Customer Reviews

The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is a very interesting attempt to present an explanation for the origin of some of the features of today's language structures. The author does not try to go back to the very beginning of language itself, but takes his story from the point where words already existed, but most grammatical structure had not yet evolved, still before any language of which a record survives.

The author uses examples in present-day languages to illustrate processes in linguistic evolution that are currently taking place or have taken place recently enough to be well documented. This lends a lot of credibility to his ideas.

Because the author was born in Israel (presumably having modern Israeli Hebrew as his first language) and has become a specialist in Semitic historical linguistics, he presents more examples from Semitic languages than one often sees in popular linguistics books intended for the English-language reader, but it is all written in a very easily understood way, and I find the book as readable as if it had been written by a native speaker of English, though with a few signs that the English which the author learned was more British than American.

There is only one negative comment I would make, and that does not sufficiently detract from the value of the book that I would deny it a 5-star rating: I wish that the author would more clearly separate his own personal speculations from the ideas which are believed by the majority of linguistics professionals. It is clear that a lot of the ideas presented in this book are the author's own, but it is not clear how many.

I loved this book. I've read several books on linguistics; but this has to be the best of the lot. It's so fun to read that I didn't want to put it down. (I even found myself laughing out loud several times while reading it.) In addition to being fun to read, it's very informative. I took a couple of linguistics courses in college, have read a number of books on the subject, and have studied the rudiments of several languages; but I think I've learned more about language from this book than I learned in all of my previous studies. If you're a student of linguistics, foreign languages, or English grammar (or even if you have only a passing interest in these subjects), you've got to read this book.

The purpose of the book is to explain how and why language changes over time: How did we get from simple "me Tarzan" grunts to the complex linguistic structures of languages like Latin? Why is the English spoken today so different from the English spoken only a few centuries ago? How are the various languages of the world related to each other -- and how do we account for the similarities and differences between them? In order to answer these questions, the book takes us on a fascinating (and fun) tour of language; delving into the often mysterious world of grammar, usage, and phonetics; shedding some much-needed light on everything from the multiple declensions of Latin, to the 3-consonant root system of the Semitic languages, to the seemingly bizarre discrepancy between French spelling and pronunciation, to the importance of word order, to why a "father" is actually a "pater", and how a "pod" became a "foot". If you're into language, you won't be disappointed with this book. It's very insightful.

Guy Deutscher makes learning about language fun in his book The Unfolding Of Language. Deutscher, a mathematician turned linguist, has a great sense of humor and a joy for his subject that comes through in his writing. The author takes what could be a really dry subject [think back to language classes [both English and foreign] in high school - bet you really liked conjugating all those verbs!] and most of the time makes it glide by as the reader gets a fairly deep education on the evolution of language. My biggest complaint about the book [and the reason for my agonized over 4 star rating] is that it starts to feel like overtime has been called towards the end of the book. I think Deutscher already had a sense of this since what could've ended up as 5 more chapters [or at least additions to 5 existing chapters] are attached at the back of the book as Appendices A through F. I have nothing against detail, but would've liked to have seen more of the material sent to the back of the book as extended notes or another appendix. Still, I feel that The Unfolding Of Language is a very worthwhile read, worth the effort, and I learned a lot and had a good time doing it!

The author calls language an "uninvented invention". This very engaging book is an attempt to uncover at least some of the secrets of language and to dismantle the stated paradox. By drawing on recent discoveries in linguistics, Deutscher explores the elusive forces of creation, change and the innate structure of language. In addition, he investigates the way that the elaborate conventions of communication develop in human society. This cultural evolution means the emergence of behavioural codes that are passed on from generation to generation.

Chapter One: Castles In The Air, takes a close look at the structure of language, whilst the following chapter: Perpetual Motion, demonstrates linguistic development and change with particular reference to English, German, French and the Indo-European language family as a whole. Chapter Three: Forces Of Destruction, is a further investigation of how and why changes in sound and meaning take place, with many examples from Indo-European. Chapter Four examines interesting verbs like "To have/to hold" and the concepts of space and time in linguistic expression.

Chapter Five: Forces Of Creation, is a discussion of how new words and structures arise, how meanings change and how languages are enriched by these developments. Chapter Six looks at the need for order in languages and contains lots of interesting information on the Semitic family and its intricate verbal system. In essence, the effects of erosion interact with the mind's craving for order. There is thus a constant search for regular patterns and spontaneous analogical innovations arise. This is based on erosion + expressiveness and erosion + analogy.

