Scan barcode
A review by antiauk
What Language Is: And What It Isn't and What It Could Be by John McWhorter
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.