Rating: 
Summary: Interesting---at first.
Review: Another reviewer in here wrote that this book stayed interesting for the first 200 pages and then became a chore to finish. This generous person still gave the book 4 stars. I have given it 2 stars for just about the same reason, however the interest factor lessened and then disappeared almost completely for me after the first 100 pages or so. McWhorter writes well, no doubt about it. He keeps things going using his considerable wit, charm and intelligence. The problem is that underneath his literary style, he simply states and restates his basic premise over and over and over again. He uses examples that at first I found very interesting to read, but by the fifteenth example, I found myself wanting to finish the book as quickly as I could. Unless you REALLY want to get into very specific linguistic differences in many, many sometimes related languages, you are advised to steer clear of this book. If it had been around 150 pages or so, and far more streamlined in its approach, it might have been a great read.
For those language students out there who have a command of a handful of languages and are interested in the subject of how they came to be, this book may be for you. For the general public interested in how languages developed from the first UR-language I would say that this book is probably not for you.
Rating: 
Summary: Initially fascinating, eventually tedious
Review: Even though I don't have a particular interest in linguistics, I picked up this book, and for the first 200 pages, could not put it down. McWhorter describes the evolution of language with an awe-inspiring array of examples from a larger-than-can-be-believed selection of the world's 6000 languages. His sheer enthusiasm for his topic kept the pages flying through detailed discussions of the development of grammatical quirks in the world's "Berlitz" languages, and the development of entirely new Pidgin and Creole languages. Somewhere around page 200, however, I abruptly lost interest. Perhaps it was the repetiveness of his themes, or the density of the examples, but all of a sudden I just didn't care anymore that (to pick a random quote from the book): "In Maori, whaka- is the 'makes it change' prefix, as in ako 'learn,' whakaako 'teach'. But then there also cases where you 'just have to know', such as uru 'enter' but whaka-uru 'assist' or tuturi 'kneel' but whakatuturi 'be stubborn'." The bottom line: McWhorter has a gift for lighting a fire under the non-linguist lay reader, but even his engaging personality and style cannot overcome the tedium that eventually sets in as a result of his admirable refusal to talk down to his audience.
Rating: 
Summary: At last, a Stephen Jay Gould / Oliver Sacks for linguistics
Review: For those of you who have been interested in language and yet turned off by linguistics, this is a wonderful book. McWhorter's style is breezey and informal and some of his allusions will undoubtely either be missed or unappreciated by some readers, but this is true of most books. This book reads like an anthology of the best lectures by your favorite professor in college. I imagine that McWhorter must make a fantastic classroom teacher. He superbly takes a complicated, and I believe it is fair to say, somewhat arcane topic and makes it seem vital and interesting to the common, educated reader. Like Stephen Jay Gould for paleobiology and Oliver Sacks for neurology, McWhorter has the ability to present complex ideas in useful and entertaining ways. The reviewer listed above who has been "reading books about language and linguistics for many years" states that this book is "boring for non-neophytes". He/she may be right. However, I am a neophyte to linguistics, despite being a professor of history, and I would venture to guess that even linguists, for whom perhaps this is all old hat, could learn something about presentation if they stopped looking down their noses long enough to see beyond their insular academic world of other linguists. Graduate students in particular are frequently socialized into the professional belief that if something is "popular" and not opaque, that it must be worthless. This is the ideology which has created the gaping chasm between academic writers and our natural audience: educated, "lay" readers. If Chomsky and his ilk could distill their ideas into readable prose like McWhorter does, the world would be a richer place.
Rating: 
Summary: An uncertain alchemy of lead and gold
Review: Have you noticed how prevalent the word "got" has become? As in "I've got a cold" (instead of "I have a cold") or "What's he got that I don't?" (instead of "What does he have that I don't?"). Or the versatile phrase, "You got it." (Which has various possible meanings: You have understood what I mean. You have mucho mojo. I will do as you ask.) On one hand, pairing "have" and "get" is grammatically excessive, but on the other hand, the syllables flow more easily off the tongue. It's easy to see why Americans would trend toward the easier locution. All language is in a constant process of simplifying itself, or perhaps it's more accurate to say streamlining, and spoken language leads the way, with writing a slow follower. The Power of Babel embraces that reality.
McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Berkeley and the author of Authentically Black, so he's got [sic] the chops. The book is filled with illuminating tidbits, such as the notion of "idea packets" - the brief units of information we present in spoken language, which are often run together with "and" or "so" and are less grammatically structured than they would be in written communication. One analysis concludes that the average idea packet is seven words long. Or take "diglossia," the term for the practice, typical in European countries, of speaking the standard version of the language in public and the local dialect at home. This leads to a discussion about the difference between "language" and "dialect," with McWhorter arguing that all language is dialect. He clearly explains the distinction between pidgin (a broken version of a language) and creole (a new language combining at least two others), and gives examples of both. The book's driving premise is that our 6,000 languages evolved out of a single, original language. I'm not convinced, but the linguistic history he includes is very interesting. The Power of Babel is an "entertaining romp" according to the blurb, which may put up a red flag for some seriously information-seeking readers. It's a consciously mass-appeal book, filled with pop culture references that produce some excruciatingly misjudged attempts at wit such as when, in a discussion of sound change, the author refers to "the French `cher' (pronounced like Chastity Bono's mother's name)." Ouch! It's the reading equivalent of stubbing your toe. McWhorter mentions Monica Lewinsky, Marlo Thomas, and Dick Cavett, too, all in an apparent bid to make the book outdated as soon as possible. I have a friend who doesn't follow popular culture and found many of the ephemeral references baffling rather than illuminating. McWhorter evidently hoped such silliness would help alleviate some of the very dense linguistics talk he indulges in, but it's a distracting miscalculation that detracts from the many parts of his book that are genuinely worthwhile. The Power of Babel would be more successful if he had managed to strike a better balance between the two.
Rating:
Summary: The Evolution of Expression
Review: Here McWhorter takes a concept from biology, evolution, and applies it to linguistics, resulting in an often fascinating treatment of how human language changes and develops over time. Despite cultural snobs who try to enforce strict and unchanging practices in speaking one's language, McWhorter shows us that languages are incredibly fluid and transitory, and new ones are always being born while old ones go extinct. One interesting case of language evolution is that the grammar of modern English is descended directly from one sub-family of languages, Germanic, but 99% of the vocabulary has been borrowed from a different sub-family, the Romance languages. This is a function of vast forces of politics and history, rather than education or cultural identity.
We also find that there is a fine line between languages and dialects, with a continuum of regional tongues bridging the gaps between "official" languages; most regional or social dialects are legitimately robust and intricate rather than uneducated; and the socially acceptable "standard" version of any language (such as the English taught in schools) is merely the local dialect of whatever group came to political/economic power. Most interestingly, McWhorter shows how writing a language freezes it in time in an "acceptable" version, and puts the brakes on the continuous evolution that has led to so many unique and expressive tongues around the world. McWhorter also has some great thoughts on the current extinction of thousands of indigenous languages and dialects around the world in favor of the less expressive languages of the powerful.
A couple of things keep this book from being a true classic though. McWhorter has a rather unfocused writing style with an annoying amount of cheesy humor that is merely distracting. This usually appears in footnotes with barely-useful pop culture observations and bad disconnected jokes like "chimpanzees have always made me extremely uncomfortable." At the more fundamental level, McWhorter operates from a theoretical approach that appears to be accepted by a healthy percentage of, but not all, linguists - the theory that there was one original human language that developed among the first proto-humans who learned to speak, and emerged before the great migrations out of Africa and then evolved from one starting point into tens of thousands of tongues worldwide. I'm sure not a linguist but I did not emerge from this book convinced of that theory, which does place a certain amount of doubt on some of McWhorter's conclusions, even though they are usually quite fascinating. [~doomsdayer520~]
Rating:
Summary: Very good popular-level treatment
Review: I was at first a bit unsure as to whether to give this book a full 5 stars. Sure, I liked it a lot, but it does need some negative comments here. But I decided I liked it enough to give it 5. At first, I felt that the book was not as well integrated as I'd like. With further reading it grew on me. McWhorter covers a lot of topics in comparative/historical linguistics, and does so in a very readable style, but the breadth of his coverage seemed to me at first to be just too great. As I said, as I read further, I changed my mind somewhat. I still think that it could be somewhat better integrated, but I think it's not as badly integrated as I first thought. One thing that I can fault McWhorter on is that if you have read his other book, "The Word on the Street," you'll find him repeating some of his ideas. They aren't at the same level of prominence: major theses he advances in the earlier book become minor points here. But it does seem he could at least change his examples. He gives the SAME example of a sentence that is traditionally considered ungrammatical which everyone naturally uses, and the SAME example of a passage in Shakespeare that is universally misunderstood because of semantic change over time, that he used in the other book. But he's not as bad as Keith Devlin, who has published popularizations of math with whole chapters taken verbatim from earlier books. So again, I can't fault McWhorter that much. Other than these two comments, however, I have only positive things to say. I think that this book is a good treatment of historical and comparative linguistics, of dialect variation and pidgin/creole structure, and such at a level accessible to the interested general public. And so I recommend it to all interested readers.
