Concepts

About this book

"The dominance of English in the worlds of scholarship, culture, and commerce has many benefits, of course, enabling people from all over the world to exchange ideas and communicate with one another. Yet this book foregrounds the fact that English monolingualism reduces not only our linguistic resources but our conceptual ones as well. If concepts are embedded in languages, then English monolingualism reduces the store of concepts available to us. This book aims to expand that store of concepts. concepts: a travelogue presents concepts drawn from the cultures of four continents and twenty-six different languages. For every contributor, in the course of exploring ideas that have been key to thinking in their language - ideas, for example, about sound and silence, voice and image, living and thinking, self and world - also addresses the issue of translation. Together, they show how translation is itself a way of invention, how it is not just a rendering concepts in one system in the terms of another, but a way of generating new (not novel) ideas."--