Product Description

In this work, the author shares his expertise as a linguist to introduce us to Russonorsk, a creole of Russian and Norwegian once spoken by trading fur trappers in the summer, the ways in which Yiddish, a dialect of German, has been influenced by the grammar of Polish and a dialect of an Australian aboriginal language which only has three verbs. Along the way we learn how English absorbed French at two stages of its history, giving us Norman French warranty and the standard French guarantee, while Japanese has been infused with Chinese vocabulary at four distinct periods, and that Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are best regarded as three dialects of Scandinavian.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #330623 in Books
• Published on: 2003-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In his enormously ambitious book The Power of Babel, John McWhorter offers an account of the first common language ever spoken by human beings, and proceeds to explore why it then fragmented into the 6,000 languages that are spoken today across the globe. As Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, McWhorter is perfectly qualified to provide a witty and accessible guide to his subject. As he puts it, "the process by which one original language has developed into six thousand is a rich and fascinating one, incorporating not only findings from linguistic theory but also geography, history, sociology. It is this fascinating story that I will share with you in this book."

McWhorter's theory of language draws explicit parallels with Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct and the biological theories of Richard Dawkins. The Power of Babel absorbs and uses everything from evolutionary theory to Monopoly and soap operas to offer a dynamic story of language which originally "split into thousands of branches that each have evolved in part to maintain what is necessary to communication but in equal part have evolved just because various semantic spaces, perceivable to and processible by human cognition but nonessential to the needs of speech, were 'there' to be evolved into". For McWhorter, languages do not "evolve"; instead they endlessly transform themselves across and into other languages. As a result, "today's languages are Polaroid snapshots of ever-mutating transformations of the first language in six thousand different directions". He controversially concludes that there is no possibility of ever recovering the original first language, but that "of the languages extant today, the ones that most closely approximate the first language are creoles".

The Power of Babel is a clever and engaging book, never dry or boring, but it sometimes overplays the grandness of its claims, which can sometimes seem rather straightforward. --Jerry Brotton

Review
There are some 6,000 human languages. But how and why are there so many? How do languages evolve over time - and is there some original or ur-language from which they all developed? Is language fundamentally encoded in us when we are born, or completely learned? These and many other related questions are investigated in this intriguing book. McWhorter is an American Professor of Linguistics and speaks many languages. But he wears his learning lightly and wittily, and has managed to make this book both accessible and authoritative. He's especially good at teasing out how English and French are shot through with fragments of other tongues, and reflective of their only partially buried pasts.

Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, John McWhorter has been fascinated by languages ever since, aged four, he was shocked to the core by the discovery that people could communicate in tongues other than English. Here he draws on a lifetime of linguistic study to discuss languages and language change in an accessible and wide-ranging survey that takes us from the depths of Africa to the North American plains, and back to the dawn of language an estimated 150,000 years ago. On the way he shows us languages dividing into separate, mutually incomprehensible dialects and then coalescing again; languages simplified then reinvented by people needing to communicate with others in a tongue foreign to all of them; languages with only three verbs and languages with 16 genders. He explodes many myths, demonstrating that language change is natural and inevitable, and actually happens much more slowly in Western, writing-dominated cultures than is the norm; and that languages spoken by isolated, 'primitive' peoples are usually the most grammatically complicated, rich in centuries of exuberant, unnecessary linguistic flourishes. All of McWhorter's arguments are enlightening and compelling, supported by an astonishing wealth of evidence from hundreds of different languages. His analysis of dying languages, and to what extents we should go to protect them, is fascinating and thought-provoking, as is that of the impossibility of reconstructing the first language ever spoken - Proto-World. But what communicates itself most clearly in this book is his love of sheer variety and vitality of language, its unnecessary accretions and unexpected twists. From the tones of Cantonese to the clicks of Xhosa, we all participate in this vibrant expression of our humanity. Books like this always leave one feeling slightly frustrated: the discussion of Hebrew - in the 19th century used only in religious rites, now the native tongue of millions - is tantalisingly brief, and more on the precise nature of phonetic and grammatical change would have been welcome. But McWhorter certainly manages to whet the appetite, and his fresh enthusiastic prose obviates any hint of dryness even in the most technical passages. Perhaps at times he is a little too informal - he has a fondness for backing up his explanations with references to mostly American popular culture, which is sometimes endearing but more often irritating. More seriously, it adds a parochial tinge to a subject which, otherwise, is unbounded by time and place in its importance to us all. (Kirkus UK)

The Times
he writes with the contagious exuberance of a born teacher... fascinating'

Customer Reviews

Meandering review of author's pet subjects
It's difficult to know where to begin with this tome.
It's kinda like "Will & Grace" meets sociolinguistics. There is a serious work in there on linguistics, but this is somewhat overwhelmed by McWhorter's immaculate scholarship and bizarre errors.
"Welsh [hangs on] in England" (p256) - sorry, Wales is in Great Britain not England. And there are many Welsh for whom English is not a first language.
The book is as much about a bibliomaniac sitting in his appartment with his cat, eyebrows and DVD collection, as it is about the history (or non-history)of language. Anyone hoping for a helicopter view on historical linguistics will have to look elsewhere.
There is rather more about pidgins and creoles than the book's thesis might warrant, and in the end I found McWhorter's lack of understanding of balanced bilingualism rather sad and annoying.

Overall it's a reasonably enjoyable read if you enjoy languages and 20th century TV. To be honest there are much better sources of information.

Book unsuitable for interested amateurs
I've been reading books about language and linguistics for many years and have rarely been as disappointed by a book. If you extract all McWhorter's own self-referential little comments about his childhood, stories about television shows and comic books, and "cute" footnotes (example: 6. "Hats off to the 'Simpsons' house composer...." 7. "I like that one too." 9. "Dino fans: Yes, I know....", to take just one chapter), there is scarcely any new or interesting information in his book.

Who is the book aimed at? On one hand, the overly colloquial style ("Make no mistake: I love written language deeply and enjoy few things more than composing prose on the page" !!) argues that it is aimed at a reader who knows nothing whatever about the subject and needs to be pulled in by things like analysis of a McDonald's ad in German. On the other hand, the long, long, long sections about creoles and pidgins seem to be aimed at a reader who is already fascinated by that subject. Well, at any rate this book was NOT aimed at me-- an interested and educated amateur.

The power of babel
If your interested in historical linguistics from an interested lay-perspective or the subject is new - its well worth the read - informative and enterraining - the Richard Dawkins of historical linguistics