Bøger af Michael Fortescue

In volume one of the trilogy 'The Adventures of the Flubb' The Flubb had barely had time to adjust to his comfortable new life as 'word taster' for a novel dictionary project when he found himself whisked away by Scotland Yard. The task for which he has been seconded turns out to be to give his opinion on an ambiguous suicide letter that had fallen into the hands of the police in connection with a suspected murder case. A theatre critic has been found stabbed to death in his own drawing room and his actress wife - who penned the letter - has disappeared. Certain suspicious words have been underlined in the letter by the forensic experts and now - snipped out - they are being detained in holding cells below the Yard for interrogation. In the middle of the Flubb's examination of the renegade words they manage to break out and scatter. This results in a nerve-wracking chase across the English landscape accompanied by the manic sergeant Jenkins, in an attempt to bring them back to their cells...

In this, the fourth volume in the trilogy 'The Adventures of the Flubb' (well, the Flubb never was much good at numbers!) our intrepid word-taster is called upon to retrieve a valuable hard drive that his technically minded colleague Derek has 'borrowed' from work and fitted into a grand piano. He had been tinkering for some time with a device that can turn keyboard music into speech and vice versa. A beautiful young Austrian lady contacted him, worried by the mute depression of her composer brother and hoping Derek's device would get him communicating with his piano and composing again. Derek saw her request as an excellent chance to test out his prototype and at the same time to bring in a bit of much needed cash to the company. The consequences of his ill-fated experiment soon prove alarming, however, with the piano and the composer (now in manic phase) becoming locked in furious musical combat. The young lady is at her wit's end and her other brother, an equally unstable artist who is perpetually squabbling with his twin, does not help the situation one bit, accusing him of undermining the painting of his masterpiece. Derek has no choice but to reveal to the Flubb what has happened and to beg him to try and sort things out. The Flubb's initial attempts to talk sense into both the composer and the piano are in vain. Events escalate alarmingly when it transpires that the piano has eloped at night with the sister, the device still installed inside it, and the Flubb is drawn into a wild chase in pursuit of the couple. This leads at first to a curiously expandable boarding house on the cliffs above Dover then across the channel to a frustratingly slow river cruise down the Rhine and the Danube to Austria. In Vienna he and the brothers become embroiled with a sinister grand piano mafia. Will the Flubb manage to retrieve the hard drive undamaged? Will his diplomatic skills be up to reuniting the three temperamental siblings? And what on earth will be the fate of a vile-tempered grand piano let loose in the Vienna Woods?

The miniatures in the first part of this book all involve perspective. The perspective in all of them is in one way or another unusual: sometimes frame by frame, sometimes macroscopic, sometimes microscopic; sometimes it is the thing perceived that does the perceiving, and sometimes two or more perspectives are superimposed or blended. The metamorphoses of the second part are less to do with transformations of beings - divine or otherwise - than with the metamorphoses of words, by association of meaning. In short, the volume as a whole constitutes a divertissement of intertwined ideas and images.

This is the third in the series 'The Adventures of the Flubb', following on from 'The Evolution of the Flubb' and 'The Flubb Investigates'. In the first book we saw the development out of nothingness of the Flubb, a strange creature with a taste for words and a craving for porridge. At the end of that book, after many bizarre adventures, he had found his niche as an assistant lexicographer, functioning as 'word-taster' on an unusual dictionary project. In the second volume, the Flubb found himself hired by Scotland Yard to 'taste' the veracity of an ambiguous suicide letter that had fallen into their hands in connection with a suspected murder case. He ended up chasing the words that escaped from the letter all across England before recapturing them and bringing his difficult task to a conclusion. In the present book he has grown restless again, and decides he must renew his search for his lost relatives, spurred on by an interest in Relativity (which he has recently read about). This takes him to Greenland, for he has also come across certain articles about the mysterious pre-Inuit 'Dorset' people of Greenland. The only clue he has is an old newspaper cutting with a picture of of a certain Watt What and his offspring from Dorset in whom he detects a certain family resemblance to himself. Now he is excited to learn that archaeologists think the lost Dorset people may be identical with the legendary 'Tunit' of the Greenlanders. These are supposedly giants who live under the Inland Ice - which is now melting at an alarming rate thanks to global warming. To get under the ice he teams up in Jakobshavn with a not very likable Cambridge glaciologist who has been measuring melt water outflow from the Greenland glaciers for years...

In this tongue-in-cheek novel there is a diabolical plot afoot to detonate a dirty bomb on the lawn of the White House involving of all things the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen. Brent, Senator Barrington's naïve twit of a son, is an unwitting part of the plot - and its ultimate backfiring. There are dark forces at work beneath the surface and they have their claws in the senator's son - or so they think. We follow Brent's chaotic journey in search of material on global warming for his thesis at Shenektekoot Community College. The senator willingly finances his travels, hoping to keep him out of his hair while he is up for re-election. The tale starts in Copenhagen, whence Brent intends - after interviewing the Danish queen - to go straight to Greenland, but he is fated first to circumnavigate the globe, meeting some odd characters and managing to upset world leaders galore. He leaves a trail of destruction in his wake wherever he goes, much to the dismay of his father. The devils trying to control him for their own ends can zip back and forth through time and space by 'black matter transport', but they can only affect events by influencing the minds of human protagonists. The clownish pair Azi and Belz prove in the long run to be as incompetent as Brent himself.

