As a self-taught student of the Yiddish language, I've sought out many Yiddish language text books. Uriel Weinreich's "College Yiddish" is by far the definitive book on the subject. All other first-year books pale in comparison. Each lesson is presented and structured in an extremely logical and coherent manner. The scope of "College Yiddish" covers the language so extensively that before you know it, you're able to read Yiddish books and newspapers without much effort. If you are a student of other foreign languages, you will be amazed at just how well this book was written. You'll wish that Uriel Weinreich had written books covering other languages as well.

The Yiddish texts at the beginning of each chapter are intelligently written--not "dumbed-down" as most language books do. "College Yiddish" doesn't just cover grammar and vocabulary, it also includes the history of the language, Jewish culture in Europe, anti-Semitism, folklore, Zionism, creation of Israel, etc, all presented in a very appealing way.

While studying from "College Yiddish", I also recommend that you purchase Uriel Weinreich's "Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary". After your completion of "College Yiddish", you should continue your studies with "Yidish af Yidish" by David Goldberg and "Yiddish II: An Intermediate and Advanced Textbook" by Mordkhe Schaechter, both of which continue from where "College Yiddish" left off. I recommend that both be purchased because they both cover different aspects of Yiddish; "Yidish af Yidish" being more academic where as "Yiddish Tsvey" is more colloquial.

Too many books that purport to teach you Yiddish treat it as either a joke or a relic. Prof. Weinreich's "College Yiddish" treats Yiddish as a living, expressive and literary language, not as a compendium of phrases to say to your bubbe when she visits, or as a collection of cursewords. The book consists of 30 graded lessons, each based on a text which covers some aspect of Jewish life, culture and history, and especially of the Jewish communities of central and eastern Europe for whom Yiddish was a bond. At the end of the book is an excellent precis of Yiddish grammar. But this book isn't "dry as dust," either: Prof. Weinreich takes Jewish humor as seriously as he does Jewish culture and literature! Very highly recommended.

Those who have spent any time looking for good information on the Yiddish language know quite well how difficult it is to find anything of any quality. "College Yiddish" is the best source I have ever found in three years of searching. Besides containing very clear explanations of grammar accompanied by exercises, the cultural information included is of immense interest. I heartily recommend this book.

Roman Jakobson in his later years of Brain and Language studies delivers this lecture at New York University in 1980. Although this may be somewhat dated at the moment, Jakobson surely gives some wonderful insights into how language is understood by the brain, and in particular how the ears listen and then register to the brain. Written in a highly dense and technical (considering its a lecture) along with really long winded sentences that makes it more difficult to gather everything. He is certainly talking to the learned student of phonology and neurology. Citing from many examples from the 40's through the late 70's, Jakobson shows that hearing is a contralateral process. He explains this through process of aphasia and other brain disorders and some people with damaged hearing. And these works, from what I can tell are extended from Gazzaniga's work, as well as so many others who worked with siezures and split-brain operations. Definately reccomended for the language and linguistic student, as well as for neurology studies. Also reccomended is Karl H. Pribram's "Language of the Brain."

Jakobson's text _Child Language Aphasia and Phonological Universals_ is a technical but readable examination of the most basic level of speech, phonemic differentiation. His approach, as in his other work, is structuralist.

Beginning with a discussion of previous theories of child language, Jakobson clarifies the need for and context of his theory. The premise of his approach is that phonemes achieve significance only in their contrastive relationships. Using this idea, he explains specifically many of the speech deformities (or, non-formities) typical of children, e.g., substitution of "y" for "l". Jakobson shows that consonant and vowel differentiation patterns are essentially the same for learners of all human languages. He also shows that the production of some sounds presupposes the production of other sounds. The hierarchy of contrastive relationships between phonemes is clarified with his discussion of aphasia, speech formation in reverse, and pronunciation of foreign languages. E.g., "r" and "l" are difficult for those whose first and primary language is Japanese because Japanese does not use the latter liquid; similarly, Russian speakers have difficulties with Serbo-Croatian accents, and English speakers with the German "ch".

I came to this text as a student learning about structuralism. It has been extremely useful to me as an example of applied structuralist thought. When I need context for abstract structuralist ideas, I exemplify them in the terms of Jakobson's linguistic theory; it is especially easy to do so with this theory because it's a theory of language, the example that sets the rule for structuralism, and because its presentation is crystal clear.

This exciting volume organized by Jean Jacques Weber provides an overview of this subarea of linguistics. As he says "the book focuses on the main problems that have fascinated scholars working at the interface between language and literature: What is literature? How does literary discourse differ from other discourse types? How do we read and interpret literary texts? What is style? What is the relationship between language, literature and society?"

Fine essays written by a few of the most important scholars of the stylistics area are edited as chapters of the book. One can choose while reading them all or just a special one. Each section introduces a particular approach, thus covering the major tendencies in stylistics in the last 35 years: formalist, functionalist, affective, pedagogical, pragmatic, critical, feminist and cognitive. The aim is to provide a full sense of what stylistics is all about.

