Re: OT: Good Books?

J. K. Hoffman wrote:

>I've heard of _Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things_, and I have to admit
>that sounds interesting.  _Semantics, Culture, and Cognition_ is totally
>   new to me.  Care to give a short review? ^_^
>And, how hard do you think the Whorf collection will be for someone that
>has to look up stuff in the linguistics glossary still?  If it's just a
>matter of stretching, I can manage, but if it's over my head, I might as
>well focus on some other scary sounding book.
____________
All three books (Lakoff, Wierzbicka, and Whorf) can be read by intelligent
laypersons with little formal training in linguistics (there are a few
essays in the Whorf book where this does not apply, but he usually explains
and illustrates his terms and concepts pretty well).  The Lakoff book,
while not requiring formal linguistic training, is still pretty intense
reading, simply because it's loaded with new ideas coming from cognitive
science that leave your head reeling.  The Wierzbicka book explores the
culturally-based differences in the meanings of words from one language to
another, and essentially shows how semantic concepts which we might
initially think of as being "universal" (e.g., the emotion of "anger") in
fact vary from language to language.  She utilizes a metalinguistic
approach to this analysis, i.e., she analyzes these semantic differences
using a descriptive approach that is not biased toward English or any
particular language.

--John Quijada