February Books 19) The Unfolding of Language, by Guy Deutscher
I love reading about linguistics - it's one of those intellectual paths not taken for me, but as long as I can remember I've been fascinated by the relationships between words and especially words and grammar in different languages. Here, Deutscher runs through the basics about where we think languages have come from and how words and sentences are constructed - though even there there is some new information for me, I had not realised the importance of the 1927 discovery of Hittite with respect to Saussure's 1878 theory of Indo-European pharyngeals - and then turns his attention to how grammar changes over time.
Deutscher's approach to linguistic change was all new to me and quite fascinating. It is a given that people writing about their own language at every point of recorded history bemoan the fact that in modern days it's not spoken or written as well as it used to be; also linguistic reconstructions of extinct languages always seem to generate the impression that they were better ordered and more complex than their descendants today. Yet we also see new linguistic structures developing at the same time - he looks for instance at the future tense in French, at the use of "gonna" and "got" in English, and in considerable depth at the historical development of tense markers in Semitic verbs - mainly Arabic, but also Hebrew which has changed a lot in only the last century. In the end he makes a very good case that there is basically an equilibrium between language speakers unconsciously eroding old grammatical structures out of sheer laziness, but then being compelled to invent new elements to cover nuances of meaning that are needed - and these new elements emerge only gradually, so that "going to" shifts quite imperceptibly from only indicating movement to becoming an equivalent marker for "shall/will".
This was voted top of the non-fiction section of my 2014 unread books poll by you guys. Good call.
Deutscher's approach to linguistic change was all new to me and quite fascinating. It is a given that people writing about their own language at every point of recorded history bemoan the fact that in modern days it's not spoken or written as well as it used to be; also linguistic reconstructions of extinct languages always seem to generate the impression that they were better ordered and more complex than their descendants today. Yet we also see new linguistic structures developing at the same time - he looks for instance at the future tense in French, at the use of "gonna" and "got" in English, and in considerable depth at the historical development of tense markers in Semitic verbs - mainly Arabic, but also Hebrew which has changed a lot in only the last century. In the end he makes a very good case that there is basically an equilibrium between language speakers unconsciously eroding old grammatical structures out of sheer laziness, but then being compelled to invent new elements to cover nuances of meaning that are needed - and these new elements emerge only gradually, so that "going to" shifts quite imperceptibly from only indicating movement to becoming an equivalent marker for "shall/will".
This was voted top of the non-fiction section of my 2014 unread books poll by you guys. Good call.