Written in Stone
A Journey Through the Stone Age and the Origins of Modern Language
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Narrated by:
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Michael Healy
About this listen
Half the world's population speaks a language that has evolved from a single prehistoric mother tongue. First spoken in Stone Age times on the steppes of central Eurasia 6,500 years ago, this mother tongue spread from the shores of the Black Sea across almost all of Europe and much of Asia. It is the genetic basis of everything we speak and write today - the DNA of language.
Written in Stone combines detective work, mythology, ancient history, archaeology, the roots of society, technology and warfare, and the sheer fascination of words to explore that original mother tongue, sketching the connections woven throughout the immense vocabulary of English, with some surprising results. In snappy, lively, and often very funny chapters, Written in Stone uncovers the most influential and important words used by our Neolithic ancestors and shows how they are still in constant use today - the building blocks of all our most common words and phrases.
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Brilliant
- By Elizabeth on 04-03-10
By: Barbara Mertz
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Gould's Book of Fish
- By: Richard Flanagan
- Narrated by: Humphrey Bower
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Once upon a time that was called 1828, before all the living things on the land and the fishes in the sea were destroyed, there was a man named William Buelow Gould, a convict in Van Dieman's Land who fell in love with a black woman and discovered too late that to love is not safe. Silly Billy Gould, invader of Australia, liar, murderer, forger, fantasist, was condemned to live in the most brutal penal colony in the British Empire, and there ordered to paint a book of fish. Once upon a time, miraculous things happened....
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Wonderful, Funny & Oh So Well Written!
- By cowgirl877 on 06-23-17
By: Richard Flanagan
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Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
- A Novel
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Robert G. Slade
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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From Salman Rushdie, one of the great writers of our time, comes a spellbinding work of fiction that blends history, mythology, and a timeless love story. A lush, richly layered novel in which our world has been plunged into an age of unreason, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is a breathtaking achievement and an enduring testament to the power of storytelling.
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1001 whimsical, capricious, and wanton jinn
- By Darwin8u on 09-16-15
By: Salman Rushdie
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The Book of General Ignorance
- By: John Mitchinson, John Lloyd
- Narrated by: uncredited
- Length: 4 hrs and 20 mins
- Abridged
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Misconceptions, misunderstandings, and flawed facts finally get the heave-ho in this humorous, downright humiliating book of reeducation based on the phenomenal British best seller. Challenging what most of us assume to be verifiable truths in areas like history, literature, science, nature, and more, The Book of General Ignorance is a witty “gotcha” compendium of how little we actually know about anything. It’ll have you scratching your head wondering why we even bother to go to school.
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Interesting.
- By A. Hawkbird on 12-07-08
By: John Mitchinson, and others
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The Passion
- By: Jeanette Winterson
- Narrated by: Tania Rodrigues, Daniel Pirrie
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Set during the tumultuous years of the Napoleonic Wars, The Passion intertwines the destinies of two remarkable people: Henri, a simple French soldier, who follows Napoleon from glory to Russian ruin; and Villanelle, the red-haired, web-footed daughter of a Venetian boatman, whose husband has gambled away her heart. In Venice’s compound of carnival, chance, and darkness, the pair meets their singular destiny.
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Excellence.
- By Scottie V. on 10-07-19
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Independent People
- By: Halldór Laxness
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 20 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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This magnificent novel - which secured for its author the 1955 Nobel Prize in Literature - is now available to contemporary American audiences. Although it is set in the early 20th century, it recalls both Iceland's medieval epics and such classics as Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. And if Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to achieve independence is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic.
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I am so confused about this introduction
- By George M on 09-10-18
By: Halldór Laxness
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24 Hours in Ancient Rome: A Day in the Life of the People Who Lived There
- 24 Hours in Ancient History Series, Book 1
- By: Philip Matyszak
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In this entertaining and enlightening guide, best-selling historian Philip Matyszak introduces us to the people who lived and worked there. In each hour of the day we meet a new character - from emperor to slave girl, gladiator to astrologer, medicine woman to water-clock maker - and discover the fascinating details of their daily lives.
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Took me back to Latin class and the origin of word
- By tony harris on 05-19-20
By: Philip Matyszak
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Kim
- By: Rudyard Kipling
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Kipling's masterpiece Kim is his final and most famous work and one of the first and greatest espionage stories ever written. It explores the life of Kimball O'Hara, an Irish orphan who spends his childhood as a vagrant in Lahore. When he befriends an aged Tibetan lama his life is transformed as he is requested to accompany him on a mysterious quest to find the legendary River of the Arrow and achieve Enlightenment.
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A Stunning Experience
- By Jeanie on 09-19-12
By: Rudyard Kipling
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Artful
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Ali Smith
- Length: 4 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2012, Ali Smith delivered the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Those lectures, presented here, took the shape of discursive stories that refused to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form. Thus, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted - literally - by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature. A hypnotic dialogue unfolds between storytelling and a meditation on art that encompasses love, grief, memory, and revitalization.
