Reviews
The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention by Guy Deutscher
focus9752's review
informative
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
Very accessible, without losing the details. Covers lots of interesting linguistical trends as well as some tidbits and fun facts.
professoremdash's review against another edition
challenging
informative
slow-paced
I’m going to avoid a rating as I can’t properly judge this book’s merit in the world of linguistics. Though there were some really interesting sections, I’d say I had trouble comprehending a lot of this book. If you’re interested in linguistics, it’s definitely for you. Unfortunately, I was out of my depths. It’s definitely more advanced than a general language book.
lpm100's review
funny
informative
medium-paced
4.0
Book Review
The Unfolding of Language
4/5 stars
"A worthwhile read, but a bit wordy and speculative."
*******
It seems like there are 1001 interesting-but-trivial different things to be known about human language that have been gathered through the patient efforts of professional linguists.
If you take any couple of hundred of them, then there is enough material there for an interesting book.
And this book is just one more in an infinite series of its type. (The author wrote a different book that is similar in type about why the world looks different in different languages.)
Because the best written records of language go back only 5,000 years, it is at this point that we have to admit that any ideas deduced from uniformitarianism really are just speculation.
And in that case, much of this book reads like a book on Evolutionary Psychology/Biology. ("It is thought that"/ "it seems plausible"/"experts currently believe.......")
Nonetheless, the changes that the author can present because they actually ARE attested are interesting.
A bit from each chapter:
*******
Intro. It is somehow known that language is encoded into the human genome, but *how* is still a mystery. It's also impossible to trace the development of a language from first words until today, because human beings have been talking for somewhere between 40,000 and 1.5 million years, but we only have (incomplete, scattered) records going back about 5,000 years. So, if we want to know what was going on between those times, we have to make deductions from the 5,000 years of data that we actually *do* have. ("Uniformitarianism.")
Chapter 1. ("Castles in the Air"). Language order/construction is arbitrary. Even though Deutscher does not use the term, he gives us contrasts between synthetic and analytic languages. As well as isolating versus agglutinative languages. Subject verb object languages. Subject object verb languages. Case markers. Gender. Semitic verb systems.
Chapter 2. ("Perpetual Motion"). Languages move, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Old English is completely unintelligible from Modern English but only 30 generations removed. Spelling systems tend to lag pronunciation by several hundred years. English is about 400 years behind its alphabet these days. (Hence the erratic spelling; long ago, words really were spelled the way they were pronounced.) Concept of a "proto language." Proto-German, etc. Vowel shifts.
Chapter 3. ("The Forces of Destruction"). People have been whining about the degeneration of language for many centuries, but we have not degenerated into ape-like grunts. Degeneration is also balanced by the force of innovation. Also, degeneration only depends on from what point you start measuring: it could be that the languages of 1,000 years ago were degenerations from what was spoken 2,000 years ago.
Chapter 4 ("A Reef of Dead Metaphors"). Metaphors are used in order to make expressive speech, but once they become commonplace new metaphors have to be invented. (And this is a source of linguistic drift.) If you read closely, common language of today is full of dead metaphors that were once powerful in their time. Another extension of words is from their initial use as movements in space to movements in time. ("Going to"/ "going forward").
Chapter 5 ("The Forces of Creation") talks about how the word "go" changed into a future marker because it is the most obvious source for the abstract concept of future. And, more generally, the concept of shifting between content words and function words.
Complicated case systems such as Latin / Hungarian/ French are actually created by irregular reductions of what used to be freestanding words.
Chapter 6 ("Craving For Order") focuses on the Semitic root system. The explanation here is extremely speculative and strained. The $64,000 question is whether such an explanation is better than none at all. (Apparently not, if you are a Professional Linguist.)
The trilateral root system of Hebrew/ other Semitic languages can be argued to be an expansion of what used to be a bilateral root system. There are quadrilateral roots which appeared to be increasing a number as an expansion on the trilateral root system. (p.200).
