Customer Reviews

The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language

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Deserts of scholarly prose aside, good books about language tend to come along in two types. One examines the human capacity for speech from the fertile perspective of Noam Chomsky's theories that transformed linguistics in the 1960s. Stephen Pinker's "The Language Instinct" is the premier example. The other type, over which Richard Lederer currently reigns, diverts us with the endearing foibles of English. The first can be thought of as the molecular biology of language; the second is like Disney nature documentaries.

What's been missing is a good public account of the realm in between, corresponding to serious "natural history", as McWhorter's title has it. Neither so abstract as to be buried in "deep structure" that precedes any concrete language, nor buried up to the neck in the myopic delights of trivia. McWhorter's subject is literal "natural" "history" too - the tale of how languages, left to themselves, die and are born, mutate, divide, and intertwine over time.

So "Power of Babel" is a welcome addition. It's style is lively, even downright breezy. Its numerous examples from languages of every continent but Antarctica are pithy and aptly chosen. Partly because McWhorter makes a series of distinct points, rather than building to a climactic conclusion, the pace may begin to drag halfway through. That's fine; put it down for a while and read the latest Carl Hiassen thriller, or whatever else floats your boat. After a pause, this book ends as refreshingly as it began.

McWhorter notes that the way in which we are generally trained to think of languages has little in common with the way professional linguists think of them. What we take to be "standard" English, or French, or Russian are really anomalies. In each case, a dialect spoken by a very small population near a political center (London, Paris, Kiev and then Moscow) was elevated by fiat and then by the power of the press into "the" way to speak a "language" which had for centuries been a riot of equally correct, ever changing, barely mutually recognizable dialects. Thereafter political consolidation of nation-states based on a "common language", together with literacy in vernaculars presenting schoolchildren with models of proper use of "the" language frozen onto the printed page, slowed the pace of linguistic change to a fraction of its natural rate. This has led laymen to think of the world as neatly divided into "languages", each one spoken in only one proper fashion, almost any change to which amounts to a regrettable corruption.

McWhorter argues effectively to the contrary: that there are no languages, only dialects; that where two dialect communities border on one another, their speechways will mix indiscriminately, and that as long as language is transmitted to the next generation without the aid of recorded materials, major changes in vocabulary, pronunciation, and even grammar are par for the course, even within the space of half a century.

There's also a spirited debunking of the widely reported reconstruction of the "proto-World" language from which all others are supposedly descended. It's a valuable service, but its polemical tone is at odds with the lighter touch of the rest of the book, and McWhorter wisely relegates it to an "Epilogue."

If specific foreign languages have ever fascinated you, whether or not you were any good at learning them (I certainly wasn't), you'll probably get the same kick out of "Power of Babel" that I did.

Even though I don't have a particular interest in linguistics, I picked up this book, and for the first 200 pages, could not put it down. McWhorter describes the evolution of language with an awe-inspiring array of examples from a larger-than-can-be-believed selection of the world's 6000 languages. His sheer enthusiasm for his topic kept the pages flying through detailed discussions of the development of grammatical quirks in the world's "Berlitz" languages, and the development of entirely new Pidgin and Creole languages. Somewhere around page 200, however, I abruptly lost interest. Perhaps it was the repetiveness of his themes, or the density of the examples, but all of a sudden I just didn't care anymore that (to pick a random quote from the book):

"In Maori, whaka- is the 'makes it change' prefix, as in ako 'learn,' whakaako 'teach'. But then there also cases where you 'just have to know', such as uru 'enter' but whaka-uru 'assist' or tuturi 'kneel' but whakatuturi 'be stubborn'."

The bottom line: McWhorter has a gift for lighting a fire under the non-linguist lay reader, but even his engaging personality and style cannot overcome the tedium that eventually sets in as a result of his admirable refusal to talk down to his audience.

John McWhorter helped rekindle my lifelong love of language with his excellent book The Power Of Babel (a title pregnant with meaning, and a damned fine pun to boot). As promised by the subtitle, the book is a natural history of language, showing how a hypothesized first language could mutate into all the languages spoken on the Earth today. McWhorter has the chops as a linguist, and shows them throughout the book; he also loves language as a passionately interested human being, and this comes through in the excitement of his words on the pages. He loves a good tangent, but generally restricts them to footnotes (which I read ravenously), and any reader who finds them annoying can avoid reading them. Edwin Newman fans should avoid the book altogether; McWhorter's delight in the plasticity of spoken language and his mild disdain for the rigidity of written language will be a putoff to believers in one true standard version of a language. As a bonus, we get his very rational opinion on reports of recovered words from a Proto-World lanuage as an epilogue. I highly recommend this book to lovers of linguistics, language, words, history, culture, and details.