The reader will find out who are the main stylists up to the presente and what do they think about the discipline. Readers are encouraged to take up their own position in the fundamental debates. To grant this task, the early chapters introducting approaches current in the 1960s and 1970s are each followed by a more recent paper which takes issue with some of the assuptions behind these theories. The second part of the book presents the main currents in contemporary stylistics: pedagogical stylistics and the differents types of contextualized stylistics practised nowadays.

There are suggestions for further reading, and notes and references are provided for each essay. I would recomend this book for all that work with linguistic criticism, not just literary stylistics studies. It is also a good "guide" for students, who are seeking for information and discussion about the interface between language and literature.

The crux of Tsur's book is:

1)There is a certain kind of engagement that we can have with certain poems that leads to an intuitive awareness of kinds of significance that cannot be directly attributed to the resolution of the poem's language into a particular propositional understanding derived via habits of everyday speech interpretation. 2) The intuitive awareness that we have of the significance of a particular poem can be explained to a great extend through the interactions one has with the language of the poem which occur prior to, or in spite of, one's resolution of its particular aspects into conventional units of meaning. (The resolution of speech sound into units of meaning is a process with various steps. The two steps that Tsur focuses upon are the reduction of a sound stream to phonemic sounds, and the isolation of a frame of reference through which one can contain and differentiate between the specific semantic and referential contents of a linguistic sequence. Once one has accomplished the former step, he can address the sound stream as speech, and the latter leads to an understanding of speech.)

Expressive Sound and Double-Edgedness

The methodology that Tsur has developed to analyze the expressive nature of the sounds of poetic language relies heavily upon an approach to classifying the causal role of language structures in the synaesthetic experience of a particular linguistic articulation:

The problem of synaesthetic equivalences will cease to look embarrassingly arbitrary if, hereto, we fix out attention not one likeness of elements but on structural relationships within a scale or a matrix. When we say that i is brighter than u, we find a surprising degree of general consent. If we are more careful still and say that the step from u to i is more like an upward step, I think the majority will agree, whatever explanation each of may be inclined to offer. (Tsur 1992 citing Jakobson citing Grombich)

It is unnecessary and misleading to assert specific synaesthetic qualities as inhering in particular phonemes. It is better to say that a series phonemes can be arranged along a continuum which represents the extent to which each exemplifies a particular pertinent aspect of their common embodiment as sound, and that the terminal extremes of this continuum can be reasonably matched analogously to the terminal ends of a continuum measuring a some aspect that is synaesthetically experienced through the sound of language. These various mappings constitute the sound potential of a given phoneme. Double-edgedness is a result of the fact that various phonemes can be placed along various continuums measuring different aspects of their sound constitution, and that the degree to which a particular aspect of a phoneme's sound structure is foregrounded in a particular instance depends greatly upon contextual cues which determine the rhythm and intonation of our articulation of the phonemes involved. Thus, it is possible for one phoneme in different contexts to produce opposing intuitions. Tsur takes an example from Richards clearly demonstrating this phenomenon:

Compare for example:

Deep into a gloomy grot with Peep into a roomy cot. . .

In each of the two phrases different vowel features may be used to enhance meaning; this is the source of the double-edgedness of the sounds. In peep one tends to foreground the features [BRIGHT, HIGH], in deep the features [LONG, (FAR)DOWN]. In gloomy the feature [DARK] whereas in roomy the features [LONG, HIGH] (that is spacious) are likely to be foregrounded. (Tsur 1992)

It is Tsur's goal in What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive to discover the various expressive potencies of phonetic sounds and to develop this account as a way exploring the intuitions that are often experienced when reading certain poems or kinds of poetry.

Throughout his arguments concerning the expressive potential of phonetic sounds, Tsur relies heavily upon a distinction between one's categorical and pre-categorical awareness of language. According to Tsur, conventionally we repress our awareness of the specific qualities of the sound stream underlying a series of phonemes and hear only phonemes, or categorical sounds. Now, this argument while it remains unqualified is rather absurd. I don't have to be yelled at or threatened by someone to know that they are angry with me. And it's sometimes the case that after a conversation I have with someone, say my mother on the telephone, I have certain intuitions about her state of mind that are inexplicable in terms of the subject matter we discussed. Furthermore, it seems that in the course of daily conversation, where our words aren't painstakingly chosen to convey finely grained conceptual distinctions that (pre-categorical) cues conveyed through the rhythm and articulation of linguistic sequence are an indispensable resource for interpretation.

Tsur, despite the fact that his familiarity with linguistic research ends with the 70's offers us a practical insight-namely, to be able to respond to a particular aspect of a poem's meaning, namely the expressiveness of its sound, we must make a performance of it, in our heads or outloud. Barsalou, cites research showing that when we conceptualize or think about sounds, or rehearse them to our "mind's ear", areas of our auditory cortices show activation levels similar to those displayed when comparible sounds are actively perceived. Tsur gives us an account of one aspect of poetic significance that has eluded a systematic treatment in the field of literary theory, and consequently allows us to understand why it is that making a performance of a poem is critical to full engagement of its expressive potential. Furthermore, he gives convincing arguments concerning why it is that certain sounds produce certain effects in certain contexts.