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#Reality/Loss/Mythology
- By Ellen K. on 11-14-18
By: Ali Smith
What listeners say about Written in Stone
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Leslie RP
- 08-14-23
Informative
Well written and enjoyable listen. I liked hearing about how languages change and evolve over time and which sounds change the least.
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- Allison Wingfield
- 07-31-16
Plan to listen several times
This was entertaining and eye-opening. I took Latin and know all our Latin and Greek prefixes & suffixes, but realize now how much history went into the development of those languages and others to this day and tomorrow. I appreciate how natural he makes this subject, and now I'm appalled by comparing how we actually teach such a basic human subject as language! Kudos to the narrator! What a difficult book to have read aloud!
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- Chantelle Wood
- 12-28-20
a spectacle for the ears
I love etymology, this course is special though, searching for our proto-language closes the gap between tongues and makes learning German, Latin, Spanish, French or even Gaelic much more fun. Didn't help me with my Chinese though 😂
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- wbiro
- 07-26-17
A Historical Tour Through the Dictionary
The book literally begins at A and ends with Z, which I thought was interesting, as were the etymologies and the related human histories.
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- Daniel
- 10-16-23
Cannot bear reading to the very end
The opening chapter about prehistoric syllables was interesting, but then the writer launches into a recital of countless words and syllables from unrelated languages, ONE LETTER AT A TIME, from A to Z. I couldn't bear enduring anything past the letter "g". I was interested in learning how the various world languages evolved into being, but this book does not seem to go there. Coupled with continual mispronunciations due to the narrator's hard British drawl, I had to give up.
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- Monika
- 07-01-21
INCREDIBLY BORING (CONTENT WISE)!!!
The title of this review says it all. I regret purchasing this book and I am going to return it.
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- Ray
- 05-21-16
Better as a printed book.
As an audio book this is hard to follow. It rather all runs together like listening to a reading of a phone book. A bit of organizing in to chapters would have helped. I will be buying the ebook version.
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- Sean
- 05-06-16
Totally Reprehensible. No book I recommend less.
What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?
This book gives linguistics a bad name.
It propagates bad science and worse understandings of human language. Obviously I didn't expect a pop-science book about language to get everything right, but the ideas this book spreads are not only wrong but reprehensible in the deepest way.
I only made it 15 minutes in before I couldn't listen to it anymore, BUT in those 15 minutes I heard: poor understandings of language in general, a complete disregard for the existence of language before 6000 BCE, terrible etymologies everywhere, and *ACTUAL F***ING NAZI PROPAGANDA*
That isn't in anyway hyperbole.
Let's quickly debunk the entire first 15 minutes of this book.
The first thing the author claims in that the first words acted out their meaning, that they were all onomatopoeia, that 'Poop,' the word, acts out our reaction to poop. This isn't backed up by science, but it's possible, that is until he implies that this was the case for our ancestors less than 10,000 years ago. If he was saying this was how our ape-like ancestors, hundreds of thousands of years ago, spoke then it'd be plausible, but he didn't so it isn't. This is absurd notion appeals to the idea that 'primitive people' speak 'primitive languages' which has been thoroughly debunked and is a bit racist.
After, some terrible etymologies and mistakes that a simple google search would reveal (No it is not the sometimes called 'proto-indo-european' it's always called 'proto-indo-european') He goes into the history of the study of the proto-indo-european culture. He actually does a fairly good job about this.
Bafflingly though, he fails to explain, why the word 'Aryan' fell out of use before being replaced by the term proto-indo-european. Simply saying "it took on a sinister tone in the 1930s," without explaining why it took on that sinister tone.
However right before I stopped listening it became very clear why he didn't explain it.
I'm sure you all can guess, but the word 'Aryan' fell out of use because the Nazis that the Aryan people were the 'ubermensch' and that all other types of people needed to be exterminated. This was partly based on the idea that the Aryan (proto-indo-european) languages were fundamentally superior and that they were superior because their speakers superior. This is why they killed Jews, or how they justified it, Jews were semitic people, not proto-indo-european their languages were inferior and their people were inferior.
Christopher Stevens didn't go that far (at least in the first 15 minutes) but immediately after glossing over the 'sinister tone' of the word 'Aryan.' He disparages the click languages of Africa and the Native languages of Paraguay saying that proto-indo-european languages were 'infinitely simple and more flexible.' He says that this is why PIE cultures have dominated the world, because our language is better. This has been thoroughly debunked by linguists. every language is equally capable of expression and understanding, the idea of 'a superior language' is not only bad science, but dangerous. This idea was used in the 19th century to justify the destruction of the American Indian. It was was used to justify Imperialism, it was used to justify the holocaust.
It is wrong, even at the time, and disgusting and most of all it's *sinister.*
Also I didn't like the narrator.
What do you think your next listen will be?
Lingo, Lingo, Lingo
Did Michael Healy do a good job differentiating all the characters? How?
Nope
What character would you cut from Written in Stone?
Every character in the book. As in every character that makes up the text.. like A though Z.
Any additional comments?
nope
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27 people found this helpful