Yes, I've really done that. All I needed was a discussion with a fellow community band musician over whether "in excelsis deo" should be pronounced in church Latin or classical Latin, which then led to whether Russian is a dialect of Ukranian or Ukranian is a dialect of Russian (can you tell we are working on music for the Christmas season?) and I realized that here was a person who thinks language is as much fun as I do. So I grabbed his lapels and told him he had to go get this book.

I've recommended it to any number of other people as well. Here's the sorts of people who would like this book: people who have ever tried to learn a foreign language and gotten distracted by cognates, people who not only know what cognates are but go looking for them for fun, people who deliberately try to read the liner notes in their CDs in one of the foreign languages and then check back with the English version to see how far off you were; people who debate whether Shakespeare is early modern English or modern English; people whose idea of a good time is playing word games; people who have ever participated in the User Friendly message boards translating the day's strip into ever-more outlandish languages...

Have you ever read any of the "Asterix" comic strips? Would you like to see how Asterix looks in three different dialects of German?

This book is not as downright serious as some, nor as deeply footnoted as a truly academic book would be. For that, you'd want to read "Empire of the Word" by Nicholas Ostler. It's much more thorough, and more academic, and dryer, and has far less humor. On the other hand, if you want to have FUN reading about language, "The Power of Babel" is the right book. Some other reviewers have referred to the book's "cheesy humor" or other lack of seriousness. I consider that a GOOD thing; this is a book that a person can sit and read, and enjoy, and share bits out loud with someone else in the room, rather than requiring the reader to squint and take notes and study. If it's wrong to appreciate books written for a popular audience rather than a scholarly one, then I don't wanna be right.

One warning: after you read this book, you will have trouble falling asleep for a while because thoughts about the vast connectedness of everything will keep you awake, jumping from topic to topic and word to word. Also, you will annoy many of your friends by repeatedly announcing that "there are no languages, only dialects." So far, none of my friends has hit me over the head for this, so the side effects are safe enough to be worth the read.

