Rating: 
Summary: Fun and indulgent book for language lovers
Review: The Power of Babel is fresh, direct and entertaining. It asks you to think about language the way we think about life: it's dynamic, always different, and ever-evolving. And while we corral the many different flavors of languages into narrow categories, the better to poke and pry at them, the reality remains: languages gradiate from one to another - they are not discrete objects like horses in the field, but a continuum like colors in the sky.Most of the languages you can speak are descended from one language spoken by a Eurasian tribe some 10,000ish years ago. This book walks you through all the ways in which the words of that language have twisted, turned, separated, and merged to become some of the six thousand languages we have today. For McWhorter, languages are dialects and vice versa. He sees a language as an always bubbling, changing, shifting sort of art. For example, the divisions in English today are as slight as different words: "truck" and "lorry", or the way Frasier's Daphne would pronounce Mr. Humphries - "Mister `Oomphries," or the regional variations "soda" and "pop." Nonetheless, these slight tendrils are the roots, ultimately, for the language splitting into dialects as widely varying as the "dialects" of Latin called French and Spanish (actually the exported street slang from the Roman capital at the time of each province's conquest). He has a sharp eye for the social as well as the scientific: "At a party, even if you don't know what a group of people are talking about, you can almost always ease your way into any conversation by simply interjecting at a suitable pause `But where do you draw the line?'" A similar knowingness informs this entire book. With an encyclopedic comprehension and ready ability, he explores languages as we find them in their natural habitat. In the deceased Soviet Union, where the distinction between former provinces is politically important, Russian, Ukranian, and Belorussian are designated separate languages; in China, where "one Chinese nation" has been the political mantra for 2,200 years, eight fundamentally different languages are deemed to be mere "dialects" of the mother tongue. McWhorter's a funny, self-aware guy. Sometimes this gets a little cloying: on switching from one language to another he notes: "Javanese (note the v; now we're in Java)". He's doing it to be accessible but sometimes it comes across as over-the-top or, occasionally, patronizing. McWhorter provided my first encounter with such interesting phenomena as evidential markers, where the suffix changes based on how you know it happened - you heard it yourself, you saw it, someone else told you, etc.; and the wonderful adverbial prefixes of the Central Pomo language of California in which doing something orally or by slicing or with heat or by biting or by shaking each are indicated with their own adverbial prefix. Deeply enjoyable stuff for a language maven! McWhorter marches on and on, in widely researched and fascinating detail, through pace of language change and printing's effect on it, pidgin, borrowings, language acquisition, standard dialects and good English, creoles, and so on. And for those of you with any interest in the concept of a "Proto-World" language (the thesis that all of the world's languages are descended from a single ancestor), and perhaps even a bit romantically inclined toward believing in it (as I am), McWhorter concisely, conclusively, and devastatingly separates the theory from the evidence in his 17-page Epilogue. In sum, there is much you don't know about the natural evolution of languages, even if you haunt the linguistics section here on Amazon, and John McWhorter is your pleasant, intelligent, voluble, and entertaining guide. Slightly better editing to remove self-indulgent tics of mannerisms would really be the only critique I could offer. This book is excellent for the linguistically curious, the word aware, or the language lover. Enjoy!
