Book recs?

[her_fathers_gun]

I'm wondering if anyone has any book recommendations for:

• Comparative demon and/or mystical beast mythology--something that would talk about different traditions, rather than in a single cultural context
• Good histories of the expansion of connections between world regions in the first half of the past millennium--exploration, trade, things like that. I have a vague memory from some of my academic work of the, say, 14th-17th centuries being called the "first wave of globalization," but don't know enough to go find histories of that period (or even what it's properly called)
• Introductory books about computational linguistics (including its history)

I'm fine with reading books pitched either to a scholarly or a general audience, though I don't have any background in these areas. And non-book resources like websites are obviously totally cool too.

Thanks!

Comments

[seekingferret]

I'll poke miarr on the first question. I know she's done some academic work on the subject (I wrote her a Jewish demon story for a fic exchange).

I'm not a linguist and I don't know everywhere to send you on the third question, but if you haven't read Chomsky's Syntactic Structures it should be on the to-do list. It's a tiny little book and it's full of breathtakingly gorgeous ideas and stunningly pretty math. From what I gather, computationally speaking most of it's been supplanted or discredited, but it's a wonderful little book anyway.

Otherwise, check out Steven Pinker. And let me toss out my favorite book on linguistics, which is only tangentially related to the early days of computational linguistics: John Chadwick's On the Decipherment of Linear B.

[her_fathers_gun]

Cool! I'm getting a bunch of "dictionaries of demons" and stuff like that, but I don't even really know how to look this stuff up...

[deepsix]

For your second question, you might want to check out Janet Abu-Lughod's Before European Hegemony, which covers the period 1250-1350, and Findlay and O'Rourke's Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium. I haven't read the latter yet, but it came v highly recommended to me.

[her_fathers_gun]

Ooh, thanks! Those will be a great start.

[seekingferret]

A friend recommends a chapter on globalism in Colonialism in Question by Frederick Cooper.