As a man whose mother tongue is Russian I feel very happy that English is a language I learnt as foreign one and not the other way around. The reason is that grammatically English language is enormously simpler than Russian and I am a pretty lazy guy. Russian has six cases for nouns - English has none (objective case does not really count due to extreme simplicity). Russian has three genders (male, female and neutral or "middle" as high school teachers call it) - English has none (with couple of grotesque examples like ship referred to as "she"). Russian has intricate rules of how endings are governed depending on plural or single - in English it is always static no matter how complex a sentence is. After the reading of Mr. McWhorter's book I did realize that even with all its complexity Russian is hardly one of the most difficult languages to study.
This book is probably one of the very few on popular science (I guess anybody who read the book will not disagree that linguistics is definitely a science) I would advise to include into the list of mandatory reading parents create for their kids. It has an extremely rich historical background for many languages as well as for language as a mainstream mean of communication. The author is almost encyclopedically knowledgeable in pretty much every aspect of it and it reads very easily. Frequent manifestations of author's sense of humor are also improves readability.
Several things though I guess may need some clarifications.
Author mentions about Russia as about "highly insular nation for most of its history" (page 101). I have to disagree with this statement. Yes, 20th century was marked by insularism due to well-known political processes. But before and after that Russia was and is quite open for its neighbors for mutual interactions and it definitely includes word loaning from other languages. Yes, there are much less Latin loans in Russian language comparing to English. But at the same time there are tons of loans from Turkic family, notably from Tatar. Medieval history of Russia marked by warfare, trade and periods of political dependence from Golden Horde and because of that many basic words like money (den'gi - from tan'ga), cap (kolpak - from kolpak), strongman (bogatir' - from bagatur), chest (soondook - from sundik) to name few are loaned into Russian from Tatar. It would probably fair to say that Golden Horde played for Russian language the role similar to what has been played by Normans after 1066 for English.
In my opinion, Mr. McWhorter oversimplifies the relationship between Russian and Ukrainian, saying "mastering Ukrainian is more a matter of adjustment than precisely learning" (page 72). Yes, those languages are quite close as well as they are close enough to Polish, Serbian and Belarusian but they are far enough to prevent one from good understanding when the other language speaker speaks fast. I remember, when I was a kid in Kyrgyzstan I visited a little village of Poltavka where descendants of Cossacks sent by Tsar in early 19th century to guard outskirts of Russian Empire still speak a strange mix of old Ukrainian and old Russian. Even though I have spent some time there trying to pick up the language it was still not very understandable as a whole despite on some words and even sentences were clear sometimes.
Also, Mr. McWhorter's examples of certain words usage and phrases are somewhat outdated. For example, on the same page a phrase "pokojnoj noci" is described as a way Russian speakers say "Good Night". In fact it is 19th century way of saying good night. If my girlfriend would say to me "pokojnoj noci dorogoi" (Good night honey) my first reaction would be "Why the hell she speaks like Anna Karenina?". The contemporary way of saying good night is "spokojnoj noci" - one additional sound makes a huge difference. The same is applicable to the word "strashyj" (page 24), which may be in days of Nabokov was used exclusively for depicting really frightful things, like let's say grizzly attack. Nowadays it can be used pretty much the same way the English word terrible is used - one can say "strashno dorogo" meaning "terribly costly" and it would be quite normal and understandable.
But in general Mr. McWhorter's observations regarding Russian language are very true. He mentions about articles as a stumbling bloc. After several years of existence in English environment I still make mistakes with proper usage of those as this text I am sure confirms eloquently. Even when I feel I supposed to use "a" or "the" here or there a strange feeling of something unnatural nagging me inside. The thing is articles are perceived as something grotesquely redundant, the same way a letter "d" should be in the word "boulevard" for orthographic correctness. On the other hand I can only guess what English speakers think of all that convolution of Russian grammar with its multiple genders and cases.
Having said that, I feel like we all can consider ourselves lucky due to a mere fact that a mother tongue of Mr. McWhorter is English. Because of that his profoundly enjoyable book is easily available for our comprehension. How would it be if this great book is written and published in, let's say, Mandinka or Evenki? The cruel truth is a writer's talent should always be accompanied by a mother tongue whose market penetration is competitive enough with other 6000 or so counterparts. Only then it can be truly beneficial for readers audience and writer's wellbeing.

McWhorter's central thesis is that the evolution of language is similar to the evolution of life. Languages, like plants and animals, appear static over short time periods but change dramatically over long ones. From this thesis he draws several conclusions by analogy: that there is no "correct" dialect of a language, that linguistic biodiversity is important, and so on.

I accept the evolutionary model of language, but I disagree with many of McWhorter's conclusions. Evolution requires two things to drive it: chance mutations and selective pressure. Chance mutations were frequent in ancient times because communication was largely oral. Writing greatly slowed the rate of mutation, however, and global communication is slowing it further. We no longer live in isolated villages where speciation can take place undisturbed. Selective pressures have changed dramatically as well: I would argue that the most significant selective force operating on written works today is Google. That which is not found is not read, and therefore dies. So how do you make your works more findable? By using standard keywords, standard phrasing, and correct spelling, in English.

...Stylistically, the book's biggest flaw is its repetitiveness. The analogy between linguistic and biological evolution is a good one, but it is also largely self-evident. The author tries too hard to convince, apparently failing to realize that if we're on page 20, we must have accepted the first 19 pages to some degree.

The book is full of interesting anecdotes and variously humorous pop-culture references. (There are enough inside jokes about TV sitcoms that you wonder how the guy found time to write.) The most interesting examples, to me, were the ones that showed how differently a concept can be expressed in different languages...

One other quibble I have is organizational: there isn't much of a narrative here, more a collection of examples. Each one is interesting in its own right, but the author never seems to bring it home. I kept waiting for him to start putting the pieces together and telling a story. It never happened.

Despite these complaints, the fact remains that I did finish the book, I did enjoy reading it, and I came away with a greater appreciation of the true diversity of language.

