In the recent past, a working knowledge of the Maya script has been confined to epigraphers, art historians and other specialists. Its very unfamiliarity to the general public, and the daunting aspect of its approximately 800 signs, have made the system appear more complex and arcane than it really is. Reading the Maya Glyphs is a compact, portable guide to enable students, tourists and armchair travellers to read and understand commonly encountered Classic Maya texts.Topics covere...

Translation. It’s everywhere we look, but seldom seen—until now. Found in Translation reveals the surprising and complex ways that translation shapes the world. Covering everything from holy books to hurricane warnings and poetry to peace treaties, Nataly Kelly and Jost Zetzsche offer language lovers and pop culture fans alike an insider’s view of the ways in which translation spreads culture, fuels the global economy, prevents wars, and stops the outbreak of disease. Examples inc...

The largest collection of successful college application essays available in one volume.These are the essays that helped their authors gain admission to Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Wellesley, Colby, and other outstanding schools—followed by invaluable comments by experts in admissions, placement, and college counseling at some of the best learning institutions around the country. This helpful guide includes:100 complete essays with professional commentaryExample...

Taiwanese Grammar: A Concise Reference is an unprecedented guide delivering clear, straightforward explanations of Taiwanese grammar while offering insightful comparisons to Mandarin Chinese. Designed to be both functional and accessible, the text makes searching for topics quick and easy with fully cross-referenced entries and a comprehensive index.Topics covered range broadly from parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adverbs, etc.) to grammatical topics (aspect, negati...

Intermediate Irish is a jargon-free workbook examining the most commonly used grammatical structures within the Irish language. Focusing on the repeated use of grammatical patterns, the Grammar develops an understanding of the structures presented, making the forms familiar and automatic for learners.This user-friendly workbook includes:terminology introduced and explained with multiple examplesexercises in the grammatical forms introduced ...

With his characteristic talent for finding the connections between writing and the stuff of our lives (most notably in his earlier hit Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer), Peter Turchi ventures into new, and even more surprising, territory. In A Muse and a Maze, Turchi draws out the similarities between writing and puzzle-making and its flip side, puzzle-solving. He teases out how mystery lies at the heart of all storytelling. And he unco...

Replaces previous edition.In today's hectic world of cell phones, email, and instant messages, is it still worthwhile to know how to write a good letter? Absolutely! An attractive, well-written letter can grab the reader's attention and hold it long after someone else's email has been discarded. It can make a strong, lasting impression on a hiring manager, potential client, or faraway friend who receives it. In other words, the letter is still an important professional and personal...

Have you ever wondered how you can find out more about a word: Where did it come from? How has its meaning altered? How can it be pronounced? What is its relationship to other words? Language is not fixed, but is an evolutionary process: words develop and change, in meaning, association, and pronunciation, as well as in many other ways. Exploring the routes taken by the words we choose to investigate leads us on fascinating journeys. How to Read a Word, written by the noted lexico...

The Arabic-English Thematic Lexicon is an invaluable resource for all learners of Arabic.It contains some 8,000 entries, arranged into themes, including flora and fauna, food and drink, the human body, health care, the family, housing, clothing, education, IT, sports, politics, economics and commerce, the law, media, language, geography, travel, religion, arts, science, and natural resources. Three appendices cover the names of Arab and selected non-Arab regions, countries...

This volume explores Chinese reading development, focusing on children in Chinese societies and bilingual Chinese-speaking children in Western societies. The book is structured around four themes: psycholinguistic study of reading, reading disability, bilingual and biliteracy development, and Chinese children’s literature. It discusses issues that are pertinent to improving language and literacy development, and complex cognitive, linguistic, and socio-cultural factors that underlie langua...

The Diagnosis of Reading in a Second or Foreign Language explores the implications of language assessment research on classroom-based assessment practices by providing an in-depth look at the little-examined field of diagnosis in second and foreign language reading. This volume examines the development of second and foreign language reading and how subsequent research findings, couched in this knowledge, can help facilitate a more-informed teaching approach in second and foreign l...

Human thinking depends not only on words but also on visual imagery. Visual argumentation directly exploits the logic of the pictorial, while verbal arguments, too, draw on figurative language, and thus ultimately on images. In the centuries of handwritten documents and the printed book, our educational culture has been a predominantly verbal one. Today the challenge of the pictorial is explicit and conspicuous. In the digital world, we are experiencing an unprecedented wealth of images, a...