"A great book, one which must be applauded. The strength of this book is to propose a kind of linguistics which takes into account the various, subtle, rich, and extremely interesting interactions between language and cultural scripts. Given that books like this are rare, the author deserves countless words of praise." --Studies in Language"This is an important book. The strength of this book lies in its accurate and insightful analysis of various linguistic elements and their cross-linguistic equivalents. Wierzbicka's comman of a large number of European languages and her personal experience of cross-cultural communication provide an excellent background for this type of study." --Language in Society"There is a huge literature on the relation between language and our perception of the world, including well-known myths involving words for snow, but a feature of much previous work in this area has been a focus on an exotic (to anglophone readers) language whose strange structures appear to remake the world. The shock of this book is that the exotic language under the construction of English, and the world which is remade may very well be your own.

This is astriking contribution to the history of English, and the history of ideas." --Language"This is an important book. The strength of this book lies in its accurate and insightful analysis of various linguistic elements and their cross-linguistic equivalents. Wierzbicka's comman of a large number of European languages and her personal experience of cross-cultural communication provide an excellent background for this type of study." --Language in Society"There is a huge literature on the relation between language and our perception of the world, including well-known myths involving words for snow, but a feature of much previous work in this area has been a focus on an exotic (to anglophone readers) language whose strange structures appear to remake the world. The shock of this book is that the exotic language under the construction of English, and the world which is remade may very well be your own. This is astriking contribution to the history of English, and the history of ideas." --Language.