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Customer Reviews:Average Customer Rating: 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. Dry... Book was very dry and the guys neo-con beliefs leak into the book in a way I found annoying enough to stop reading. Language in all of its peculiarities For anyone with the least interest in that mysterious human quality called "language" this is the book for you. The marginally curious can skim through it and pick out the gems in the midst of the much the more detailed examination of humankind's current stock of 6,000 languages. For those who are fascinated by the sciene of linguistics and want more than a cursory examination of what it has to offer, this book is a treasure. But McWorther's mastery of his mother tongue is what makes this work truly fascinating. It measures up to his outstanding lectures made for the Teaching Company. how languages change The book starts from the idea that there was an original language, back when humans came to be. This seems to me, a non-linguist, to be rather speculative, but McWhorter gives a few arguments for that, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. The most interesting parts of the book are those that detail the ways in which languages change over time. It turns out that most of the change is random, and has little to do with culture. McWhorter gives 5 ways in which languages change: the first involves the tendency of unaccented vowels to get dropped over time, such that the Latin 'femina' becomes 'femme' in French. Rudimentary and flippant -- why did I buy this? This book is written at an _extremely_ rudimentary level; everything covered here can be learned much more easily and concisely, with a much less galling and obnoxious authorial voice, in any halfway-decent discussion of language. In my case, I found that already being familiar with the "Language Construction Kit" ([...]), oriented towards the building of fictional languages, gave me enough grounding that this was like reading Dr. Seuss after learning feline biology, or reading Jared Diamond after reading Fernand Braudel. | | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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