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.
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