Raymond Sokolov
Linguine Franca
The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu
By Dan Jurafsky
W W Norton 246pp £17.99 order from our bookshop
Dan Jurafsky is not the kind of linguist I encountered as a classics graduate student fifty years ago. He will not bend your ear about the connection between the sigmatic aorists of Old Irish and Attic Greek. He isn’t an evangelist for Noam Chomsky’s algorithmic theory of grammar either. Jurafsky is a behavioural linguist, gifted at explaining how words intersect with human life and history. And in this charming and informative book, he shows how looking at food through language can tell us a lot about everyday eating and cooking.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The Craft’s first martyr', John Coustos 'became a celebrity and a sensational symbol for the causes it would claim: tolerance, rational inquiry, cross-border cosmopolitanism, relative equality and enlightened faith.'
@darrin_mcmahon on the freemasons.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/with-a-nudge-a-wink
'"Dutch Light" roots its subject in his local environment, explaining, for example, how an abundance of sand for making glass led naturally to a thriving business in optical instruments in Holland.'
Patricia Fara on the life & work of Christiaan Huygens.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/through-the-magnifying-glass
Sign up to our e-newsletter!
Get highlights from the new issue and selected archive articles, as well as exclusive competitions and subscription offers delivered straight to your inbox.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/freenewsletter