The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

Category: Book

Used starting at $8.04

New starting at $9.65

Buy it

Product Description

Product Details

Customer Reviews

Review by Louis N. Gruber, 2010-03-19

If you've ever wondered how languages develop and change, why every language seems in its own time to have deteriorated from previous elegance and greatness, how abstract concepts come to be expressed with the simplest of thing-words--well if you've ever wondered about any of these things, you will love this book.

In the most entertaining way, author Guy Deutscher shows how language is continually created, destroyed and re-created by the same simple mechanisms. Yes, language is mankind's greatest invention, but it was never invented. Author Deutscher packs a tremendous amount of technical linguistic information, theory, and history into this volume, and makes it, mostly, quite understandable. More information is packed into a series of appendixes, which, this reviewer admits, he didn't read (at least, not yet).

If the book has any flaw, it would be wordiness--long, rambling sentences that are sometimes a little hard to wade through. The author tries to maintain a cheerful, conversational tone, and he sometimes uses ten words where three would have done nicely. But hey, it's still a great book for the amateur linguist. I recommend it highly. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

Review by Gilad Benjamini, 2010-01-13

The book provides a fascinating description on the birth and history of human languages. On top of the bare facts, the writer's remarkable teaching and story telling talents capture the reader. Anecdotes and facts are combined perfectly and the book is easily readable without compromising intelligence.
It left me hungry for many other linguistics books, hoping they would stand up to this level of interest.

Review by Baraniecki Mark Stuart, 2010-01-10

Before reading this book I naively thought that language changed with new technical words and borrowings from foreign languages.
Quite wrong. Deutscher shows that it has been undergoing fast evolution in its basic elements from the earliest times, and he traces the changes using written texts from 5000 year old Sumerian cuneiform to the present day.
Evolution involves destruction and differential survival with the constant creation of new words. He shows convincingly how people have always looked for the easiest (most lazy) way to speak, giving a language of ever shorter words. Fortunately language is saved by a counterbalancing "word inflation" involving the stringing together of separate words to give more emphasis. He gives a good example of the erosion / inflation process with the French for "today": LATIN... hoc die > hodie > hui > OLD FRENCH... au jour d'hui MODERN FRENCH... aujourd'hui > aujour d'aujourd'hui.
It's also interesting that traditional and newer expressions co-exist (compete?) until one or the other fades out, eg. "I haven't got anything" vs "I haven't got nothing" or the way a simple idea like the "s" for plural in English eg. duck - ducks, can overwhelm earlier variants.
The book isn't an easy read but it's changed the way I look at language.

Review by J. Murray, 2009-07-10

Dr. Deutscher has done a scholarly, thorough discussion on the roots of language, but I believe he started too late in time. I'm of the persuasion that language involves more than the spoken word. I find body language (which proponents argue communicate half of what we speak), facial expressions (think FACS, FBI, microexpressions), movement to be as telling of a person's intentions as words. Sometimes more so. Yet, he argues language was born when we could prove it was born--"...for how can anyone presume to know what went on in prehistoric times without indulging in make-believe?" "...impressive range of theories circulating for how the first words emerged: from shouts and calls; from hand gestures and sign language; from the ability to imitate...The point is that as long as there is no evidence, all these scenarios remain 'just so' stories." Or deductive reasoning. Something the modern brain excels at. This despite the fact that his cover includes the popular ape-man image.

Still, he adds humor and a highly intelligent discussion I thoroughly enjoyed.

Review by Ramesh Gopal, 2009-05-29

I rarely give 5 stars, but occasionally I encounter a book of such stunning erudition that the commendation is deserved. The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher is one of those rare books that have the potential to open up a vast new field for mental exploration, or if the topic is already somewhat familiar, to completely change how you look at it. I would be the first to admit that I am new to linguistics and so everything here could already be well known to interested readers. That said, few books on advanced topics that are meant for general readers are so well written, comprehensive and thought provoking. This book surely stands apart.

Why do some languages have such complicated case structures and verb conjugations? Why are some so irregular with so many exceptions to every rule? Why do English and Turkish arrange words in the opposite sequence in sentences? Why do Hebrew and Arabic have such a complex and remarkable system of verbs? Why do Indians often say that Sanskrit is the most precise of all languages? And finally, the fundamental question, how did language evolve?

Deutscher tackles all these issues directly and draws on examples from languages as diverse as Tamil and Jemez. He explores the common origin of many currently very different languages in Proto-Indo-European. He compares language to an architectural achievement that has produced complex and magnificent structures capable of expressing every nuance of thought. Reading the book I could not help but think that language is more like life itself, with new species constantly arising, evolving and often declining. In Deutscher's metaphor processes of erosion and addition constantly hone language to the needs of each generation of speakers.

Most of us recognize that sculpture, music, painting, not to mention science, have all become progressively more advanced over the millennia, apart from an occasional setback such as after the fall of the Greco-Roman world. Counter-intuitively, the opposite seems to have happened with language. Though our knowledge of the world is much more complex, our modern languages actually are simpler than the recorded languages of the ancient world like Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit and even Gothic, as students of these languages know. Astonishingly, the few written records from the dawn of history 5000 years ago reveal fully developed languages with almost the full set of complex features of modern languages. In today's world primitive societies do not have simpler languages than industrialized societies. On the contrary, the opposite is likely to be true. These are some of the fascinating topics discussed in the book.

Deutscher poses some hard questions when he sets out to explain how language developed, why old languages seem so much more complicated and how languages change over time. All these issues are addressed in a straightforward and organized fashion with enlightening, illustrative examples. This dazzling book was a joy to read.