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Title: The Power of Babel : A Natural History of Language by John McWhorter ISBN: 0-06-052085-X Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 07 January, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.71 (35 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Bridges the scholarly with the popular for newcomers
Comment: After hearing Prof. McW on NPR, I picked up his book, not having read his previous work dealing with "Black" English. Here, while broadening his scope to give a panorama of linguistic change over the world and the millennia, he mixes admittedly for me an overwhelming amount of detail on creoles and pidgins into his wider concerns. You do find that his style is often colloquial and witty, but for those of us non-linguists (in the learned sense), we need such a popularization of scholarly endeavors.
I bogged down in Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" halfway after it started strongly and then seemed to overwhelm me with neurology. Mc W's book, by contrast, explored what I'd always
wondered: why do languages start out so complex and then grow more simplified, rather than vice-versa as in the natural world?
While McW does not exactly solve this mystery so much as admit that languages tend to ornament and filigree given the space and often the initial isolation to do so, his exploration of the topic takes in many pop culture references that appealed to me.
As a college professor myself, you can't get too sniffy about connecting what students (and newcomers like many of us coming to linguistics via such general accounts as McW's) know to what the more educated people think about a particular field. Only 35 or so, McW has an amazing range of examples from his own experiences, cultural and media allusions, and academic invesigations to bring into his ambitious overview.
By the very nature of a popularizing book, any academic or layperson daring to translate jargon and charts into actually disseminated knowledge to a wider audience risks the inevitable run-in with meticulous specialists. Both scholarly camps deserve their place. McW can skip from Chomsky to the quip nimbly. While he must have simplified many debates to make a quick assertion, a look at McW's bibliographic notes show how immersed he is in his studies. But he never loses his common touch with those of us know-nothings. Throughout, his footnotes and asides on such matters as Simpsons and South Park characters, dubbing Married With Children into German, how getting drunk (Germans again) effects dialectal emergence, and why Lloyd Webber musicals pale before BBC comedies all make his more erudite points more digestible and memorable. He must be a great classroom teacher at Berkeley.
Again, his writing style does strike me as rather too casual and some of the book feels rushed out, but his personality and enthusiasm overcome these shortcomings. Yes, a more reserved academic has probably produced a more rigorous work on this on some library's back shelf, but for those of us without a course in linguistics or the luck to be at Berkeley, this book offers a bracing first dive into the swirling eddies of language change.
It leaves me with a question: McW notes that the puzzling assignment of gender in Germanic languages may stem from some now lost idea in folk wisdom or proto-Germanic/Indo-European myth. I wish we knew more about this! Many such fascinating tidbits nestle in these pages, and you'll enjoy finding your own.
Rating: 2
Summary: Interesting---at first.
Comment: Another reviewer in here wrote that this book stayed interesting for the first 200 pages and then became a chore to finish. This generous person still gave the book 4 stars. I have given it 2 stars for just about the same reason, however the interest factor lessened and then disappeared almost completely for me after the first 100 pages or so. McWhorter writes well, no doubt about it. He keeps things going using his considerable wit, charm and intelligence. The problem is that underneath his literary style, he simply states and restates his basic premise over and over and over again. He uses examples that at first I found very interesting to read, but by the fifteenth example, I found myself wanting to finish the book as quickly as I could. Unless you REALLY want to get into very specific linguistic differences in many, many sometimes related languages, you are advised to steer clear of this book. If it had been around 150 pages or so, and far more streamlined in its approach, it might have been a great read.
For those language students out there who have a command of a handful of languages and are interested in the subject of how they came to be, this book may be for you. For the general public interested in how languages developed from the first UR-language I would say that this book is probably not for you.
Rating: 5
Summary: What was the first language ever spoken?
Comment: If you like to consider fascinating questions, then consider this: What was the first language ever spoken? Since its inception, our species has had the same capacity for speech yet we only have an understanding of languages that only descends a few thousand years into the past. This book excellently surveys a sampling the currently existing six thousand languages with an eye towards issues pertaining to their development and change over time. What happens when two diverse peoples start interacting? This book tells you. When happens when two similar groups of people separate? This book tells you. What was the first language? This book posits an answer. It is therefore nothing less than a wonderful introduction to a fascinating topic.
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Title: Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care by John McWhorter ISBN: 1592400167 Publisher: Gotham Books Pub. Date: 09 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of "Pure" Standard English by John McWhorter, Ph.D., John McWhorter ISBN: 0738204463 Publisher: Perseus Publishing Pub. Date: 23 January, 2001 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority by John H. McWhorter ISBN: 1592400019 Publisher: Gotham Books Pub. Date: 27 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: The Language Instinct : How the Mind Creates Language (Perennial Classics) by Steven Pinker ISBN: 0060958332 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 07 November, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America by John McWhorter ISBN: 0060935936 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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