The Power of Babel

There are approximately six thousand languages on Earth today, each a descendant of the tongue first spoken by Homo sapiens some 150,000 years ago.While laying out how languages mix and mutate over time, linguistics professor John McWhorter reminds us of the variety within the species that speaks them, and argues that, contrary to popular perception, language is not immutable and hidebound, but a living, dynamic entity that adapts itself to an ever-changing human environment.

Full of humor and imaginative insight, The Power of Babel draws its illustrative examples from languages around the world, including pidgins, Creoles, and nonstandard dialects.

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. On the other hand, the long, long, long 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.

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.

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.

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.