Relatively Speaking: Volume 3 (The Adventures of the Flubb) - Softcover

Fortescue, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1500877832 ISBN 13: 9781500877835

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014

Synopsis

This is the third in the series ‘The Adventures of the Flubb’, following on from ‘The Evolution of the Flubb’ and ‘The Flubb Investigates’. In the first book we saw the development out of nothingness of the Flubb, a strange creature with a taste for words and a craving for porridge. At the end of that book, after many bizarre adventures, he had found his niche as an assistant lexicographer, functioning as ‘word-taster’ on an unusual dictionary project. In the second volume, the Flubb found himself hired by Scotland Yard to ‘taste’ the veracity of an ambiguous suicide letter that had fallen into their hands in connection with a suspected murder case. He ended up chasing the words that escaped from the letter all across England before recapturing them and bringing his difficult task to a conclusion. In the present book he has grown restless again, and decides he must renew his search for his lost relatives, spurred on by an interest in Relativity (which he has recently read about). This takes him to Greenland, for he has also come across certain articles about the mysterious pre-Inuit ‘Dorset’ people of Greenland. The only clue he has is an old newspaper cutting with a picture of of a certain Watt What and his offspring from Dorset in whom he detects a certain family resemblance to himself. Now he is excited to learn that archaeologists think the lost Dorset people may be identical with the legendary ‘Tunit’ of the Greenlanders. These are supposedly giants who live under the Inland Ice – which is now melting at an alarming rate thanks to global warming. To get under the ice he teams up in Jakobshavn with a not very likable Cambridge glaciologist who has been measuring melt water outflow from the Greenland glaciers for years...

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Fortescue gained his bachelor’s degree as well as his master’s degree in Slavic languages and literatures from the University of California, Berkeley, before going on to earn a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Edinburgh. A world traveler, Fortescue taught English in Japan and France before moving to Denmark as a researcher and lecturer in Arctic languages, from where he was able to conduct fieldwork in Greenland, Canada, Alaska, and Siberia. After many years working as a professor of linguistics, Fortescue recently retired and moved to England, his birthplace, with his wife. The author of numerous academic books and articles, he has also written short stories and verse, as well as 'Ujarak', a novel in Danish, 'The Domain of Language', a humorous introduction to linguistics, and 'The Evolution of the Flubb', a lighthearted work filled with wordplay and linguistic humor.

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1500877832
• ISBN 13: 9781500877835
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 196