author : John McWhorter

This is a highly readable and very informative account of language, from its dawn to the present day. There is technical meat about specific languages, their relationships, and how they have changed, all written in a very accessible style, including some laugh-out-loud funny acidic footnotes and asides commenting on various components of popular "culture" and features of the languages.

McWhorter explains why we shouldn’t really even talk about a "language", but rather about "dialects", and how dialects evolve, why some become "the standard", and why the dialects considered to be part of some particular languages are more divergent than other supposedly separate languages. The excursions into how languages change is fascinating. Word inflections (like verb endings) used to be completely separate words that got munged together; word tones are then the relics of such endings that in turn gradually disappeared. As an example of how extreme these changes can be, he describes how peponwi, the word for winter in Proto-Algonquian, became, with a succession of only small changes, the word aa' in Cheyenne (the dash represents a glottal stop), all in about 1500 years.

Different languages choose to distinguish different things, and what they choose is pretty arbitrary, and often unnecessary (since other languages manage without them). "Evidential markers" require each factual statement to be accompanied by evidence of how you know that ("I heard it happen", "I saw it happen", "I was told it happened"). Some languages distinguish "having" a head (inalienable) from "having" a chair. Not all languages mark definite and indefinite nouns: "the" is a weakened form of "that", marking a specific thing, whereas "a" is a weakened form of "one", marking a general thing, which have become required for everything, in English. And so on, and so on.

There’s a lot of fascinating discussion about pidgins (partial languages developed where people speaking different languages need to communicate) and creoles (what happens when pidgins are turned into full languages with grammar and so on). One point made is that languages of so-called "primitive" peoples tend to be ornate and baroque and complicated (the Fula language in particular, with its 16 arbitrary "genders", noun markers varying arbitrarily within and between genders, and the adjective markers varying differently, sounds a real nightmare), whereas the "tall buildings" languages tend to be simpler, because their rough edges have been smoothed off (undergone a degree of pidginisation) by generations using them as second languages. It seems to be the lot of many of these less widely-spoken languages to go extinct – and even if they can be kept "live" by cultural demand and teaching, they too will probably get simplified, for similar reasons.

Despite the popular accounts of "language family trees", implying pure branching, McWhorter shows how in fact there is a lot of melding, mingling, and cross-fertilisation in languages. Even ignoring the extremes of pidgins and creoles, which mix components of the progenitor languages, "ordinary" languages undergo this as well. Neighbouring languages can share vocabulary, and grammar. We have only to look at English, a Germanic language but with a large French, Latin and other vocabulary: a full 90% of English words come from other languages!

Then there is the effect of writing. It has to some extent "frozen" literate languages, greatly reducing (although not stopping) their rate of change. But it has effected a new kind of change on them: written language tends to develop a different style, with longer sentences and more subordinate clauses. This more formal style then gets picked up in the spoken language to some extent, too.

And there’s much more. All in all, this is a highly informative account of language, written in a lucid, enjoyable and accessible style. Recommended.

This is the course guidebook that accompanies the 36 lecture “Great Course” of the same name. It is essentially an abbreviated transcript of each lecture, some related reading, and some “questions to consider” . (I watched the lectures, which is what I am reviewing here, and am using the book simply as an aide-memoire.)

This is another McWhorter tour de force, as he covers the whole of linguistics in neat half hour chunks. You get the feeling that each lecture could be expanded into an entire module or book, so in a sense we get a taster-like overview of an entire Linguistics degree. And tasty it is, covering phonetics, syntax, semantics, language change, first versus second language learning, bilingualism, the effects of class and gender, conversation and speech acts, the affect of language on thought, writing systems, and even how to be a linguist.

This is the course guidebook that accompanies the 24 lecture “Great Course” of the same name. It is essentially an abbreviated transcript of each lecture, a few pictures, some suggested further reading, and a few questions to consider. (I watched the lectures, which is what I am reviewing here, and am using the book simply as an aide-memoire.)

Although the book explicitly states a myth addressed in each lecture/chapter, this is not a hotch-potch of unconnected points, but rather a course on the history of the English language, how it arose, how it has changed, and how it is still changing.

We start, as always, with proto-Indo-European, the source of essentially all European languages that have affected English. Then we learn about proto-Germanic, a more recent ancestor. Unlike other proto European languages, proto-Germanic is somewhat simple: it seems to have had some rough edges smoothed off. This is a feature that happens time and again in the development of English; such smoothing is often due to a language being learned by an adult population, who find it hard to learn the nuances, with this simplified version being handed down. This simplification of proto-Germanic is accompanied by the famous Grimm’s Law consonant shift. McWhorter notes that the new consonants are more Semitic-sounding, and suggests that proto-Germanic may have been influenced by a population of Phoenician explorers and settlers. [Given that proto-Indo-European seems to have had no words for ‘sea’ or ‘ship’, being a land-locked language, and that different descendants have unrelated words for such concepts, it would be interesting to see if the proto-Germanic words are related to the sea-faring Phoenicians’ vocabulary in this domain. I suspect someone has already looked.]

