we might prefer? Perhaps, Levine argues, our goal should be to try to live in a ”multitemporal” society, one in which we learn to move back and forth among nature time, event time, and clock time. In other words, each of us must chart our own geography of time. If we can do that, we will have achieved temporal prosperity.