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fionasongbird's review
5.0
Awesome book! I love McWhorter's style - light-hearted, engaging, and full of personality, with relevant (and funny) pop culture references and his own opinions here and there. There were so many fascinating insights; I wish I could remember them all. Highly recommended for anyone interested in linguistics. I used to be a "grammar snob" - but McWhorter's books completely changed how I look at grammar.
gonza_basta's review
4.0
That is not really the book I read, the title was "That being said" but it was frome the same author and as usual over language. I found it very interesting even because I'm trying to write a OHD project over language.
THANKS TO NETGALLEY AND PENGUIN GROUP FOR THE PREVIEW.
THANKS TO NETGALLEY AND PENGUIN GROUP FOR THE PREVIEW.
antiauk's review
4.0
Note: Review copy provided by Netgalley.
McWhorter doesn't an excellent job of describing the weird grammatical turns that language takes. While he focuses mostly on foreign language, he does frequently bring it back to English for comparison and to point out that it has the same problems. I found the effect of writing on language (and vice versa) to be especially interesting. McWhorter also did a great job of explaining that writing is a representation of language and not a language itself. And of course anyone who is willing to write about the colloquial use of "ass" AND manages to enlighten me on its finer points gets a gold star.
I did find all the linguistic examples and terminology a bit tedious, but that's mostly because I'm not overly familiar with linguistics. Luckily, those examples and terms are fairly easy to skim over and did not really reduce my enjoyment of this text. Probably not something you want to give a high school student or lower, but you could reasonably expect someone with a college level background to get what they want from this.
McWhorter doesn't an excellent job of describing the weird grammatical turns that language takes. While he focuses mostly on foreign language, he does frequently bring it back to English for comparison and to point out that it has the same problems. I found the effect of writing on language (and vice versa) to be especially interesting. McWhorter also did a great job of explaining that writing is a representation of language and not a language itself. And of course anyone who is willing to write about the colloquial use of "ass" AND manages to enlighten me on its finer points gets a gold star.
I did find all the linguistic examples and terminology a bit tedious, but that's mostly because I'm not overly familiar with linguistics. Luckily, those examples and terms are fairly easy to skim over and did not really reduce my enjoyment of this text. Probably not something you want to give a high school student or lower, but you could reasonably expect someone with a college level background to get what they want from this.
kailansunshine's review
5.0
A really excellent analysis of what makes a language "normal," and what makes a language a language at all.
pearl35's review
3.0
Popularization of research on language--how Iranian tracks with the distribution of gene M17 in the Middle East, the formations of creoles and pidgins, empires and languages in the south Pacific, code switching, modern Hebrew, the many failures of Esperanto, tracking down the formation of ancient Chinese and how slang evolves from spoken use. Entertaining examples, and the popular element of it is forgivable because of the extensive bibliography of where the real information came from.
sarahetc's review
5.0
I need to read the rest of McWhorter's extent monographs to properly place this on a spectrum from Totally Casual Friendly to Actual Academic Monograph, but with only a few of them in my brain, this definitely cheats toward actual academic monograph. That said, it's still McWhorter. And it's him gleefully using footnotes to reference other academic works and great cartoons of the 1990s. So-- priceless!
The thesis is that language is naturally complicated. Any time you have a language that doesn't seem that complicated, it's because it's been through "the Persian Conversion"-- that is, a lot of adults had to learn it to speak with other adults and they had to do it pretty quickly. His acronym is IDIOM. Language is: Ingrown, Disheveled, Intricate, Oral, and Mixed. The less intricate, the more written down, the more blended with other language, the more likely it is to have been converted from some long ago tongue into something completely new. English isn't the only example and not even the grand daddy anymore, given that English continues to simply itself itself into easier, more succinct sub-languages/dialects (I need to read more of this by him, clearly!) like Black English (or what I would have referred to as AAVE, but I guess he does not prefer that term).
Of the 6,000 languages that we know of, about 200 are written down. We ought not to let those that get written define those that have not yet been.
The thesis is that language is naturally complicated. Any time you have a language that doesn't seem that complicated, it's because it's been through "the Persian Conversion"-- that is, a lot of adults had to learn it to speak with other adults and they had to do it pretty quickly. His acronym is IDIOM. Language is: Ingrown, Disheveled, Intricate, Oral, and Mixed. The less intricate, the more written down, the more blended with other language, the more likely it is to have been converted from some long ago tongue into something completely new. English isn't the only example and not even the grand daddy anymore, given that English continues to simply itself itself into easier, more succinct sub-languages/dialects (I need to read more of this by him, clearly!) like Black English (or what I would have referred to as AAVE, but I guess he does not prefer that term).
Of the 6,000 languages that we know of, about 200 are written down. We ought not to let those that get written define those that have not yet been.
meshsock's review against another edition
3.0
At first, I wasn't into it at all, especially when he was giving a lot of examples in languages that I cannot hope to wrap my head around. I was less interested in the specific examples of how sentence are conjugated, how the word ended up different, etc., but as I continued on and he became a bit more general, I rather enjoyed it. His tone was very conversational and comfortable. Language is fascinating and this book makes you think about how interesting it really is. Well done.
bunrab's review against another edition
5.0
One of my favorite authors on the subject - chock full of humor, and lots of fascinating tidbits and trivia to spring on one's unsuspecting friends. Especially useful if you have friends who think English is a difficult language.