Have you noticed how prevalent the word "got" has become? As in "I've got a cold" (instead of "I have a cold") or "What's he got that I don't?" (instead of "What does he have that I don't?"). Or the versatile phrase, "You got it." (Which has various possible meanings: You have understood what I mean. You have mucho mojo. I will do as you ask.) On one hand, pairing "have" and "get" is grammatically excessive, but on the other hand, the syllables flow more easily off the tongue. It's easy to see why Americans would trend toward the easier locution. All language is in a constant process of simplifying itself, or perhaps it's more accurate to say streamlining, and spoken language leads the way, with writing a slow follower. The Power of Babel embraces that reality.

McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Berkeley and the author of Authentically Black, so he's got [sic] the chops. The book is filled with illuminating tidbits, such as the notion of "idea packets" - the brief units of information we present in spoken language, which are often run together with "and" or "so" and are less grammatically structured than they would be in written communication. One analysis concludes that the average idea packet is seven words long.

Or take "diglossia," the term for the practice, typical in European countries, of speaking the standard version of the language in public and the local dialect at home. This leads to a discussion about the difference between "language" and "dialect," with McWhorter arguing that all language is dialect. He clearly explains the distinction between pidgin (a broken version of a language) and creole (a new language combining at least two others), and gives examples of both. The book's driving premise is that our 6,000 languages evolved out of a single, original language. I'm not convinced, but the linguistic history he includes is very interesting.

The Power of Babel is an "entertaining romp" according to the blurb, which may put up a red flag for some seriously information-seeking readers. It's a consciously mass-appeal book, filled with pop culture references that produce some excruciatingly misjudged attempts at wit such as when, in a discussion of sound change, the author refers to "the French `cher' (pronounced like Chastity Bono's mother's name)." Ouch! It's the reading equivalent of stubbing your toe.

McWhorter mentions Monica Lewinsky, Marlo Thomas, and Dick Cavett, too, all in an apparent bid to make the book outdated as soon as possible. I have a friend who doesn't follow popular culture and found many of the ephemeral references baffling rather than illuminating. McWhorter evidently hoped such silliness would help alleviate some of the very dense linguistics talk he indulges in, but it's a distracting miscalculation that detracts from the many parts of his book that are genuinely worthwhile. The Power of Babel would be more successful if he had managed to strike a better balance between the two.

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.

As a graduate student of historical linguistics, I often find myself asked to explain aspects of contemporary language change or the reconstruction of proto-languages to interested friends or family. Unfortunately, I don't have much of a gift of simplifying the field for average people, and I've longed for a simple introduction that I could recommend. I was very happy to discover John McWhorter's THE POWER OF BABEL: A Natural History of Language, which introduces historical linguistics, squashes myths about language change all too common among the public, and shows the wonderful diversity of human tongues all in an easily approachable way. McWhorter's book often succeeds, but I was troubled by some errors. This review is mainly meant towards fellow professionals also looking for a book they may give to interested acquaintances.

McWhorter's book consists of seven chapters and an epilogue. The first, "The First Language Morphs into Six Thousand New Ones", explains sound change and grammaticalization, the key processes of language evolution, mainly using French and English examples. In chapter 2, "The Six Thousand Languages Develop into Clusters of Sublanguages", McWhorter introduces the concept of "dialects", showing that within any given speech community there is a wealth of variants, mutually intelligible but excitingly diverse. Chapter 3, "The Thousands of Dialects Mix with One Another" discusses lexical borrowing, while Chapter 4, "Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones" is about the most extreme case of language mixing, pidgins and creoles. Here the example pidgin is Russenorsk, that curious mix of Russian and Norwegian that don't deserve the obscurity into which it has fallen.

Chapter 5, "The Thousands of Dialects of Thousands of Languages All Developed Far Beyond the Call of Duty" is important. Here McWhorter explains the seemingly unnecessary features languages may take on, such as grammatical gender and complicated verbal inflections. He makes the important point that the shape of a language says nothing about the intelligence of the people who speak it, that a language serves its community perfectly well. Chapter 6, "Some Languages Get Genetically Altered and Frozen" is about the rise of standard languages out of writing. The final chapter is the most depressing, for "Most of the World's Languages Went Extinct" is about language death.

An epilogue, "Extra, extra! The Language of Adam and Eve" attempts to debunk the notions that a Proto-World can be constructed, which tend to appeal to the general public even though they lack any scientific basis. McWhorter devastatingly dismisses the work of e.g. Merrit Ruhlen and, in his darker hours, Joseph Greenberg, to the great applause of this reader.