Rating:
Summary: Boring for non-neophytes
Review: I've been reading books about language and linguistics for many years and have rarely been as disappointed and annoyed by a book. If you extract all McWhorter's own self-referential little comments about his childhood, stories about television shows and comic books, and "cute" footnotes (example: 6. "Hats off to the 'Simpsons' house composer...." 7. "I like that one too." 9. "Dino fans: Yes, I know....", to take just one chapter), there is scarcely any new or interesting information in his book. Who is the book aimed at? On one hand, the overly colloquial style ("Make no mistake: I love written language deeply and enjoy few things more than composing prose on the page" !!) argues that it is aimed at a reader who knows nothing whatever about the subject and needs to be pulled in by things like analysis of a McDonald's ad in German, badly reprinted comic strips, or an explanation that some languages have tones. On the other hand, the long, long, l-o-o-o-o-ng sections about creoles and pidgins seem to be aimed at a reader who is already fascinated by that subject. Well, at any rate this book was NOT aimed at me-- an interested and educated amateur.
Rating:
Summary: Pleasures for the linguistically curious
Review: If you are interested in languages, then this book is definitely worth your time. As a language aficionado myself, I was most satisfied with the following aspects of The Power of Babel: -With painstaking attention to detail, the author illustrates the various processes by which languages evolve, cross-pollinate, and sometimes die. He raises and answers crucial questions such as: Why do some languages have spectacularly complex systems of grammar, whereas others are more streamlined and efficient? Why do languages like Vietnamese employ tonal systems? -McWhorter confronts the question of language extinction with realism. As the author explains, languages have been dying for eons. Some threatened languages can be partially saved, but a certain degree of linguistic consolidation is inevitable in the modern world. -The author describes the evolution of English with clarity, mostly by citing examples of how English was spoken at various points in history. Wherever possible, he ties defunct usages of English to modern English usages, which is especially fascinating. For example, McWhorter tells us that the word "hound," a secondary word for "dog" in modern English, was once the primary word used by English speakers (from the Germanic word "hund"). -I am interested in extinct and obscure languages, and I found more than my fill of them in this book. You will read not only about Latin and Occitan, but also about seldom discussed languages such as Tocharian and Dalmatian. As several other reviewers pointed out, McWhorter presents a lot of detail about the mechanics of some specific languages; in some cases, this may be more information than many readers will need. However, these passages are used for illustrative purposes only, in support of more general points that the author has made. The reader is free to skim these sections without missing the larger benefits of the book. The author also inserts a lot of jokes along the way, and at times the tone is a bit on the chummy side. My guess is that McWhorter adopted a deliberately colloquial style in order to enliven what might have otherwise been extremely dry material. (If you doubt this, pick up a linguistics textbook written for the academic market.) On this point, McWhorter succeeds admirably. The 300 pages of this book are, overall, an easy and enjoyable read. (Review by Edward Trimnell, author of "Why You Need a Foreign Language & How to Learn One," (ISBN:1591133343))
Rating:
Summary: What was the first language ever spoken?
Review: If you like to consider fascinating questions, then consider this: What was the first language ever spoken? Since its inception, our species has had the same capacity for speech yet we only have an understanding of languages that only descends a few thousand years into the past. This book excellently surveys a sampling the currently existing six thousand languages with an eye towards issues pertaining to their development and change over time. What happens when two diverse peoples start interacting? This book tells you. When happens when two similar groups of people separate? This book tells you. What was the first language? This book posits an answer. It is therefore nothing less than a wonderful introduction to a fascinating topic.
Rating:
Summary: What was the first language ever spoken?
Review: If you like to consider fascinating questions, then consider this: What was the first language ever spoken? Since its inception, our species has had the same capacity for speech yet we only have an understanding of languages that only descends a few thousand years into the past. This book excellently surveys a sampling the currently existing six thousand languages with an eye towards issues pertaining to their development and change over time. What happens when two diverse peoples start interacting? This book tells you. When happens when two similar groups of people separate? This book tells you. What was the first language? This book posits an answer. It is therefore nothing less than a wonderful introduction to a fascinating topic.
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