Chapter 7 ("The Unfolding of Language") presents a somewhat confused discussion. There's a lot of ink spilled on the separation between noun-thing / verb-action. And for the life of me, I can't understand why - - given that this author is a native speaker of Hebrew. (For the record, that's the language where verb≈noun≈adjective.)
Paths of metaphor: seizing>possession>obligation>likelihood. ("Get me a beer">"he's got a car">"I've gotta go">"she's gotta be there by now")
Epilogue (enumerated because of the many recapitulated points)
1. Languages exist in something like an equilibrium between decay-by-erosion and expansion-by-word inflation.
2. It's quite arbitrary to imagine that any one point was the ideal time (for example, the foolishly complicated case system in Latin is the erosion + agglutination of what used to be separate words).
3. Grammatical and morphological complexity seem to exist in inverse proportion to the population that the language serves. (Cantonese and Hokkien are substantially more tonally complicated then Mandarin, but they serve smaller populations. The English of 1,000 years ago had eight cases--all of which have almost completely vanished in Modern English--which has to bear the weight of 1/3 of humanity.)
4. Literacy may be a counterforce to agglutination and therefore to more complex word structure.
5. Languages are disappearing at the rate of one every two weeks, and before the century is out it is expected that between half and three quarters of the world's 6000 languages will have disappeared, and almost all of the languages of small preliterate societies.
Vocabulary:
uniformitarianism
poor stimulus
paucal
nominative
accusative
genitive
dative
ablative
dead metaphor
analytic language
synthetic language
content word (contrasted with "grammatical element")
pointer words
property-word
Quotes:
-(p.36): "The architecture of the Semitic verb is one of the most imposing edifices to be seen anywhere in the world's language, but it is founded on a concept of sparest design."
-(p.101): Louis Thomassin wrote in all seriousness the French and Hebrew were so close to each other that 'one may truthfully say that, basically, they are no other than one in the same language.'
-(p.76): "Taking it from the authorities, then, it seems a miracle that language did not degenerate into the grunts of apes long ago."
-(p.268): "In itself, the wearing a way of all those ancient endings is anything but mysterious. As we have seen, erosion is a mighty and merciless force, and given sufficient time no endings can withstand it."
The Unfolding of Language
4/5 stars
"A worthwhile read, but a bit wordy and speculative."
*******
It seems like there are 1001 interesting-but-trivial different things to be known about human language that have been gathered through the patient efforts of professional linguists.
If you take any couple of hundred of them, then there is enough material there for an interesting book.
And this book is just one more in an infinite series of its type. (The author wrote a different book that is similar in type about why the world looks different in different languages.)
Because the best written records of language go back only 5,000 years, it is at this point that we have to admit that any ideas deduced from uniformitarianism really are just speculation.
And in that case, much of this book reads like a book on Evolutionary Psychology/Biology. ("It is thought that"/ "it seems plausible"/"experts currently believe.......")
Nonetheless, the changes that the author can present because they actually ARE attested are interesting.
A bit from each chapter:
*******
Intro. It is somehow known that language is encoded into the human genome, but *how* is still a mystery. It's also impossible to trace the development of a language from first words until today, because human beings have been talking for somewhere between 40,000 and 1.5 million years, but we only have (incomplete, scattered) records going back about 5,000 years. So, if we want to know what was going on between those times, we have to make deductions from the 5,000 years of data that we actually *do* have. ("Uniformitarianism.")
Chapter 1. ("Castles in the Air"). Language order/construction is arbitrary. Even though Deutscher does not use the term, he gives us contrasts between synthetic and analytic languages. As well as isolating versus agglutinative languages. Subject verb object languages. Subject object verb languages. Case markers. Gender. Semitic verb systems.
Chapter 2. ("Perpetual Motion"). Languages move, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Old English is completely unintelligible from Modern English but only 30 generations removed. Spelling systems tend to lag pronunciation by several hundred years. English is about 400 years behind its alphabet these days. (Hence the erratic spelling; long ago, words really were spelled the way they were pronounced.) Concept of a "proto language." Proto-German, etc. Vowel shifts.
