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The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention, by Guy Deutscher
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Blending the spirit of Eats, Shoots & Leaves with the science of The Language Instinct, an original inquiry into the development of that most essential-and mysterious-of human creations: Language
Language is mankind's greatest invention-except, of course, that it was never invented." So begins linguist Guy Deutscher's enthralling investigation into the genesis and evolution of language. If we started off with rudimentary utterances on the level of "man throw spear," how did we end up with sophisticated grammars, enormous vocabularies, and intricately nuanced degrees of meaning?
Drawing on recent groundbreaking discoveries in modern linguistics, Deutscher exposes the elusive forces of creation at work in human communication, giving us fresh insight into how language emerges, evolves, and decays. He traces the evolution of linguistic complexity from an early "Me Tarzan" stage to such elaborate single-word constructions as the Turkish sehirlilestiremediklerimizdensiniz ("you are one of those whom we couldn't turn into a town dweller"). Arguing that destruction and creation in language are intimately entwined, Deutscher shows how these processes are continuously in operation, generating new words, new structures, and new meanings.
As entertaining as it is erudite, The Unfolding of Language moves nimbly from ancient Babylonian to American idiom, from the central role of metaphor to the staggering triumph of design that is the Semitic verb, to tell the dramatic story and explain the genius behind a uniquely human faculty.
- Sales Rank: #117773 in eBooks
- Published on: 2006-05-02
- Released on: 2006-05-02
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
Using language himself in a lively and engaging way, Deutscher, an expert in Semitic languages at the University of Leiden in Holland, identifies two principles—the desire to create order out of chaotic reality, and the urge to vary the sounds of words and their meanings—providing the direction by which language developed and continues to develop. Rather than search for the prehistoric moment when speech originated, Deutscher says we can most profitably understand the phenomenon by taking the present as the key to the past. Using a wide array of examples, he delves into the back-formation of words (making a noun into a verb), the evolution of relative clauses from simple pointing words (that, this) and the turning of objects into nouns. On the question of whether language is innate, Deutscher takes a middle path, asserting that our brains are wired for basic language, but that linguistic complexity is brought about by cultural evolution. Deutscher's entertaining writing and his knack for telling a good tale about how words develop offer a delightful and charming story of language. (June 1)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
The linguistic chain that connects the boasts of an ancient Sumerian monarch to the jests of Groucho Marx is long and convoluted, but Deutscher retraces it, fascinating link by fascinating link, identifying the dynamic processes that have continuously transformed and renewed the world's diverse languages. Even when delving deeply into ancient manuscripts and temple engravings, Deutscher interprets every linguistic mutation as the consequence of evolutionary forces still observable in today's living languages. Readers see in linguistic fossils from Mesopotamia traces of the same conversion of living metaphor into conceptual lattice still taking place in modern English, German, and Indonesian. What Deutscher demonstrates most clearly is how linguistic structures that look like the product of deliberate artifice can emerge from entirely natural processes. Predictably, when he probes the linguistic developments before the advent of writing, the author must frequently substitute his own speculations for solid evidence. Entailing just enough technical detail to tempt readers into professional sources (listed at the book's conclusion), this introduction to fundamental linguistic principles opens to nonspecialists a rich theoretical vista. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“A lively and thought-provoking exploration of why language change appears to be haphazard yet is fundamentally orderly. Exciting, witty, and a masterpiece of contemporary scholarship.”
—Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and English, Stanford University
“At last, an entertaining and readable book that presents the most current views on language and its evolution.”
—Joan Bybee, Professor of Linguistics, University of New Mexico
“Thoroughly enjoyable... Guy Deutscher is an erudite and entertaining guide through the paradoxes and complexities of language evolution.”
—Gene Gragg, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, University of Chicago
Most helpful customer reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Bursting with new ideas
By Chris Crawford
I've read a goodly amount of material on linguistics, so I expect each new book to go over much the same ground as previous books, but this one took me by surprise -- it's chock full of new and interesting ideas. Other reviewers have already explained the basic structure of the book; allow me to offer some of the tidbits that stuck to my mind:
1. The concept of erosion. People always shorten words, cut off consonants, simplify vowels. His working example, and an excellent one it is, is "gonna", an eroded form of "going to". Erosion wears down words to the point that they start to lose expressiveness, at which point people tack on something else to clarify their meaning. He presents one case of a French word; I can't recall the details but here's an analogy: suppose that "gonna" someday gets eroded to 'gon' and later to 'g'. At some point, people will need to flesh it out, so perhaps they'll tack 'will' onto it to get 'gwill', which in turn might get eroded down to 'gill'. And so on and on and on. Many of the words in our language are eroded, compressed, multi-layer fossils of much longer original expressions.
