The book that results from his total of seven years among his Piraha friends is an honest, sensitive, and often intellectual account of a people with a very different worldview from his own, and the implications this worldview has on our understandings not only of linguistics, but grammar, anthropology, psychology, and the formation of culture. He spent the next 30 years living on and off with the Piraha, delving into their culture and language, and finding himself faced finally with some startling conclusions in both his personal and professional life. A linguist and missionary employed by a Christian organization to learn the Piraha language and then translate the Bible into it, he went up the Amazon with his wife and three small children to live in a hut and learn what he could about these supposedly simple people. It’s packed, like many great travel books, in the Nature/Science department, and classified as linguistics/anthropology.Īnd yet, anyone wanting to learn about some of the most remote parts of the Brazilian Amazon and the native tribes that maintain traditional lifestyles there would be hard-pressed to find a better resource than Everett’s Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes.Įverett went to live among the Piraha people in 1977. Because you won’t find Daniel Everett’s book in the travel literature section. Both download and print editions of such books should be high quality.(Please note that the people and language referred to here, Piraha, has a tilde - a little squiggle - over the final ‘a,’ but said squiggle is nowhere to be found in my word program.)ĭon’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle (published 2008, US and UK) proves the contention that some of the most enlightening “travel” books are written not by travel writers, but by researchers and explorers. Most newer books are in the original electronic format. Also, their file size tends to be smaller than scanned image books. These ebooks were created from the original electronic layout files, and therefore are fully text searchable. We mark clearly which print titles come from scanned image books so that you can make an informed purchase decision about the quality of what you will receive. The text is fine for reading, but illustration work starts to run dark, pixellating and/or losing shades of grey. It's the problem of making a copy of a copy. Unfortunately, the resulting quality of these books is not as high. We essentially digitally re-master the book. Also, a few larger books may be resampled to fit into the system, and may not have this searchable text background.įor printed books, we have performed high-resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book. However, any text in a given book set on a graphical background or in handwritten fonts would most likely not be picked up by the OCR software, and is therefore not searchable. The result of this OCR process is placed invisibly behind the picture of each scanned page, to allow for text searching. Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.įor PDF download editions, each page has been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to attempt to decipher the printed text. These products were created by scanning an original printed edition.
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