Language

A child can learn to walk almost anywhere—but take society away, Edward Sapir argues, and the child will never learn to speak. What makes speech so unlike breathing or walking?

In this early twentieth-century study, Sapir asks readers to look past the apparent naturalness of everyday speech and see a human inheritance made by communities over time. He distinguishes language from instinctive cries of pain or joy, then takes aim at the tempting idea that words grew from imitations of nature. Even “cuckoo” and “to laugh,” he suggests, are shaped by human convention, not simply copied from the world. If speech is a cultural creation, why do its sounds and symbols differ so greatly from people to people—and what does that reveal about the way we think and live?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.