Witty, entertaining, and informative, this book on so-called 'false friends' will be of immediate use to anyone using the French language and needing to understand French society and culture. The individual entries have been carefully designed to carry the basic linguistic information required and then develop into a wider consideration of the social and cultural context within which the specific words and phrases are used in current French. As this title is supposed to be used in conjunction with and not instead of a dictionary, it also offers a brief list of recommended reading ranging from standard dictionaries to introductory works on French society and institutions.
Witty, entertaining, and informative, this book on so-called 'false friends' will be of immediate use to anyone using the French language and needing to understand French society and culture. The individual entries have been carefully designed to carry the basic linguistic information required and then develop into a wider consideration of the social and cultural context within which the specific words and phrases are used in current French. As this title is supposed to be used in conjunction with and not instead of a dictionary, it also offers a brief list of recommended reading ranging from standard dictionaries to introductory works on French society and institutions.
Focussing on the key role of the English medieval parliament in hearing and determining the requests of the king's subjects, this ground-breaking new study examines the private petition and its place in the late medieval English parliament (c.1270-1450). Until now, historians have focussed on the political and financial significance of the English medieval parliament; this book offers an important re-evaluation placing the emphasis on parliament as a crucial element in the provision of royal government and justice. It looks at the nature of medieval petitioning, how requests were written and how and why petitioners sought redress specifically in parliament. It also sheds new light on the concept of royal grace and its practical application to parliamentary petitions that required the king's personal intervention. The book traces the development of private petitioning over a period of almost two hundred years, from a point when parliament was essentially an instrument of royal administration, to one where it was self-consciously dispatching petitions as the highest court of the land. Gwilym Dodd considers not only the detail of the petitionary process, but also broader questions about the government of late medieval England. His conclusions contribute to our understanding of the nature of medieval monarchy, and its ability (or willingness) to address local difficulties, as well as the nature of local society, and the problems that faced individuals and communities in medieval society.
This book examines geographical names, place-names, and toponymy from philosophical and cultural evolutionary perspectives. Geographical name-tracking-networks (Geo-NTNs) are posited as tools for tracking names through time and across space, and for making sense of how names evolve both temporally and spatially. Examples from North and South American indigenous groups, the Canadian arctic, Wales, England, and the Middle East are brought into a theoretical framework for making sense of aspects of place-naming practices, beliefs, and systems. New geographical tools such as geographic information systems (GIS) and global positioning systems (GPS) are demonstrated to be important in the production and maintenance of robust networks for keeping names and their associated meanings viable in a rapidly changing world where place-naming is being taken up increasingly in social media and other new mapping platforms. The Geography of Names makes the case that geographical names are transmitted memetically (i.e. as cultural units, or memes) through what Saul Kripke called communication chains. Combining insights from Kripke with views of later Wittgenstein on language and names as being inherently spatial, the present work advances theories of both these thinkers into an explicitly geographical inquiry that advances philosophical and practical aspects of naming, language, and mapping.
In 1944-45, Capt. G.H. Davies served with the hard-fighting 53rd Welsh Division. He was an artillery officer in command of a battery of 25-pdr field guns and saw action from Normandy to the final surrender of Nazi Germany. Capt. Davies was present at the Normandy battles, the fierce fighting for s'Hertogenbosch and the Battle of Arnhem.During the course of the war, Capt. Davies kept a diary and also snatched a few photographs on his treasured camera. When the opportunity arose Capt. Davies liberated a camera from a fallen SS officer and, after the war, had the film developed. The film contained graphic images of the war from the German side of the line.Seventy years on from the events, the wartime diary, the photographs of the guns and the photographs taken by the dead SS officer were the inspiration for the son of Capt. Davies, television producer and writer Gwilym Davies, to undertake an emotional return to the battlefields, which his father had described in his diary.The result of that pilgrimage is an important new book which builds upon the wartime diary and the photographs to produce a powerful record of one man's war service with the guns of the 53rd Welsh Division. The book also contrasts the experience of Capt. Davies with those of the Germans on the other side of the line. Gwilym Davies is himself an accomplished photographer and his photographs of the 70th anniversary celebrations and the memorials provide a poignant counterpoint to the events of 1944.
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