The final chapter brings it all together and includes detailed discussions of possessives, quantifiers, plural markers, articles and the various interactions of verbs and nouns. This highly entertaining read is accessible to the non-linguist and explains many fascinating features of language and its structure. There are five appendices, copious notes, a bibliography and glossary of terms. The book concludes with an index.

I also recommend On The Origin Of Languages by Merritt Ruhlen, The Power of Babel by John McWhorter, How To Kill A Dragon by Calvert Watkins, and the work of that great pioneer of language classification, Professor Joseph Greenberg.

An excellent addition to my collection of popular nonfiction books on language. Deutscher explains how language changes over time. The discussion of metaphors is fascinating. His final theory on why languages have tended toward simplicity in case systems is quite convincing. This is a five-star book moving towards four stars. While it is brilliantly conceived and has some stunning insights, the book is too laden with examples and feels padded at times--you can almost hear the editor saying, "Bring in more examples, expand the book a bit". But this is a relatively minor criticism. This is an excellent book.

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.

Some reviewers complain that The Unfolding of Language does not read easily, but I have a hard time imagining a more readable approach to this material.

While some of the material in this book requires concentration, I would not have wanted it 'dumbed down' to make it more readable.

I have no education in linguistic and was able to understand all of the material, although as I mentioned, it takes a little work in places.

Along with books like Guns, Germs, and Steel, The Unfolding of Language is an excellent example of a readable presentation of academic material.

The Unfolding of Language tackles many topic, include questions like Was Latin the ultimate language, with modern European languages being low-brow street versions of it? If Latin and other such seemingly sophisticated languages were so complex, who invented them? How are languages evolving? Why are they evolving as they are? How did languages progress from Noun-Verb, two-word sentences to something like ancient Greek and Latin? Why do languages have reflexive pronouns? and many other topics and questions.

The scope of this book is impressive.

This is one of the most intellectually fascinating books I have ever read. As soon as I started thinking about the design of language, I have wondered how language comes about. Who decided which verbs would be regular and which irregular? Why "mice" instead of "mouses"? Even as a child, I wondered "Who decides these things?" (Admittedly, I was not a typical kid.) Why does our language change? Why is English spelling so goofy? How did the Latin noun case structure evolve? Who invented the Arabic triconsonantal pattern?

By now, many readers have said "Huh?" and moved on to the next book. But if these are things you've wondered about, this is the perfect book for you, too. Deutscher tries to explain the mysterious processes underlying the development and decay of languages. In his style of writing, he is walking a tightrope; this is a book that is aimed at intellectuals who are not knowledgeable about lingustics. At times he's a bit too cute for his own good, but I will forgive that flaw because it's preferable to being too obtuse. Deutscher's book will never make any bestseller list, but it has made the academic discipline of linguistics accessible to those outside his specialty.

Deutscher's book is an excellent introduction to a fascinating topic: the ways in which language has evolved over thousands of years through processes like erosion, accretion and analogy. His explanations of phenomena like the Latin case system, French verb endings, and Semitic verbal templates are excellent--though marred, as other reviewers have noted, by the author's often annoying sense of his own cleverness. Other reviewers have also noted that, because of the author's British education, many of his examples come from British English. This, combined with his sense of his own cleverness, unfortunately yields an obsession with the British verb "to snog" which (when used to illustrate the complexities of the Semitic verb) grew a little tiresome. But despite the author's idiosyncracies, I recommend this book. Although Deutscher may draw too much attention to himself, he also succeeds admirably in drawing attention to the processes by which the remarkable architecture of language is created, destroyed, and built up again from the broken pieces.

Clear and very readable, Deutscher provides the lay reader (me) deep insight into the ever-changing structure of language. Sometimes I needed to put it down and absorb it a section at a time, but almost every group of ideas made me feel as though I had accessed something important and left me eager to get to the next set of ideas when I was ready. Each argument makes good intuitive sense. No section required specialized knowledge, yet each concept was defended with solid examples.

Deutscher differentiates clearly between speculation and generally held views. His explanation of metaphor is not only interesting in iteslf but immediately improved my writing.

I found his explanation of Hebrew verb structure fascinating, especially since it relates to another of my interests, the origin of that remarkble invention, the alphabet. The alphabet seems to have been a Semitic innovation some 3 or 4 thousand years ago. His discussion of Hebrew also provides indirect insight into why Hebrew vowels generally are not written even though they are very present and fundamental to understanding the language. Armed with a better understanding of the evolution of language, I am also more tolerant with, like, my teenagers use of "poor grammar" or "imprecise word meanings".