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A review by prahlad
The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention by Guy Deutscher
4.0
This book is about the way in which the mechanical aspects of a language evolve over time. Specifically, it deals with how nouns, verbs, prepositions, etc evolved and how they changed (and continue to change). Broadly, the author's thesis is that such evolution occurs through three methods: erosion, expressiveness and analogy.
Erosion is the easiest to describe and understand ("going to" changes to "gonna" is the most recent such example). It is a result of laziness on the part of the speaker and stems from a need to simplify words to make them more easily pronouncable.
Expressiveness is the way language evolves to describe an event, say, in more colourful detail ("man throw spear" changes to "large man throws sharp spear"). Here, it is easy to understand the motivation behind such a change, but the details about how new words are formed is often quite subtle.
Analogy is the least intuitive of these methods. It happens when a new word is invented because it seems to fit into a pre-existing pattern of words. For instance, the word "greed" came from "greedy" via what is called a back-formation. It exists only because other words ("slow-slowly" for example) fit this pattern, so "greedy" needed a noun partner.
In broad strokes, the book tries to explain these ideas through examples (the most interesting of which are from the Semitic languages). The author also takes great pains to say that these ideas are merely theories, and hard to verify even in one language, let alone all of them. The book ends with a long chapter on how languages could have evolved from the "me Tarzan" phase as the author calls it.
Overall, I liked the book. It is an interesting exploration of the mechanical aspects of language with a number of interesting examples from English, French, Arabian and many other languages.
I do have one small gripe though: The book did not explore the social aspect of language at all. For instance, the development of a language when it comes in contact with another language was not discussed at all. The formation of creoles, and the role of power (think English in modern India) were also not discussed. It would have been nice to understand these more "human" issues as well as the mechanical ones.
Nonetheless, a good book and highly recommended.
Erosion is the easiest to describe and understand ("going to" changes to "gonna" is the most recent such example). It is a result of laziness on the part of the speaker and stems from a need to simplify words to make them more easily pronouncable.
Expressiveness is the way language evolves to describe an event, say, in more colourful detail ("man throw spear" changes to "large man throws sharp spear"). Here, it is easy to understand the motivation behind such a change, but the details about how new words are formed is often quite subtle.
Analogy is the least intuitive of these methods. It happens when a new word is invented because it seems to fit into a pre-existing pattern of words. For instance, the word "greed" came from "greedy" via what is called a back-formation. It exists only because other words ("slow-slowly" for example) fit this pattern, so "greedy" needed a noun partner.
In broad strokes, the book tries to explain these ideas through examples (the most interesting of which are from the Semitic languages). The author also takes great pains to say that these ideas are merely theories, and hard to verify even in one language, let alone all of them. The book ends with a long chapter on how languages could have evolved from the "me Tarzan" phase as the author calls it.
Overall, I liked the book. It is an interesting exploration of the mechanical aspects of language with a number of interesting examples from English, French, Arabian and many other languages.
I do have one small gripe though: The book did not explore the social aspect of language at all. For instance, the development of a language when it comes in contact with another language was not discussed at all. The formation of creoles, and the role of power (think English in modern India) were also not discussed. It would have been nice to understand these more "human" issues as well as the mechanical ones.
Nonetheless, a good book and highly recommended.