The stories in this book are exciting and sometimes very strange. Some are sad and some are happy. We meet many interesting people – a young man in love, a lonely customer in a shop, a shy soldier. Strange things happen to all these people. But life is strange sometimes.
Skylan Ivorson is a sea-raider of the Vindras and eventually becomes the Chief of Chiefs of all Vindras clans, an honor he truly feels he deserves as one who has been blessed by Skoval, the god of war.
This book looks at the ever-present anxieties associated with language change. Focusing on English from Alfred the Great to the present, Tim Machan offers a fresh perspective on the history of language. He reveals amusing and sometimes disconcerting aspects of our linguistic and social behavior and suggests that anxiety about language has sometimes allowed us to avoid the issues we really find disturbing: when speakers of English worry over grammar, sounds, or words the real source of their anxiety is often not language at all but issues like immigration or social instability.
The remarkable fact that some languages appear to be more complex than others has long been a matter of interest to linguists and has repeatedly motivated efforts to define linguistic complexity and to explain how and why complexity develops and why it is sometimes “maintained” (as Dahl puts it) and sometimes not. In this monograph Dahl presents a theory of linguistic complexity and tries to tackle the mysteries of its growth and occasional longevity.
"I started collecting fossils when I was seven, and I’ve been doing it ever since. In fact, it’s now my job – I work at a museum, and my specialty is prehistoric animals, including fossil fish and dinosaurs. We’re constantly finding new dinosaur bones that tell us more about these extraordinary beasts – how they fought each other, how they looked after their babies, how far they travelled, how they changed over time, and much more. These dinosaur fossils are in big demand, and are sometimes smuggled overseas and sold illegally...