The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language

by John McWhorter

Book Overview

There are approximately six thousand languages on Earth today, each a descendant of the tongue first spoken by Homo sapiens some 150,000 years ago. While laying out how languages mix and mutate over time, linguistics professor John McWhorter reminds us of the variety within the species that speaks them, and argues that, contrary to popular perception, language is not immutable and hidebound, but a living, dynamic entity that adapts itself to an...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 006052085X
• ISBN13: 9780060520854
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

I grab people by the lapels and tell them to read this book

Yes, I've really done that. All I needed was a discussion with a fellow community band musician over whether "in excelsis deo" should be pronounced in church Latin or classical Latin, which then led to whether Russian is a dialect of Ukranian or Ukranian is a dialect of Russian (can you tell we are working on music for the Christmas season?) and I realized that here was a person who thinks language is as much fun as I do. So I grabbed his lapels and told him he had to go get this book. I've recommended it to any number of other people as well. Here's the sorts of people who would like this book: people who have ever tried to learn a foreign language and gotten distracted by cognates, people who not only know what cognates are but go looking for them for fun, people who deliberately try to read the liner notes in their CDs in one of the foreign languages and then check back with the English version to see how far off you were; people who debate whether Shakespeare is early modern English or modern English; people whose idea of a good time is playing word games; people who have ever participated in the User Friendly message boards translating the day's strip into ever-more outlandish languages... Have you ever read any of the "Asterix" comic strips? Would you like to see how Asterix looks in three different dialects of German? This book is not as downright serious as some, nor as deeply footnoted as a truly academic book would be. For that, you'd want to read "Empire of the Word" by Nicholas Ostler. It's much more thorough, and more academic, and dryer, and has far less humor. On the other hand, if you want to have FUN reading about language, "The Power of Babel" is the right book. Some other reviewers have referred to the book's "cheesy humor" or other lack of seriousness. I consider that a GOOD thing; this is a book that a person can sit and read, and enjoy, and share bits out loud with someone else in the room, rather than requiring the reader to squint and take notes and study. If it's wrong to appreciate books written for a popular audience rather than a scholarly one, then I don't wanna be right. One warning: after you read this book, you will have trouble falling asleep for a while because thoughts about the vast connectedness of everything will keep you awake, jumping from topic to topic and word to word. Also, you will annoy many of your friends by repeatedly announcing that "there are no languages, only dialects." So far, none of my friends has hit me over the head for this, so the side effects are safe enough to be worth the read.

English, Russian and other languages - really great book.

As a man whose mother tongue is Russian I feel very happy that English is a language I learnt as foreign one and not the other way around. The reason is that grammatically English language is enormously simpler than Russian and I am a pretty lazy guy. Russian has six cases for nouns - English has none (objective case does not really count due to extreme simplicity). Russian has three genders (male, female and neutral or "middle" as high school teachers call it) - English has none (with couple of grotesque examples like ship referred to as "she"). Russian has intricate rules of how endings are governed depending on plural or single - in English it is always static no matter how complex a sentence is. After the reading of Mr. McWhorter's book I did realize that even with all its complexity Russian is hardly one of the most difficult languages to study.This book is probably one of the very few on popular science (I guess anybody who read the book will not disagree that linguistics is definitely a science) I would advise to include into the list of mandatory reading parents create for their kids. It has an extremely rich historical background for many languages as well as for language as a mainstream mean of communication. The author is almost encyclopedically knowledgeable in pretty much every aspect of it and it reads very easily. Frequent manifestations of author's sense of humor are also improves readability. Several things though I guess may need some clarifications. Author mentions about Russia as about "highly insular nation for most of its history" (page 101). I have to disagree with this statement. Yes, 20th century was marked by insularism due to well-known political processes. But before and after that Russia was and is quite open for its neighbors for mutual interactions and it definitely includes word loaning from other languages. Yes, there are much less Latin loans in Russian language comparing to English. But at the same time there are tons of loans from Turkic family, notably from Tatar. Medieval history of Russia marked by warfare, trade and periods of political dependence from Golden Horde and because of that many basic words like money (den'gi - from tan'ga), cap (kolpak - from kolpak), strongman (bogatir' - from bagatur), chest (soondook - from sundik) to name few are loaned into Russian from Tatar. It would probably fair to say that Golden Horde played for Russian language the role similar to what has been played by Normans after 1066 for English.In my opinion, Mr. McWhorter oversimplifies the relationship between Russian and Ukrainian, saying "mastering Ukrainian is more a matter of adjustment than precisely learning" (page 72). Yes, those languages are quite close as well as they are close enough to Polish, Serbian and Belarusian but they are far enough to prevent one from good understanding when the other language speaker speaks fast. I remember, when I was a kid in Kyrgyzstan I visited a little village of Poltavka where de

What was the first language ever spoken?

If you like to consider fascinating questions, then consider this: What was the first language ever spoken? Since its inception, our species has had the same capacity for speech yet we only have an understanding of languages that only descends a few thousand years into the past. This book excellently surveys a sampling the currently existing six thousand languages with an eye towards issues pertaining to their development and change over time. What happens when two diverse peoples start interacting? This book tells you. When happens when two similar groups of people separate? This book tells you. What was the first language? This book posits an answer. It is therefore nothing less than a wonderful introduction to a fascinating topic.

Words, words, words!

John McWhorter helped rekindle my lifelong love of language with his excellent book The Power Of Babel (a title pregnant with meaning, and a damned fine pun to boot). As promised by the subtitle, the book is a natural history of language, showing how a hypothesized first language could mutate into all the languages spoken on the Earth today. McWhorter has the chops as a linguist, and shows them throughout the book; he also loves language as a passionately interested human being, and this comes through in the excitement of his words on the pages. He loves a good tangent, but generally restricts them to footnotes (which I read ravenously), and any reader who finds them annoying can avoid reading them. Edwin Newman fans should avoid the book altogether; McWhorter's delight in the plasticity of spoken language and his mild disdain for the rigidity of written language will be a putoff to believers in one true standard version of a language. As a bonus, we get his very rational opinion on reports of recovered words from a Proto-World lanuage as an epilogue. I highly recommend this book to lovers of linguistics, language, words, history, culture, and details.