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  Tamil: A Biography

  Rs. 3,790.00 Original price was: Rs. 3,790.00.Rs. 2,390.00Current price is: Rs. 2,390.00.
  

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  David Shulman

   

     Spoken by eighty million people in South Asia and a diaspora that stretches across the globe, Tamil is one of the great world languages and one of the few ancient languages that survives as a mother tongue for so many speakers.

   

  David Shulman presents a comprehensive cultural history of Tamil language, literature and civilization emphasizing how Tamil speakers and poets have understood the unique features of their language over its long history. Impetuous, musical, whimsical, in constant flux, Tamil is a living entity and this is its biography.Two stories animate Shulman s narrative. The first concerns the evolution of Tamil s distinctive modes of speaking, thinking and singing.

   

  The second describes Tamil s major expressive themes, the stunning poems of love and war known as Sangam poetry and Tamil s influence as a shaping force within Hinduism. Shulman tracks Tamil from its earliest traces at the end of the first millennium BCE through the classical period, 850 to 1200 CE, when Tamil-speaking rulers held sway over southern India and into late-medieval and modern times, including the deeply contentious politics that overshadow Tamil today.

   

    Tamil is more than a language, Shulman says. It is a body of knowledge, much of it intrinsic to an ancient culture and sensibility. Tamil can mean both knowing how to love in the manner of classical love poetry and being a civilized person. It is thus a kind of grammar, not merely of the language in its spoken and written forms but of the creative potential of its speakers.

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  The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

  Rs. 2,690.00
  

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  Steven Pinker

   

  “Great stuff! Only Steven Pinker could have written this marvelous book, and thank heaven he has. ‘Good writing can flip the way the world is perceived,’ he writes, and The Sense of Style will flip the way you think about good writing. Pinker’s curiosity and delight illuminate every page, and when he says style can make the world a better place, we believe him.”
   —Patricia T. O’Conner, author of Woe Is I and, with Stewart Kellerman, Origins of the Specious

   

  “This book is a graceful and clear smackdown to the notion that English is going to the proverbial dogs. Pinker has written the Strunk & White for a new century while continuing to discourage baseless notions such as that the old slogan should have been ‘Winston tastes good AS a cigarette should.’”
  —John McWhorter, author of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue and The Power of Babel

   

  “Pinker’s linguistical learning…is considerable. His knowledge of grammar is extensive and runs deep. He also takes a scarcely hidden delight in exploding tradition. He describes his own temperament as “both logical and rebellious.” Few things give him more pleasure than popping the buttons off what he takes to be stuffed shirts.”
  —The Wall Street Journal

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  Several Short Sentences About Writing

  Rs. 2,690.00
  

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  Verlyn Klinkenborg

   

  “Powerful . . . each sentence miraculously contains an idea or insight that lesser writers would have milked for several pages.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

   

  “This is a very interesting little book about writing. Modest. Learned. Good-natured. Direct and sympathetic to its readers. You don’t even have to read it front to back (probably you couldn’t, anyway). You can just open it anywhere—as I did—and take away something useful.” —Richard Ford

   

  An indispensable and distinctive book that will help anyone who wants to write, write better, or have a clearer understanding of what it means for them to be writing, from widely admired writer and teacher Verlyn Klinkenborg.

   

  Klinkenborg believes that most of our received wisdom about how writing works is not only wrong but an obstacle to our ability to write. In Several Short Sentences About Writing, he sets out to help us unlearn that “wisdom”—about genius, about creativity, about writer’s block, topic sentences, and outline—and understand that writing is just as much about thinking, noticing, and learning what it means to be involved in the act of writing. There is no gospel, no orthodoxy, no dogma in this book. Instead it is a gathering of starting points in a journey toward lively, lucid, satisfying self-expression.

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  The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

  Rs. 2,790.00
  

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  Steven Pinker

   

  ‘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 marvellously readable book… illuminates every facet of human language: its biological origin, its uniqueness to humanity, it acquisition by children, its grammatical structure, the production and perception of speech, the pathology of language disorders and the unstoppable evolution of languages and dialects’ – Nature

   

  In this classic, the world’s expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America

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