2. Complementing erosion is back-formation, a process by which people extend patterns in the language to other words. One example might be the child who says, "I goed with mommy." The trick is, there are lots of patterns scattered all through the language, and ofttimes a pattern can be recruited to a word when that word has been dangerously eroded. This is especially likely when two words are similar in pronunciation. "sing sang sung" leads to "ring rang rung" -- but should past tense of the fairly new verb "wing" be "winged" or "wang" or "wung"? With so many patterns to choose from, there's always grist for language change.
3. He starts off with a delightful point on the common plaint that English is going to hell, that people nowadays don't know how to use it properly, how just 30 years ago the language was so much more pristine. He presents a modern quote to this effect; then another quote from 30 years ago saying the same thing; then another quote from 30 years before that saying the same thing; and so on all the way back to 1620. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
4. I was particularly impressed by his explanation of how the weird Semitic word system (every word has a root of three consonants, and the vowels that are filled in specify its gender, case, number, and so forth.) He starts by pointing out that this system is too intricate, too well-ordered, to have simply arisen by chance. Or is it? He proceeds to demonstrate just how it could have happened using erosion and back-formation.
5. Vowel coloring. This is another concept that I had seen mentioned but never explained. Some vowels can affect vowels near them in a word. The example he gives is the Germanic "gest", whose plural was "gestiz". [I'm probably screwing up the spelling here.] The 'i' in the plural form "colored" the 'e' and caused it to shift into an 'a'. Later on, the 'iz' was eroded down to a schwa (spelled as an 'e', but pronounced as a short "uh"). Thus, the singular is "Gest" but the plural is "Gaste".
All in all, a surprising and fascinating book. This guy is definitely on my list of authors to watch.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Is language being created and destroyed in a constant cycle?
By A. Panda
Understandable, readable, but best of all, enjoyable explanation of the destructive and creative forces acting upon language. This book will convey you a "big picture" of how our present languages could have evolved into their present state and is mainly aimed at the interested layperson or at beginner students of linguistics, not for specialists (or maybe for those specialists that would like to read an overview of their science field from a humorful perspective).
The destruction of language structures, as well as the creation of new ones is explained with very illustrative examples taken fom a wide variety of languages and from different historic periods. (Other reviewers have already explained the involved forces). Most 20th/21st century linguists believe that the same forces that acted on prehistoric languages should be the same forces at play now, so by observing present (or at least more or less recent) language changes we should be able to understand the forces that shaped our current languages.
Creative changes are harder to observe than destructive ones, since it is easier to observe a present irregularity and look for its origin in the past (the action of a destructive force) than to look at something that looks regular now and imagine that sometime in the past it was irregular. Therefore, the only way to observe such creative processes is by noting an irregularity in some old text, which has somehow become regular in the present. This difficulty gave rise to the widespread idea among 19th century experts that language was only decaying. Although linguists have finally managed to observe some creative phenomena, these are not enough to compensate for the erosion that is evident in languages. Maybe written language and the existence of formal "grammar" and "ortography" are hindering or at least slowing down the creative processes. Linguists still do not know if this situation will lead us to a frightening erosion of meaning and structure in language (for example almost all noun cases existing in Proto-Indo-European, Latin and some Germanic languages are disappearing). Personally, I do not believe language will deteriorate to that point, since the very function of language (communicating meanings between individuals) would be threatened. Therefore, maybe we will reach some critical point and afterwards there will be a Cambric explosion of meaning and structure, it's a pity we will probably not witness this.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating!
By Łukasz Duda
A short, speculative history of our greatest invention. In it, an explanation for all the complexities and irregularities of our languages. Cases, verb endings, semitic consonantal root system, it's all here. And it's all written with plenty of examples and witty asides. Really enjoyable to read!
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