In this final volume of 'The Adventures of the Flubb' our little word-taster finds himself out of a job. The pocket dictionary project has collapsed with his boss running off to join the Theosophists in the Himalayas. Mindful now of the chaos his often misguided attempts to help people in the past has left behind him, he sets out to make amends for some of the damage he has caused. He retraces his steps - the same approximate steps he followed through 'The Evolution of the Flubb', but now in reverse. Alas, these well-meaning attempts only produce more chaos in their wake - and do not bring him any closer to another job. His efforts to find his way again leads him back from London to Oxford and once more around the globe, first on a research vessel to the Arctic, then on a cruise to the Caribbean, then on a nuclear submarine to California and across the Pacific to China as (unknown to himself) a double agent. He graduates to triple agent as he travels on with the Trans-Siberian towards Europe once more - with one notable detour into space on the way... All this and more brings him finally back to the small town where he first emerged from the mist, and it is back into the mist that he will disappear, leaking words all the time. But perhaps his seemingly random footsteps have been leading him after all towards some invisible goal...

In building up a scenario for the arrival on the shores of Alaska of speakers of languages related to Eskimo-Aleut with genetic roots deep within Sineria, this book touches upon a number of issues in contemporary historical linguistics and archaeology. The Arctic "gateway" to the New World, by acting as a bottleneck, has allowed only small groups of mobile hunter-gatherers through during specific propitious periods, and thus provides a unique testing ground for theories about population and language movements in pre-agricultural times. Owing to the historically attested prevalence of language shifts and other contact phenomena in the region, it is arguable that the spread of genes and the spread of language have been out of step since the earliest reconstructable times, contrary to certain views of their linkage. Proposals that have been put forward in the past concerning the affiliations of Eskimo-Aleut languages are followed up in the light of recent progress in reconstructing the proto-languages concerned. Those linking Eskimo-Aleut with the Uralic languages and Yukagir are particularly promising, and reconstructions for many common elements are presented. The entire region "Great Beringia" is scoured for typological evidence in the form of anomalies and constellations of uncommon traits diagnostic of affiliation or contact. The various threads lead back to mesolithic times in south central Siberia, when speakers of a "Uralo-Siberian" mesh of related languages appears to have moved along the major waterways of Siberia. Such a scenario would acount for the present distribution of these languages and the results of their meeting with remnants of earlier linguistic waves from the Old World to the New.

This volume is about the surprises lurking behind the genealogies of English words, often obscured by sound changes and borrowings from other languages. Though surprising - and often amusing - these etymologies are part and parcel of the history of the language. They encompass interesting shifts in meaning through the ages, and reflect the multiple sources that have added to the richness of English vocabulary.

A study of the mental lexicon - the way in which the form and meaning of words is stored by speakers of specific languages. It provides a principled means of distinguishing those semantic features required by a mental lexicon that have a direct bearing on grammar from those that do not.

This volume is the first comprehensive comparative dictionary to cover the whole of the Chukotko-Kamchatkan family. The genealogical status of this family (whether from a common source or due to convergence) has long been controversial, but its coherence as a family can now be taken as proven. Its geographical position between Siberia and northernmost America renders it crucial in any attempt to relate the languages and peoples of these large linguistic regions. The dictionary consists of cognate sets arranged alphabetically according to reconstructed proto-forms and covers all published lexical sources for the languages concerned (plus a good deal of unpublished material). The criterion for setting up Proto-Chukotian sets is the existence of clear cognates in at least two of the four languages: Chukchi, Koryak, Alutor, and (now extinct) Kerek, and for Proto-Chukotko-Kamchatkan sets cognates in at least one of these plus Itelmen. Internal loans between the two branches of the family are indicated - this is particularly important in the case of the many loans from Koryak to modern western Itelmen. Proto-Itelmen sets without clear cognates in Chukotian are listed separately, without reconstructions. The data is presented in a reader-friendly format, with each set divided into separate lines for the individual languages concerned and with a common orthography for all reliable modern forms (given as full word stems, not just 'roots'). The introduction contains information on the distribution of the individual languages and dialects and all sound correspondences relating them, plus a sketch of what is known of their (pre)historical background. Inflections and derivational affixes are treated in separate sections, and Chukchi and English proto-form indexes allows multiple routes of access to the data. A full reference list of sources is included.

Words are escaping from the flagship project of the prestigious House of Words. Something must be done fast to get them back before a rival company is brought in to take over the project. But the lexicographers below deck are not being cooperative. Treated as slaves they use their time when not supervised to play word games, facing the threat of the overseer?s whip if discovered. The management suspects that they may be aiding the leakage and their ringleader is clapped in irons. Emissaries are sent to negotiate with the words now living in riotous anarchy in the wild woods, but with little success. The words have certain demands if they are to return. An ultimatum is relayed to the irascible editor-in-chief, who cannot allow this undermining of editorial policy. His aging boss, the publisher, who is himself having difficulty remembering words, is only interested in cost-efficiency. A solution of a surprising kind is finally brokered by a humble female servitor sympathetic to the lexicographers? cause.

This unconventional introduction to the linguistic discipline of semantics - and pragmatics - takes the form of a series of zany dialogues, each illustrating a particular topic. They do this by breaking the rules that govern language usage in such a way as to bring home their hidden existence with a jolt. The intention is to render the significance of these abstractions more tangible and to sharpen the reader's awareness of what lurks beneath the surface of more 'normal' human communication. The notion of context is crucial throughout: it is the key to understanding the richer meaning of both individual words and whole utterances. Following each dialogue there are some definitions and a brief discussion of the topics concerned, together with references for more serious reading. The collection arose from the author's experience as professor of linguistics at the University of Copenhagen, in particular with the functional and cognitive aspects of language.