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From accents to politics, this fascinating collection of essays from today's leading linguists uncovers the many misconceptions we hold about language
"The media are ruining English"; "Some languages are harder than others"; "Children can't speak or write properly anymore." Such pieces of "cultural wisdom" are often expressed in newspapers and on radio and television. Rarely is there a response from experts in the fields of language and language development. In this book Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill have invited nineteen respected linguists from all over the world to address these "language myths"--showing that they vary from the misconceived to the downright wrong. With essays ranging from "Women Talk Too Much" and "In the Appalachians They Speak Like Shakespeare" to "Italian Is Beautiful, German Is Ugly" and "They Speak Really Bad English Down South and in New York City," Language Myths is a collection that is wide-ranging, entertaining, and authoritative.
"Language Myths" is an apt title for this book
| Customer Rating:   | I was made to read this book in my undergraduate days and I am writing this review from memory as I hated the book so much that I have put it away in a safe place so that its memory may come back and haunt me one day.
Many linguists have a lazy approach towards language learning and language change, and this book clearly reflects that. It forces the politically correct (but as yet unprovable, and hence unscientific) message that all languages are equal in all respects down the reader's throat. Even if languages at some level do seem to be equal in functionality, how exactly they are equal is difficult to articulate. So what these experts do is to bludgeon the reader over the head repeatedly with these so-called "truths", until the reader accepts them out of exasperation.
I take particular issue with the first essay, where the author says it is perfectly acceptable to use English any way you like as long as it is understood. Of course, this begs the question, since, if you don't use a language according to accepted patterns of usage in the first place, you can't expect others to understand you. And even if it were the case that you could expect to be understood, languages have rules, and people can follow the rules, or break them, to make a point. The author can hope to be put out of a job some time soon if there are no linguistic rules left for him to describe.
Next, he gives the exmaple of a person who says "Are you inferring I'm stupid?" to mean "Are you implying I'm stupid?" and says that when the person says A, we can take it that he means B. Now this is not entirely true, because one may both INFER (in thought) and IMPLY (through our actions) that someone is stupid. So A does not equal B and it is possible for the reader to misunderstand the speaker. Sometimes a language has different words or grammatical structures for a reason, and these words don't exist simply to confuse or dismay second language learners.
One article I did like because it didn't attempt to bite off more than it could chew was the one on how actual studies (yes, actual studies) have shown that in mixed-gender social settings, women don't actually talk as much as men, and that the age-old wisdom about women talking too much might actually be misguided.
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Witty and enlightening
| Customer Rating: | | This is a fantastic book that can be easily read in a short time. The essays are concise and very well-written. They're eye-opening and dismiss many common misconceptions about language and culture. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in language and looking for an enjoyable, entertaining read. |
A study of the nature of language
| Customer Rating: | Readers interested in linguistics will learn that language change can't be prevented because it is a self-regulating system which takes care of itself. All languages are capable of vocabulary expansion to deal with new areas of life their speakers need to talk about. The media, often wrongly accused of ruining a language, are actually linguistic mirrors: they reflect current language usage and extend it. Languages cannot posses good or bad qualities because no language system can ever be shown to be clearer or more logical or more beautiful or ugly than any other language system.
What about the speakers of a language? Despite the widespread belief that women talk more than men, most of the available evidence suggests just the opposite. If you want to learn a foreign language, rest assured that there are no easy or difficult languages. In fact it is not even possible to perform overall measurements of the complexity of a language. Since all human languages allow the precise communication of complex messages they all require a grammatical system. Double negatives may sound appalling in English yet they exist in many other languages. It is therefore not appropriate to think in terms of logic when looking at language use.
An accent is like a map which listeners perceive through their ears and it gives them information about where a speaker was born, what age they are, what gender, what level of education they have, how much they might weigh and whether they feel well or ill at the moment of speaking. And finally readers may be surprised to learn that in many ways - mainly lexical - American English is more conservative than British English.
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Tilting at Windmills
| Customer Rating: | I found this book to be a great disappointment. Don't get me wrong - there's nothing I find healthier than a little myth-debunking. So I was predisposed to like this collection of 21 essays, edited by Bauer and Trudgill.
