De Gruyter

The dialects of Irish; study of a changing landscape. (DVD included)

Following his study of the structure of Irish, Hickey (linguistics, U. of Duisburg and Essen) here provides an overview of its present-day dialects, for students and scholars who do not necessarily have any prior experience of the language. There are three main dialects with further subdivisions, he says, that have diverged considerably in their development over the centuries. Unlike most other European languages, there is no official Irish pronunciation against which variants can be contrasted, and few of the major references on Irish refer to pronunciation at all, thus bypassing the issue of dialects. After reviewing the history, status, and sound system of Irish he describes collecting data, features of dialects, the prosody of Irish, dialect reconstruction, and further variation. The accompanying disk contains the actual recordings of over 200 speakers in different Irish-speaking regions that he made for study between 2004 and 2009. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Feynman-Kac-type theorems and Gibbs measures on path space; with applications to rigorous quantum field theory.

Mathematicians Lörinczi (Technical U. of Munich), Fumio Hiroshima (Kyushu U., Japan), and Volker Betz (Warwick U., Britain) present an account of Feynman-Kac-type formulae and their uses in quantum field theory. They cover heuristics and history, probabilistic preliminaries, Feynman-Kac formulae, Gibbs measures associated with Feynman-Kac semigroups, the free Euclidean quantum field and Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes, the Nelson model by path measures, and the Pauli-Feirz model by path measures. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Old Avestan syntax and stylistics; with an edition of the texts.

In a spin-off from his recent translation of the Old Avestan texts for The Hymns of Zoroaster (London 2010) West systematically examines the syntax, word order, and stylistic features in the texts, the only examples of written Old Avestan discovered to date, indeed named for the Zend Avesta. His goal is not to reconstruct proto-Indo-European or even proto-Indo-Iranian syntax, though he suggests that someone doing so might make use of his work. Neither does he look for parallels or evolution in regard to Younger Avestan. The texts are from Yasna 27 to Yasna 41. They are not translated. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Purely objective reality. (reprint, 2009)

Keely conceived and wrote the entire book in Bulgaria, he explains, teaching semiotics at the New Bulgarian University of Sofia in September 2002 and the spring of 2005. He begins with what objective reality is and how it is possible. His topics there include the problem of objectivity and the root of its semiotic resolution, objectivity as a branch on the tree of relations, the first appearance of objectivity in its difference from things, the source in subjectivity of relations of apprehension, and the social construction of reality. The second part provides background to the first, with discussions of the difference it makes what a sign is, why inter-subjectivity is not enough, and the amazing history of sign. This is the paperbound edition of a book published in cloth in 2009. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Relative homological algebra; v.2.

Accompanying the second edition of the first volume, originally published in 2000, this second volume concentrates on applying the principles to complexes of modules. Most of these results are already known, say Enochs (U. of Kentucky-Lexington) and Jenda (Auburn U., Alabama), but not easily available in a single place. They cover complexes of modules, short exact sequences of complexes, the category K(R-Mod), co-torsion pairs and triplets in C(R-Mod), adjoint functions, model structures, creating co-torsion pairs, minimal complexes, and Cartan and Eilenberg resolutions. As in the first volume, chapter-end exercises are provided for classrooms or self-study. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Sound and communication; an aesthetic cultural history of Sanskrit Hinduism. (CD-ROM included)

A scholar of religion and a Sanskritist who share overlapping interests in history, the history of religion, philosophy, and the field of ethno-Indology combined their efforts to prepare this extraordinary study. They state in the foreword: "In this treatise on text, communication and sound in Hindu Sanskrit, we propose a new way of accessing Indian cultural history and an expanded method of interpreting text...we are not solely interested in the perception of sound but, in a much more general manner, in the manifold and shifting correlations between language and the understanding of the world in Sanskrit Hinduism." The included music CD contains examples of the most common kinds of recitation, song, and music. This work holds exceptional interest for a wide audience — academics of religion, philosophy, and history as well as musicologists, musicians, and linguists. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Spaces and borders; current research on religion in Central and Eastern Europe.

Social scientists, mostly from Eastern Europe who were raised and educated after the fall of communism and the return of Christianity, explore experiencing religion, strategies of religious elites, and religion and politics. Their topics include negotiating a border between religion and spirituality, the dynamics of counter-stigmatization strategy, the acculturation of Hinduism and the Czech traditions of yoga, clericalization of nationalism, a sociological and legal analysis of freedom of religion in the Baltic states, comparative evidence from eastern and western Europe on confronting religion with national pride values, and the political secularity of religious people in European countries. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Time; from concept to narrative construct; a reader.

The 11 texts relate philosophical perspective on time to literary theory's attempts to clarify how time appears, functions, and is construed in and by narratives. The idea is to group seminal texts in a fresh context in order to contribute a new approach that integrates a philosophical, a narratological, and a computational perspective on narrative-based time. Among the topics are the tenses of verbs, constituting time through action and discourse, the significance of time in narrative art, the timelessness of poetry, story-time and fact-sequence-time, and an artificial intelligence perspective on the flow of time in narrative. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)