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Summary:
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 ever-changing human environment.
Full of humor and imaginative insight, The Power of Babel draws its illustrative examples from languages around the world, including pidgins, Creoles, and nonstandard dialects.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
Adam Spoke Creole
Customer Rating:
John McWhorter's fascinating book on the transformation of languages, The Power of Babel, explores how language changes through time, the mechanisms behind those changes, and the essential mutability of this thing we all use, all the time, human verbal communication. Readable, though at times dense, McWhorter is not afraid to mix semi-complex discussions of linguistics with various subjects, from comic books to popular songs. Perhaps his most interesting suggestion is on the subject of the first language. What language did the first Homo Sapiens who evolved in Africa over 150,000 years ago speak? McWhorter finds reconstructions of this language based on current languages without merit. Languages are too mutable for that; he posits that the first language probably resembled today's "creole" languages. Pidgin and Creoles, the stew which creates new languages, was the basis of the six thousand languages spoken today. Add time, distance, and the human mutability, and we have a post-babel world
Objective Attainable
Customer Rating:
Dr. McWhorter successfully, in his own right, presents his information as an historical series of linguistic sparks, any one of which can induce further reading in other places. His style and copious examples follow the inter- and intra-connectivities and patterns of language itself. His humor, though not well captured personally in print, portray a genuine interest in his non-linguist audience. I highly recommend purchasing his DVD lectures to appreciate his personality and passion, not to mention greater detail to language study.
Really good, even if not exactly what some would expect
Customer Rating:
The Power of Babel is really a well-written and engaging book about language and how it changes, a judgment echoed by many other reviewers. However, I expected it to be a history of the development of language, from the first one to the major language families to the currently spoken ones. Indeed, it has some of it, but it's not its major focus: ultimately, The Power of Babel is about more basic concepts, like what's really a "language" and how languages change with time and mix with one another. It's more about the basic mechanisms that propel languages through history than the history of the changes themselves. And it's quite good at that.
That it mismatched my expectations was not a big problem: as I am quite interested in language (in general) and languages, the book was indeed much fun to read. So, I assume, it should be for other language buffs out there. But some people may get disappointed, as it seems to be the case for some other reviewer.
It also didn't bother me that the text is sprinkled with pop references and jokes; I rather liked it, even if I didn't get some of them by virtue of not having grown in the USA. The text is agile and quite pleasant to read. Furthermore, it has very curious and interesting tidbits about English and French, e.g., I found in Mcwhorter's book why in French you use two words (ne and pas) for negation, something none of my French teachers told me.
So if you are interested in language, I'd seriously recommend this book, even if it's not a history of language development. Rather, it's quite more general than that, but with a great many examples of language change and evolution from all around the world. All that, and it's quite fun to read.
An admirable effort to explain language change to laymen, but desperately needed proofreading
Customer Rating:
As a graduate student of historical linguistics, I often find myself asked to explain aspects of contemporary language change or the reconstruction of proto-languages to interested friends or family. Unfortunately, I don't have much of a gift of simplifying the field for average people, and I've longed for a simple introduction that I could recommend. I was very happy to discover John McWhorter's THE POWER OF BABEL: A Natural History of Language, which introduces historical linguistics, squashes myths about language change all too common among the public, and shows the wonderful diversity of human tongues all in an easily approachable way. McWhorter's book often succeeds, but I was troubled by some errors. This review is mainly meant towards fellow professionals also looking for a book they may give to interested acquaintances.
McWhorter's book consists of seven chapters and an epilogue. The first, "The First Language Morphs into Six Thousand New Ones", explains sound change and grammaticalization, the key processes of language evolution, mainly using French and English examples. In chapter 2, "The Six Thousand Languages Develop into Clusters of Sublanguages", McWhorter introduces the concept of "dialects", showing that within any given speech community there is a wealth of variants, mutually intelligible but excitingly diverse. Chapter 3, "The Thousands of Dialects Mix with One Another" discusses lexical borrowing, while Chapter 4, "Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones" is about the most extreme case of language mixing, pidgins and creoles. Here the example pidgin is Russenorsk, that curious mix of Russian and Norwegian that don't deserve the obscurity into which it has fallen.
Chapter 5, "The Thousands of Dialects of Thousands of Languages All Developed Far Beyond the Call of Duty" is important. Here McWhorter explains the seemingly unnecessary features languages may take on, such as grammatical gender and complicated verbal inflections. He makes the important point that the shape of a language says nothing about the intelligence of the people who speak it, that a language serves its community perfectly well. Chapter 6, "Some Languages Get Genetically Altered and Frozen" is about the rise of standard languages out of writing. The final chapter is the most depressing, for "Most of the World's Languages Went Extinct" is about language death.
An epilogue, "Extra, extra! The Language of Adam and Eve" attempts to debunk the notions that a Proto-World can be constructed, which tend to appeal to the general public even though they lack any scientific basis. McWhorter devastatingly dismisses the work of e.g. Merrit Ruhlen and, in his darker hours, Joseph Greenberg, to the great applause of this reader.
Many readers have found fault with two aspects of McWhorter's book. The first is the humourous tone he adopted in trying to make the heady details of historical linguistics appealing for those without training. He makes reference to a massive amount of sitcoms and comic books, sometimes makes use of McDonald's advertising as an example of international language contact, and likes to phrase things in a clever manner. I found this unobjectionable, for McWhorter has a very similar sense of humour to my own. However, what is objectionable are the factual errors that pop up in the book. Other reviewers have mentioned some, but for the one I found most annoying, I'll throw in McWhorter's claim that Russian has borrowed from Old Church Slavonic, "based on Bulgarian". Well, Old Church Slavonic was based on the Slavonic dialect of Thessaloniki, outside the Kingdom of Bulgaria (and some notable OCS manuscripts have no connection at all to Bulgaria), and furthermore Russian didn't borrow from OCS, but rather from a later language called Church Slavonic (I don't see any yers in these borrowed words, do you?). One wonders if the book was reviewed by other members of the linguistics community before publication, or if the publisher just assumed that with a popular audience it could just throw it out there.
THE POWER OF BABEL is, as far as I know, the only book that gently explains concepts of historical linguistics to the laymen, at the same time debunking various myths of language superiority or great Eskimo vocabularies. It's worth checking out, in spite of its faults.
McWhorter Hits a Home Run
Customer Rating:
McWhorter writes an unexpectedly pleasant style for an academic. His theory is intriguing and well explained. In fact, he has challenged many of my assumptions about language and has provoked me to wonder whether I have been far too critical of non-standard dialects of my own language. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of human language.
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