Many readers have found fault with two aspects of McWhorter's book. The first is the humourous tone he adopted in trying to make the heady details of historical linguistics appealing for those without training. He makes reference to a massive amount of sitcoms and comic books, sometimes makes use of McDonald's advertising as an example of international language contact, and likes to phrase things in a clever manner. I found this unobjectionable, for McWhorter has a very similar sense of humour to my own. However, what is objectionable are the factual errors that pop up in the book. Other reviewers have mentioned some, but for the one I found most annoying, I'll throw in McWhorter's claim that Russian has borrowed from Old Church Slavonic, "based on Bulgarian". Well, Old Church Slavonic was based on the Slavonic dialect of Thessaloniki, outside the Kingdom of Bulgaria (and some notable OCS manuscripts have no connection at all to Bulgaria), and furthermore Russian didn't borrow from OCS, but rather from a later language called Church Slavonic (I don't see any yers in these borrowed words, do you?). One wonders if the book was reviewed by other members of the linguistics community before publication, or if the publisher just assumed that with a popular audience it could just throw it out there.

THE POWER OF BABEL is, as far as I know, the only book that gently explains concepts of historical linguistics to the laymen, at the same time debunking various myths of language superiority or great Eskimo vocabularies. It's worth checking out, in spite of its faults.

The Power of Babel is fresh, direct and entertaining. It asks you to think about language the way we think about life: it's dynamic, always different, and ever-evolving. And while we corral the many different flavors of languages into narrow categories, the better to poke and pry at them, the reality remains: languages gradiate from one to another - they are not discrete objects like horses in the field, but a continuum like colors in the sky.

Most of the languages you can speak are descended from one language spoken by a Eurasian tribe some 10,000ish years ago. This book walks you through all the ways in which the words of that language have twisted, turned, separated, and merged to become some of the six thousand languages we have today.

For McWhorter, languages are dialects and vice versa. He sees a language as an always bubbling, changing, shifting sort of art. For example, the divisions in English today are as slight as different words: "truck" and "lorry", or the way Frasier's Daphne would pronounce Mr. Humphries - "Mister `Oomphries," or the regional variations "soda" and "pop." Nonetheless, these slight tendrils are the roots, ultimately, for the language splitting into dialects as widely varying as the "dialects" of Latin called French and Spanish (actually the exported street slang from the Roman capital at the time of each province's conquest).

He has a sharp eye for the social as well as the scientific: "At a party, even if you don't know what a group of people are talking about, you can almost always ease your way into any conversation by simply interjecting at a suitable pause `But where do you draw the line?'" A similar knowingness informs this entire book.

With an encyclopedic comprehension and ready ability, he explores languages as we find them in their natural habitat. In the deceased Soviet Union, where the distinction between former provinces is politically important, Russian, Ukranian, and Belorussian are designated separate languages; in China, where "one Chinese nation" has been the political mantra for 2,200 years, eight fundamentally different languages are deemed to be mere "dialects" of the mother tongue.

McWhorter's a funny, self-aware guy. Sometimes this gets a little cloying: on switching from one language to another he notes: "Javanese (note the v; now we're in Java)". He's doing it to be accessible but sometimes it comes across as over-the-top or, occasionally, patronizing.

McWhorter provided my first encounter with such interesting phenomena as evidential markers, where the suffix changes based on how you know it happened - you heard it yourself, you saw it, someone else told you, etc.; and the wonderful adverbial prefixes of the Central Pomo language of California in which doing something orally or by slicing or with heat or by biting or by shaking each are indicated with their own adverbial prefix. Deeply enjoyable stuff for a language maven!

McWhorter marches on and on, in widely researched and fascinating detail, through pace of language change and printing's effect on it, pidgin, borrowings, language acquisition, standard dialects and good English, creoles, and so on.

And for those of you with any interest in the concept of a "Proto-World" language (the thesis that all of the world's languages are descended from a single ancestor), and perhaps even a bit romantically inclined toward believing in it (as I am), McWhorter concisely, conclusively, and devastatingly separates the theory from the evidence in his 17-page Epilogue.

In sum, there is much you don't know about the natural evolution of languages, even if you haunt the linguistics section here on Amazon, and John McWhorter is your pleasant, intelligent, voluble, and entertaining guide. Slightly better editing to remove self-indulgent tics of mannerisms would really be the only critique I could offer.

This book is excellent for the linguistically curious, the word aware, or the language lover. Enjoy!