Lives of the Great Languages

aw_product_id: 
37882206308
merchant_image_url: 
merchant_category: 
Books
search_price: 
28.00
book_author_name: 
Karla Mallette
book_type: 
Paperback
publisher: 
The University of Chicago Press
published_date: 
17/09/2021
isbn: 
9780226796062
Merchant Product Cat path: 
Books > Poetry, Drama & Criticism > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > Literary studies: classical, early & medieval
specifications: 
Karla Mallette|Paperback|The University of Chicago Press|17/09/2021
Merchant Product Id: 
9780226796062
Book Description: 
In this ambitious book, Karla Mallette studies the nature and behaviors of the medieval cosmopolitan languages of learning—classical Arabic and medieval Latin—as they crossed the Mediterranean. Through anecdotes of relationships among writers, compilers, translators, commentators, and copyists, Mallette tells a complex story about the transmission of knowledge in the period before the emergence of a national language system in the late Middle Ages and early modernity.Mallette shows how the elite languages of learning and culture were only tenuously related to the languages of everyday life. These languages took years of study to master, marking the passage from intellectual childhood to maturity. In a coda to the book, Mallette speculates on the afterlife of cosmopolitan languages in the twenty-first century, the perils of monolingualism, and the ethics of language choice. The book offers insight for anyone interested in rethinking linguistic and literary tradition, the transmission of ideas, and cultural expression in an increasingly multilingual world.

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