Some people say scohn, while others say schown. He says bath, while she says bahth. You say potayto. I say potahto And- -wait a second, no one says potahto. No one's ever said potahto. Have they? From reconstructing Shakespeare's accent to the rise and fall of Received Pronunciation, actor Ben Crystal and his linguist father David travel the world in search of the stories of spoken English. Everyone has an accent, though many of us think we don't. We all have our likes and dislikes about the way other people speak, and everyone has something to say about 'correct' pronunciation. But how did all these accents come about, and why do people feel so strongly about them? Are regional accents dying out as English becomes a global language? And most importantly of all: what went wrong in Birmingham? Witty, authoritative and jam-packed full of fascinating facts, You Say Potato is a celebration of the myriad ways in which the English language is spoken - and how our accents, in so many ways, speak louder than words

This essay was written in 1878 by I. Goldziher, who is considered one of the founders and greatest masters of Islamic studies in Europe. He examines the origin and early history of Arabic grammar and some features of its later development with special regard to the cultural historical apsects of the question. Goldziher draws a picture of the most important trends and attitudes in the Arabic linguistics of the Middle Ages. The author's comprehensive historical approach enables him to integrate small, seemingly unconnected pieces into a whole system, fitting into our knowledge of other fields of Islamic culture and science. That is why his work may interest not only specialists of Arab linguistics but also historians of general linguistics and historians of Islam. Although a century and a quarter elapsed since its publication in Hungarian Goldziher's essay still has not become outdated, since no similar work has been published. The original text has been supplemented with amendments and explanations, a comprehensive and updated bibliography has also been added, together with an appendix (the original texts of the citations) and two indices.

This dictionary is based on old and recent manuscripts, printed texts, literary Midrashic texts, recorded oral Bible translations, folk literature, and diverse spoken registers. It has an extensive introduction, including a brief history of the Jewish dialects and their relations to older Aramaic, detailed observations on orthography, phonology, morphology, semantics, and other related grammatical features, that will serve the users well. The source for each word is indicated, including context quotations when necessary. A special effort was made to trace the origin of each and every word, be it native (classical and Talmudic Aramaic, Syriac etc.), or a loan word (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Kurdish, Turkish, general European). The Dictionary includes an index to all the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic words which have cognates or reflexes in Jewish Neo-Aramaic, a very important tool for the history of comparative linguistic studies of Aramaic. The Dictionary will be useful for scholars of Neo-Aramaic as well as classical and Talmudic Aramaic and Syriac, Semitic Languages, Jewish Languages, Languages in Contact, and other Near Eastern Languages in general. It is the first scholarly dictionary of Jewish Neo-Aramaic, and is intended to be a linguistic monument to the community that spoke it for many centuries until its emigration to Israel.

The book claims that Yiddish was created when Judaized Sorbs first relexified their language to High German between the 9th-12th centuries; by the 15th century, the descendants of the Judaized Khazars also relexified their Kiev-Polessian (northern Ukrainian and southern Belarusian) speech to Yiddish and German, Yiddish thus uses a mixed West-East Slavic grammar and suggests that converted Khazars were a major component in the Ashkenazic ethnogenesis.

The soul of this book is not just linguistic. The author creates an innovative approach, combining language with anthropology and history, and this can serve a medley of researchers in interdisciplinary fields. The texts introduce the long and rich inheritance of the Arabic-speaking Jews of Tiberias. They have lived there for centuries with only brief interruptions, and have spoken Arabic as their mother tongue. The author continues here his research on other communities in Galilee where Arabic has been spoken by Jews, such as Haifa, Safed and Pqi'in. The book pays homage to these people, their heritage and language, before all sink, alas, into the limbo of forgotten things. These are the last vanishing voices, which speak out, tell and still breathe. Hopefully they will still serve as evidence in the future of a once glorious but dying culture, whose existence, paradoxically, may even come to be doubted in future times.