We then get the move to England, with the language being further smoothed by interaction with the inhabitants of the Saxon Shore, and further smoothed again as the Wessex and Northumberland dialects smashed together. McWhorter points out there is a further dialect that developed from a people learning English as adults: the American Black English dialect has further such streamlinings.

Having convinced us through the first half of the course that English is a simple language, in the second half he delves into how it actually has quite a complicated grammar. We get the ‘meaningless do’ formation: why do we say “I do not drink” rather than “I drink not”? indeed, why do we say “why do we say?” rather than “why say we?”. This may have been due to Old/Middle English smushing up against the neighbouring Celtic languages, particularly Welsh, which are essentially the only other languages that have this construct. We get the ‘obsessive progressive’ formation: why do we have the distinction between “I eat” and “I am eating”? We get the curious lack of future tense: “I will eat tomorrow”, where ‘will’ is a form of mood verb rather than a fully-fledged future tense formation. And so on.

McWhorter then discusses different ways of using English: formal and informal speech, and formal and informal writing, and how they differ. He finishes off with a note that English is still changing, the way it has always changed, and we should not be surprised about this.

All in all, another great McWhorter lecture series, with lots of fascinating information, from large structural features to gorgeous little snippets of detail.

McWhorter is arguing against the notion that language affects thought in some profound way. He does not deny that subtle experiments consistently show that speakers of different languages have minutely different reaction times, or other differences, in certain respects. But that is the point: they are small, almost undetectable, differences, not huge contrasts. A difference that makes hardly any difference is hardly a difference.

His main argument is that people think these things are more impressive than they are because of the way they are reported in the press; that they think the differences are stranger and more unique than they are because they don’t know enough different languages; and that they think the differences are more important than they are because of some kind of paternalistic anti-racism (it is typically non-English languages that are shown to make more distinctions than does English, despite there being examples in the opposite direction).

In particular, the lack of knowledge of further languages exhibiting the particular features can make for wild over-generalisations. English doesn’t make this specific distinction, but language X does: therefore speakers of X must be more sensitive to these distinctions; somehow speakers of X need to make these distinctions because of their rich culture. On the face of it, this might sound plausible; but once you learn that languages W, Y, Z of nearby peoples also don’t make these distinctions, whereas languages A, B, C of very different peoples do, the argument is less persuasive. For example, McWhorter discusses the Amazonian Tuyuca language, which has evidential markers, little suffixes that indicate how you came to know the things you say (I hear, I am told, I don’t know for sure, ...):

It is not that the subtleties of language structure greatly influence thought, and that those differences are caused by local cultures and environments. It is rather that languages just naturally and continually embellish and simplify and grow and shrink and change, and have manifold complexities in different parts of their structure.

McWhorter brings to bear his immense knowledge of language in this lively and provocative small book. Having read it, I will no longer swallow reports that language significantly affects thought, and I now know a lot more about the rich complexity of languages.

This is the course guidebook that accompanies the 34 lecture “Great Course” of the same name. It is essentially an abbreviated transcript of each lecture, a few pictures, some related reading, and a few quizes. (I watched the lectures, which is what I am reviewing here, and am using the book simply as an aide-memoire.)

This is a whistle-stop tour of all the major language families, and some minor ones. Given the scope, there is no opportunity to go into any depth. What McWhorter does, in his inimitable style, is paint a broad-brush picture of the similarities and differences, and the mind-blowing diversity that exists (although that diversity is daily shrinking as languages go extinct). Everything we think is “normal” for a language to have, or not to need, from our limited experience, has multiple counter-examples in other languages: from vowels (just a few, or very many) and consonants (gazillions of possibilities), to vocabulary and grammar (tenses, genders, plurals, pronouns, evidential markers, word order, and more), to language divergence and blending. It gives a great feeling for the sheer range of possibilities exploited by people around the world to communicate by making structured noises at each other.

This is the course guidebook that accompanies the 24 lecture “Great Course” of the same name. It is essentially an abbreviated transcript of each lecture, a few pictures, and some related reading. (I watched the lectures, which is what I am reviewing here, and am using the book simply as an aide-memoire.)

McWhorter uses each letter of the alphabet as an excuse to talk about an interesting facet of linguistics, covering grammar, vocabulary, sociolinguistics, language change, historical linguistics, and so much more. That the letters are merely an excuse is clear from cases like W, which is the lecture on slang. Interesting and informative, like the rest of McWhorter’s lectures and books.

This is the course guidebook that accompanies the 16 lecture “Great Course” of the same name. It is essentially an abbreviated transcript of each lecture, a few pictures, and some related reading. (I watched the lectures, which is what I am reviewing here, and am using the book simply as an aide-memoire.)

McWhorter is here focussing on the origin and evolution of the Roman alphabet. He starts with some historical background from Cuneiform, through Heiroglyphs, to the invention of alphabets. He then moves on to lectures each focussed on one or a few letters, and their origin and evolution. This is packed with fascinating details, links between different letters, and reasons for pronunciation and alphabetic order. Fun and informative.