Each chapter takes a particular 'language myth' and then argues against the validity of the myth, some more convincingly than others. (Having tried to learn both Russian and Spanish as foreign languages, I think it's fair to say that the statement "Some languages are harder than others" is not a myth). The quality of the contributions is somewhat variable, though most are quite readable. This accessibility to readers who may not necessarily have any formal exposure to linguistics is the book's main strength, in my view.
The reason for my disappointment is that, for almost half the chapters, I found the stated myth to be a straw man, which made those chapters not particularly interesting to read. There were two common problems - in some cases, the wording of the myth was so non-specific as to be meaningless, another common flaw was that the myth was worded in a very extreme fashion, essentially presenting a straw man for the author to demolish.
For instance, myth 1 "The meanings of words should not be allowed to vary or change" is couched in such absolute terms that anyone expressing even slight disagreement is automatically made to seem unreasonable. Or take the example "bad grammar is slovenly". The author appears to interpret "bad" grammar to mean anything that deviates, even slightly, from some highly codified set of rules. The acknowledgement that one can communicate clearly, without ambiguity, without sticking to the letter of the law each and every time, is hardly startling, That said, there are some deviations from the rules which are not helpful, because they induce an avoidable ambiguity. This type of bad grammar is indeed slovenly. By arguing against a strawman of questionable relevance, an opportunity is lost to explore the question in a more nuanced fashion.
Other allegedly widespread myths whose prevalence I found questionable were "Some languages are just not good enough" (what does this even mean?), "French is a logical language", "Women talk too much" (are these people serious?), "Some languages have no grammar" (does anyone over the age of 10 seriously believe this for an instant?), "You shouldn't say 'It is me'" (why single out this particular example?), "Everyone has an accent except me", "They speak really bad English down South and in New York City", "In the Appalachians they speak like Shakespeare" (even if one tries to take this seriously, the inevitable question rises unbidden: "how would anyone know?")
I might have liked the book better if it had eschewed the "mythbusting" device, the effect of which was to polarize arguments unnecessarily, and instead had just explored the questions raised in a less artificially polemic manner.
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Linguistic Myth-Busters
| Customer Rating: | LANGUAGE MYTHS is a collection of twenty-one essays written by noted modern linguists. Each one takes a "myth" -- something accepted as true by a large number of people -- and debunks that falsehood in the course of their argument. It's a simple enough idea for an anthology, but it works very well. There are many misconceptions about language in general and English in particular, so there is a lot of material for the authors to work with.
This book actually covers quite a lot of ground. To give you an idea, here are some of the essay titles (corresponding to the myths in need of debunking): "The Media are Ruining English", "Women Talk Too Much", "Italian is Beautiful, German is Ugly", "You Shouldn't Say 'It is Me' because 'Me' is Accusative" and "In The Appalachians They Speak Like Shakespeare." There's a lot of variety, from the particulars of English grammar to comparisons of individual languages to how languages are currently evolving.
I really enjoyed the essays of this book. And I liked the fact that I spent a fair amount of time mentally nodding along with it, reading arguments about things that I had instinctively felt were right without having spent the mental energy required to actually wonder why I thought that way. For example, I really dug the reasoning in the "Double Negatives Are Illogical" essay. The assertion that something like "ain't no pandas in that room" would be negated because the (contracted) "not" and the "no" canceled out each other never sat right with me. So I was very open and appreciative of the author's argument.
Conversely, there were plenty of myths that I had unconsciously bought into without having spent sufficient time thinking about. It was fascinating to see the linguists presenting the opposing side.
So, I found this book a nice split between augmenting my own ideas about language and pulling down the walls around some of my own poor assumptions. The one constant in both is that I was forced to more fully elaborate on my own thoughts. Even in cases where I didn't agree with the final conclusion, I at the very least was presented with a logical, well-argued discussion. And for this reason alone, I highly recommend this book, as having one's thoughts challenged in a calm, rational discussion is always a good idea. |
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