Geoffrey Lewis – författare

This is the first full account of the transformation of Ottoman Turkish into modern Turkish. It is based on the author's knowledge, experience and continuing study of the language, history, and people of Turkey. That transformation of the Turkish language is probably the most thorough-going piece of linguistics engineering in history. Its prelude came in 1928, when the Arabo-Persian alphabet was outlawed and replaced by the Latin alphabet. It began in earnest in 1930 when Ataturk declared: Turkish is one of the richest of languages. It needs only to be used with discrimination. The Turkish nation, which is well able to protect its territory and its sublime independence, must also liberate its language from the yoke of foreign languages. A government-sponsored campaign was waged to replace words of Arabic or Persian origin by words collected from popular speech, or resurrected from ancient texts, or coined from native roots and suffixes. The snag - identified by the author as one element in the catastrophic aspect of the reform - was that when these sources failed to provide the needed words, the reformers simply invented them. The reform was central to the young republic's aspiration to be western and secular, but it did not please those who remained wedded to their mother tongue or to the Islamic past. The controversy is by no means over, but Ottoman Turkish is dead. Professor Lewis both acquaints the general reader with the often bizarre, sometimes tragicomic but never dull story of the reform, and provides a lively and incisive account for students of Turkish and the relations between culture, politics and language with some stimulating reading. The author draws on his own wide experience of Turkey and his personal knowledge of many of the leading actors. The general reader will not be at a disadvantage, because no Turkish word or quotation has been left untranslated.This book is important for the light it throws on twentieth-century Turkish politics and society, as much as it is for the study of linguistic change. It is not only scholarly and accessible; it is also an extremely good read.

This is the first full account of the transformation of Ottoman Turkish into Modern Turkish. It is based on the author's knowledge and experience of the language, history, and people of Turkey. The transformation of the Turkish language is probably the most thorough-going piece of linguistic engineering in history. Its prelude came in 1928, when the Arabo-Persian alphabet was outlawed and replaced by the Latin alphabet. It began in earnest in 1930 when Ataturk declared:'Turkish is one of the richest of languages. It needs only to be used with discrimination. The Turkish nation, which is well able to protect its territory and its sublime independence, must also liberate its language from the yoke of foreign languages.'All Arabic and Persian vocabulary was replaced forthwith by words collected from popular speech, resurrected from ancient texts, or coined from native roots and suffixes. The snag - identified by the author as one element in the catastrophic aspect of the reform - was that when these sources failed to provide the needed words, the reformers simply invented them. The reform was central to the young republic's aspiration to be western and secular, but it did not please those who remained wedded to their mother tongue or to the Islamic past. The controversy is by no means over, but Ottoman Turkish is dead.Geoffrey Lewis both acquaints the general reader with the often bizarre, sometimes tragi-comic, but never dull story of the reform, and provides a stimulating and incisive account for students of Turkish language, history, and culture. The author draws on his own wide experience of Turkey and his personal knowledge of many of the leading actors. He has left no word, phrase, or sentence of Turkish untranslated, other than the names of books and articles.

Domenico was the name taken by a rabbi and doctor from Safed in Palestine on his conversion to Catholicism in 1593. For some ten years, he served as Third Physician to Sultan Murad III. In 1611 he wrote, or more accurately he dictated, his Relatione della gran Citta di Constantinopli. This is not just a topographical description of the city, but also an account of its inhabitants and the regulations governing their lives, of how the Sultan spent his time, of the principles and practice of Islam, and much more. English Text.

One of the greatest of all English common lawyers,Lord Atkin it was who asked the question in Donoghue v. Stevenson 'Who then in law is my neighbour?' which became the foundation of the whole modern law of negligence. His courageous dissent in the wartime detention case of Liversidge v. Anderson is now recognised as a historic stand on principle. This book contains absorbing accounts of the background to these two great cases, as well as an assessment of their significance in the legal history of this century. It is the only legal biography of its kind. Instead of taking the conventional narrative form it treats individually the principal themes of Lord Atkin's decisions and illuminates some less well known aspects of his work including the critical series of Canadian constitutional appeals in 1936. In showing the strong influence on his thinking of Lord Atkin's home life and upbringing in the Welsh countryside, this study confirms Lord Wright's conclusion that it was first and foremost a liberal spirit which animated Atkin's work. This is a reprint of a work first published by Butterworths in 1983.

On November 2, 1917, Arthur Balfour, then Foreign Secretary, wrote to Lord Rothschild to say that the British Government viewed with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. The consequences of this statement have reverberated throughout the world in a crescendo of bitterness and violence ever since. It interposed a European (mainly Russian) Jewish cultural idea in an Arab land and it led eventually to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Eleven years before his declaration, Balfour had met the passionate Zionist and emigre chemist Chaim Weizmann while electioneering in Manchester. At the centre of Geoffrey Lewis's compelling book is the story of this encounter and the developing relationship between these two men: the Zionist and the Zealot, so different from each other, yet drawn together by forces that neither quite understood, with consequences that were to have a profound effect on the modern world.

Francis (FA) Mann was among the most brilliant of an exceptional group of German-Jewish émigrés who came to Britain in the 1930s to escape persecution in Hitler's Germany. Born and educated in Germany, he was in time to become one of Britain's most distinguished international lawyers; a scholar of English, German and international law, a practitioner admired for his skill and tenacity, and the author of countless books and articles on international and domestic law whose views were very much shaped by his personal experiences and who in turn helped to shape international law in the 20th century. Mann enjoyed a traditional German education and was set for a career in the law when Hitler came to power in 1933. Being Jews, both Mann and his wife, Lore (also a brilliant law student) immediately left the country of their birth for England. Francis was naturalised in 1946 and became an ardent, if not uncritical, patriot. Having re-trained as a lawyer in England, it was not long before his rapidly expanding practice merged with that of Herbert Smith, which was to provide the setting in which he developed into one of the most original and enterprising legal practitioners of his day, and among the most influential legal writers of his generation. While his reputation in the field of international law spread throughout the world, in England he was that rare thing - a true jurist, steeped in the learning of the civil and common law, a 'cosmopolitan' lawyer long before such a term had entered the legal lexicon. This book is a personal recollection by someone who knew him as a friend and professional colleague for more than 30 years. For his early life the author has drawn upon on the personal memories of family, colleagues and friends as well as upon Mann's surviving papers, including the important and revelatory series of letters that Mann wrote to his wife from Berlin in 1946 where he was sent as a member of the Allied Control Commission.