The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language [Paperback]

John McWhorter (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 7, 2003 | ISBN-10: 006052085X | ISBN-13: 978-0060520854

There are approximately six thousand languages on Earth today, each a descendant of the tongue first spoken by Homo sapiens some 150,000 years ago. While laying out how languages mix and mutate over time, linguistics professor John McWhorter reminds us of the variety within the species that speaks them, and argues that, contrary to popular perception, language is not immutable and hidebound, but a living, dynamic entity that adapts itself to an ever-changing human environment.

Full of humor and imaginative insight, The Power of Babel draws its illustrative examples from languages around the world, including pidgins, Creoles, and nonstandard dialects.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Starting with the well-known model of relationships among languages as a family tree, McWhorter (linguistics, Berkeley) fleshes out and refines this model as he narrates development of language. He explores five main ways that languages change, such as sound change and the transformation of words into pieces of grammar. McWhorter further illuminates and compares concepts of dialect, pidgin, and Creole to demonstrate the changing nature of language. Through the discussion, he replaces the family-tree model of language relations with the more sophisticated images of a bush and a net. Numerous examples support each point, including cartoons illustrating German dialects. Indeed, the sheer weight of all the examples and detailed discussion could discourage an initially curious reader. While McWhorter reaches out to general readers by avoiding jargon and using an informal tone, brevity is needed to reach the maximum audience. Steven Fisher offers a narrative language history in History of Language (Reaktion, 1999), but while Fisher presents a slightly briefer account, it is also far more technical, with an emphasis on evolutionary theory. Not an essential purchase, McWhorter's work is recommended only for public libraries with large language collections. Marianne Orme, Des Plaines P.L., IL
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

This book is not for those uncomfortable with change. McWhorter's main goal is to convey to laypeople what linguists know about the inexorable changeability of languages. He compares our popular understanding of language to Monopoly instructions--static and written as though "from on high." But whereas Parkers Brothers is not likely to revise the rules of its game, language is as transitory as a cloud formation. From this analogy, aided by parallels with natural evolution, McWhorter shows us how the world's many dialects arose from a single Ur-tongue. He emphasizes the idea that "dialect is all there is." What we call a "standard language" is in fact a dialect that has been anointed by people in power and by cultural circumstances. All this becomes a tad academic in places, but McWhorter's use of analogies, anecdotes, and popular culture keeps the discussion lively. A worthy contribution to our understanding of the defining feature of human life. Philip Herbst
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (January 7, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006052085X
• ISBN-13: 978-0060520854
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (76 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #55,209 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

208 of 211 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Why language is silly putty January 18, 2002

By Royce E. Buehler VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

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.

114 of 119 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Initially fascinating, eventually tedious January 8, 2002

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

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.

66 of 70 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Words, words, words! March 24, 2002

By Bruce Crocker

Format:Hardcover

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.