Bibliofreakblog

The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher

O.K., I’m a big nerd.  One of the things I’m really into is linguistics.  I love grammar and root words and trying to figure out just what words came first and how and why.  But not all of the books I read on the subject(s) are that good.  Sometimes they veer off the path and start talking about the evolution of the theory of linguistics, as does Christine Keneally’s The First Word.  I blame Noam Chomsky for guiding the great vessel of linguistics along the coast, always keeping the shore in plain sight.  What I mean by that metaphor is that Chomsky said why bother to search for the origins of language?  It’s not gonna happen; let’s focus on what we can already test (like, uh, universal grammar, Noam?).  Thus it was with great amounts of pleasure that I read Guy Deutscher’s book on, as the subtitle goes, the “evolutionary tour of mankind’s greatest invention.” 

Also cool: kick-ass inserts of language trees that look like real trees.  Even helpful maps in case you can’t remember which part of the Middle East the Akkadians inhabited (above the Babylonians and below the Assyrians, silly!).  And more than one Latin comic.

But pictorial distractions aside, Deutscher’s book is so good because he isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty (from his armchair) and really delve into language.  He takes on the forming and ridding of case-endings (why build such a complicated system and then let it all slip away?  What was the point?), the templates of Semitic languages (written without vowels), the economy of sound and language (dropping the “g” on a word that ends in “ing” and also going from the Greek pesk to our English word, fish), among others.   

But here’s the best of the best.  He illustrates the basics of language as communication to the art of language as poetics.  Over time, a  sentence can go from:

girl fruit pick                 turn         mammoth see

to:           

A girl who was picking fruit on day suddenly heard some movement behind her.  She turned around and saw a huge mammoth charging straight at her.

If you are like me, your heart just skipped a beat.  If you are not like me, you maybe just threw up a little bit in your mouth.  If you are somewhere in between and did neither or perhaps both, rest assured of one thing:  When he takes on the complicated issues, Deutscher warns you that you might want to skip this part and head to the next chapter.  But I didn’t, and the headache I got was well worth it.

Buy The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention on Amazon

If you like this book/author, you might like:

(my reviews in blue)

The Stories of English by David Crystal
The Search for the Perfect Language by Umberto Eco
The First Word by Christine Kenneally
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker
The Talking Ape: How Language Evolved by Robbins Burling
The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins
The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language by John McWhorter
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss
Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester 
Alex and Me by Irene Pepperberg
 

Other works by Guy Deutscher:

Syntactic Change in Akkadian Evolution of Sentential Complementation
Through the Language Glass: How Words Colour your World