![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexiscartwheelPardon me while I geek out about linguistics. :D
Earlier this week I finished reading The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language by John McWhorter. I picked up the book thinking that I didn’t really know much about historical linguistics, but once I started reading, I realized I was wrong. The earlier chapters of the book established things I was already quite familiar with: it all started with one big proto-language, languages change over time, languages are dialects with an army, dialects are on a continuum, etc. It was a little basic, but a good review of topics I learned about in my Romance Linguistics class, but with broader scope.
The book got more interesting for me when I reached the chapter concerning pidgins and creoles, which were never covered in depth in any of my classes. McWhorter refutes the common perception that a pidgin changes into a creole when children learn it as a first languages; he gives examples of creoles that were or are spoken primarily by adults. But they have advanced grammar. (CRAZY!) Pidgins reduce language to its most basic parts, and creoles are the newest languages around, so they can give linguists clues about the most necessary elements of language. (Since the haven’t been around long, they don’t have lots of embellishments.)
But the best section by far was at the end, when he turns to language death. I wanted to take a class about language death, but the professor who was supposed to teach it left, and the department never did scrounge up a replacement. Here's some of what McWhorter had to say:
Thousands of languages are dying, and they’re dying quickly. There have been some successful efforts to revive languages: the most popular example is Hebrew in Israel. However, in many other places, reviving a local language can be difficult if speaking another language (for instance, English) allows for greater social mobility. There are already efforts to preserve some languages, like Welsh and Maori, but that won’t work for all the world’s language. McWhorter recommends that every linguist should go out and record a dying language before it’s too late. (That’d be fun, eh?) He says it’s urgent to preserve a record of these languages, even if it’s not “sexy” Chomskyan stuff. (His whole rant about theoretical linguistics versus sociolinguistics was highly amusing.)
The Power of Babel is a good read if you’re interested in languages, even if you have no linguistic expertise. There’s not a lot of technical terminology, and the style is fairly light and a little irreverent. This book may have the strangest footnotes of any non-fiction book I’ve ever read: rather than citations, which are at the back of the book, they’re mostly humorous asides. And if you do know about linguistics, it's still an amusing and informative book; a good overview though it does not go into great depth about any one topic.
Earlier this week I finished reading The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language by John McWhorter. I picked up the book thinking that I didn’t really know much about historical linguistics, but once I started reading, I realized I was wrong. The earlier chapters of the book established things I was already quite familiar with: it all started with one big proto-language, languages change over time, languages are dialects with an army, dialects are on a continuum, etc. It was a little basic, but a good review of topics I learned about in my Romance Linguistics class, but with broader scope.
The book got more interesting for me when I reached the chapter concerning pidgins and creoles, which were never covered in depth in any of my classes. McWhorter refutes the common perception that a pidgin changes into a creole when children learn it as a first languages; he gives examples of creoles that were or are spoken primarily by adults. But they have advanced grammar. (CRAZY!) Pidgins reduce language to its most basic parts, and creoles are the newest languages around, so they can give linguists clues about the most necessary elements of language. (Since the haven’t been around long, they don’t have lots of embellishments.)
But the best section by far was at the end, when he turns to language death. I wanted to take a class about language death, but the professor who was supposed to teach it left, and the department never did scrounge up a replacement. Here's some of what McWhorter had to say:
“By one reasonable estimate, ninety percent of the world’s languages will be dead by 2100—that is, about fifty-five hundred full, living languages will no longer by spoken about 1,125 months from when you are reading this. As David Crystal puts it, this means that a language is dying roughly every two weeks.”
”…almost all of the indigenous languages of North America and Australia would appear to be lost forever as living languages.”
Thousands of languages are dying, and they’re dying quickly. There have been some successful efforts to revive languages: the most popular example is Hebrew in Israel. However, in many other places, reviving a local language can be difficult if speaking another language (for instance, English) allows for greater social mobility. There are already efforts to preserve some languages, like Welsh and Maori, but that won’t work for all the world’s language. McWhorter recommends that every linguist should go out and record a dying language before it’s too late. (That’d be fun, eh?) He says it’s urgent to preserve a record of these languages, even if it’s not “sexy” Chomskyan stuff. (His whole rant about theoretical linguistics versus sociolinguistics was highly amusing.)
The Power of Babel is a good read if you’re interested in languages, even if you have no linguistic expertise. There’s not a lot of technical terminology, and the style is fairly light and a little irreverent. This book may have the strangest footnotes of any non-fiction book I’ve ever read: rather than citations, which are at the back of the book, they’re mostly humorous asides. And if you do know about linguistics, it's still an amusing and informative book; a good overview though it does not go into great depth about any one topic.
Tags:
