Just got the following e-mail:
News has been spreading on Facebook today that all books at
Springerlink from before 2005 are now freely downloadable as searchable pdf files. […] You can do various kinds of searches — there are relevant ones in psycholinguistics, language acquisition, natural language processing, as well as philosophy, semantics, syntax, morphology, … Try starting here, then change the search as you wish. No one knows how long this opportunity will continue. […] But it’s a great opportunity while it lasts.
FYI.
Update (Dec. 30): The promo/mistake seems to be over, but it was fun while it lasted.
Thanks! I found more interesting stuff among the older materials, such as van Loon’s Crumbs from an old Dutch closet: The Dutch dialect of old New York (1938).
Goodness Gracious.
I downloaded eight math books, combined list prices over $800.00. Springer math books are pricey. But they are worth it.
Y – Hendrik Willem van Loon! Same guy who wrote The Story of Mankind for kids. I had it when I was a kid. (I could never get my own kids to read it though.) But oddly the book you mention isn’t listed in the Wikipedia article on him. Thanks for the tip; I will see if I can download it.
I tried to use the search yesterday, but it was drinking from a firehose: without a title in mind, I couldn’t get anywhere. And today everything seems to be shut off again. I hope some latter-day Aaron Swartz (pbuh) took advantage of it, however.
The free downloads look to be gone now. Was it all a mistake or a very brief promotion?
Good question. I managed to snag a book on Merezhkovsky, so thanks, Springer, whether accident or promo!
Ken Miner, no, Lawrence Gwyn van Loon.
Oops, thx, MMcM. Well, that van Loon apparently published forged documents (Wikipedia). Therefore, Y, read cum grano salis.
This one has one text, apparently reprinted from a version published elsewhere (by D. C. Hesseling, in Tijdschrift voor Nederlansche taal- en letterkunde 32, 306, 1913).
The orthography is interesting: En kääd’l had twî jongers; de êne blêv täus; de andere xöng vôrt f’n häus f’r en stât. Hāi wāz nît tevrêde täus en dârkis tû râkni ārm. ‘A man had two sons; the one stayed at home; the other went abroad from home to make his fortune. He was not content at home and therefore then he became poor.’
Ken, Thanks for the heads up about Van Loon. I have a fascination with weird scholarly forgers. I found a clear-eyed but sympathetic discussion of van Loon in Nicoline van der Sijs, Cookies, Coleslaw and Stoops: The Influence of Dutch on the North American Languages, much of which is online.
It worked this morning but they aren’t available anymore. What happened?
Language of the Parker Chronicle v. I and II, baby!
The orthography looks just like that of J. D. Prince’s 1910 article on Jersey Dutch, linked here.