Chapter 3. ("The Forces of Destruction"). People have been whining about the degeneration of language for many centuries, but we have not degenerated into ape-like grunts. Degeneration is also balanced by the force of innovation. Also, degeneration only depends on from what point you start measuring: it could be that the languages of 1,000 years ago were degenerations from what was spoken 2,000 years ago.
Chapter 4 ("A Reef of Dead Metaphors"). Metaphors are used in order to make expressive speech, but once they become commonplace new metaphors have to be invented. (And this is a source of linguistic drift.) If you read closely, common language of today is full of dead metaphors that were once powerful in their time. Another extension of words is from their initial use as movements in space to movements in time. ("Going to"/ "going forward").
Chapter 5 ("The Forces of Creation") talks about how the word "go" changed into a future marker because it is the most obvious source for the abstract concept of future. And, more generally, the concept of shifting between content words and function words.
Complicated case systems such as Latin / Hungarian/ French are actually created by irregular reductions of what used to be freestanding words.
Chapter 6 ("Craving For Order") focuses on the Semitic root system. The explanation here is extremely speculative and strained. The $64,000 question is whether such an explanation is better than none at all. (Apparently not, if you are a Professional Linguist.)
The trilateral root system of Hebrew/ other Semitic languages can be argued to be an expansion of what used to be a bilateral root system. There are quadrilateral roots which appeared to be increasing a number as an expansion on the trilateral root system. (p.200).
Chapter 7 ("The Unfolding of Language") presents a somewhat confused discussion. There's a lot of ink spilled on the separation between noun-thing / verb-action. And for the life of me, I can't understand why - - given that this author is a native speaker of Hebrew. (For the record, that's the language where verb≈noun≈adjective.)
Paths of metaphor: seizing>possession>obligation>likelihood. ("Get me a beer">"he's got a car">"I've gotta go">"she's gotta be there by now")
Epilogue (enumerated because of the many recapitulated points)
1. Languages exist in something like an equilibrium between decay-by-erosion and expansion-by-word inflation.
2. It's quite arbitrary to imagine that any one point was the ideal time (for example, the foolishly complicated case system in Latin is the erosion + agglutination of what used to be separate words).
3. Grammatical and morphological complexity seem to exist in inverse proportion to the population that the language serves. (Cantonese and Hokkien are substantially more tonally complicated then Mandarin, but they serve smaller populations. The English of 1,000 years ago had eight cases--all of which have almost completely vanished in Modern English--which has to bear the weight of 1/3 of humanity.)
4. Literacy may be a counterforce to agglutination and therefore to more complex word structure.
5. Languages are disappearing at the rate of one every two weeks, and before the century is out it is expected that between half and three quarters of the world's 6000 languages will have disappeared, and almost all of the languages of small preliterate societies.
Vocabulary:
uniformitarianism
poor stimulus
paucal
nominative
accusative
genitive
dative
ablative
dead metaphor
analytic language
synthetic language
content word (contrasted with "grammatical element")
pointer words
property-word
Quotes:
-(p.36): "The architecture of the Semitic verb is one of the most imposing edifices to be seen anywhere in the world's language, but it is founded on a concept of sparest design."
-(p.101): Louis Thomassin wrote in all seriousness the French and Hebrew were so close to each other that 'one may truthfully say that, basically, they are no other than one in the same language.'
-(p.76): "Taking it from the authorities, then, it seems a miracle that language did not degenerate into the grunts of apes long ago."
-(p.268): "In itself, the wearing a way of all those ancient endings is anything but mysterious. As we have seen, erosion is a mighty and merciless force, and given sufficient time no endings can withstand it."
rhyslindmark's review
3.0
Long-winded explanation of the competitive forces that shape the evolution of human language. Cool to learn about the destructive and creationary forces behind language. I'll need to do more thinking about how these forces combine with the internet and constructed languages to see if there's a way we can proactively shape the development of future language.