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining tour of how words evolve
Review: The Power of Babel is fresh, direct and entertaining. It asks you to think about language the way we think about life: it�s dynamic, always different, and ever-evolving. And while we corral the many different flavors of languages into narrow categories, the better to poke and pry at them, the reality remains: languages gradiate from one to another � they are not discrete objects like horses in the field, but a continuum like colors in the sky. Most of the languages you can speak are descended from one language spoken by a Eurasian tribe some 10,000ish years ago. This book walks you through all the ways in which the words of that language have twisted, turned, separated, and merged to become some of the six thousand languages we have today. For McWhorter, languages are dialects and vice versa. He sees a language as an always bubbling, changing, shifting sort of art. For example, the divisions in English today are as slight as different words: �truck� and �lorry�, or the way Frasier�s Daphne would pronounce Mr. Humphries � �Mister �Oomphries,� or the regional variations �soda� and �pop.� Nonetheless, these slight tendrils are the roots, ultimately, for the language splitting into dialects as widely varying as the �dialects� of Latin called French and Spanish (actually the exported street slang from the Roman capital at the time of each province�s conquest). He has a sharp eye for the social as well as the scientific: �At a party, even if you don�t know what a group of people are talking about, you can almost always ease your way into any conversation by simply interjecting at a suitable pause �But where do you draw the line?�� A similar knowingness informs this entire book. With an encyclopedic comprehension and ready ability, he explores languages as we find them in their natural habitat. In the deceased Soviet Union, where the distinction between former provinces is politically important, Russian, Ukranian, and Belorussian are designated separate languages; in China, where �one Chinese nation� has been the political mantra for 2,200 years, eight fundamentally different languages are deemed to be mere �dialects� of the mother tongue. McWhorter�s a funny, self-aware guy. Sometimes this gets a little cloying: on switching from one language to another he notes: �Javanese (note the v; now we�re in Java)�. He�s doing it to be accessible but sometimes it comes across as over-the-top or, occasionally, patronizing. McWhorter provided my first encounter with such interesting phenomena as evidential markers, where the suffix changes based on how you know it happened � you heard it yourself, you saw it, someone else told you, etc.; and the wonderful adverbial prefixes of the Central Pomo language of California in which doing something orally or by slicing or with heat or by biting or by shaking each are indicated with their own adverbial prefix. Deeply enjoyable stuff for a language maven! McWhorter marches on and on, in widely researched and fascinating detail, through pace of language change and printing�s effect on it, pidgin, borrowings, language acquisition, standard dialects and good English, creoles, and so on. And for those of you with any interest in the concept of a �Proto-World� language (the thesis that all of the world�s languages are descended from a single ancestor), and perhaps even a bit romantically inclined toward believing in it (as I am), McWhorter concisely, conclusively, and devastatingly separates the theory from the evidence in his 17-page Epilogue. In sum, there is much you don�t know about the natural evolution of languages, even if you haunt the linguistics section here on Amazon, and John McWhorter is your pleasant, intelligent, voluble, and entertaining guide. Slightly better editing to remove self-indulgent tics of mannerisms would really be the only critique I could offer. This book is excellent for the linguistically curious, the word aware, or the language lover. Enjoy! (p.s. I've just read the other reviews and couldn't disagree more about "nothing new here" -- I've been reading in linguistics for over a decade and I found something "wow!" every other page.)
Rating: 
Summary: The good, the bad, and the boring...
Review: This book is a mix of interesting "did you know" facts, mind-numbing forays into pidgin and creole languages, and evolutionist rubbish, with a LOT of private "wink-nudge" notes and 20th-century pop culture references thrown in. I love learning about language and languages, but I wish I hadn't wasted my time on this particular book.
Rating:
Summary: Language change is the norm
Review: This is a very good natured book. As a child McWhorter tried to learn Hebrew. Seeing a chart at the back of a dictionary, he thought it was absolutely necessary to translate "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Swedish, and Yiddish. Human language is unique in its ability to communicate, to convey. Language is eternally and inherently changeable. The five faces of language change are sound change, extension, rebracketing, expressiveness, and semantic change. Language change leaves foot prints. Culture and language are weakly related. Most languages are bundles of variations--dialects. Linguistically homogenizing tendancies are printing, education, and the communication revolution. Sometimes for political reasons dialects are considered separate languages. Some of the so-called languages are mutually intelligible such as Macedonian and Bulgarian, Swedish and Danish and Norwegian, Russian and Ukranian and Belorussian, and Romanian and Moldavan. The Vikings scattered about a thousand words into English. After 1066 the Normans introduced seventy five hundred words into English. When pidgin expands to creole the language is no longer simple. Creole is not strictly speaking an intertwined language. The Gullah language is a creole. All languages are complex to some degree. Sometimes standardization and literacy congeal freezing a language. There has been large-scale language death. Not all European languages are Indo-European. Finnish, Estonian, Lappish and Hungarian belong to another group, the Uralic.
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