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The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 417.7
EAN: 9780060520854
ISBN: 006052085X
Label: Harper Perennial
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: 2003-01
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Release Date: January 07, 2003
Studio: Harper Perennial
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Editorial Review: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.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Really good, even if not exactly what some would expect
The Power of Babel is really a well-written and engaging book about language and how it changes, a judgment echoed by many other reviewers. However, I expected it to be a history of the development of language, from the first one to the major language families to the currently spoken ones. Indeed, it has some of it, but it's not its major focus: ultimately, The Power of Babel is about more basic concepts, like what's really a "language" and how languages change with time and mix with one another. ... Read More
Rating:  - An admirable effort to explain language change to laymen, but desperately needed proofreading
As a graduate student of historical linguistics, I often find myself asked to explain aspects of contemporary language change or the reconstruction of proto-languages to interested friends or family. Unfortunately, I don't have much of a gift of simplifying the field for average people, and I've longed for a simple introduction that I could recommend. I was very happy to discover John McWhorter's THE POWER OF BABEL: A Natural History of Language, which introduces historical linguistics, squashes myths ... Read More
Rating: - McWhorter Hits a Home Run
McWhorter writes an unexpectedly pleasant style for an academic. His theory is intriguing and well explained. In fact, he has challenged many of my assumptions about language and has provoked me to wonder whether I have been far too critical of non-standard dialects of my own language. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of human language.
Rating: - If language drives you crazy...
If language drives you crazy, if you find yourself comparing words across European languages while reading random train schedules abroad, or defending the legitimacy and grammatical coherency non-standard dialects, or just generally devoting too much time to translating verb tenses, this book is great. Even if you do not have any interest in linguistics (yet), read this book. Read Steven Pinker's as well "The Language Instinct" and you might well be bit by the bug and major in it like I did.
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Rating: - Extremely well written
This book might have been deadly dull if anyone but John McWhorter had written it. He carries the reader along by the sheer force of his delight in the subject and in all things popular or cultural, whence arrive his anecdotal examples that pepper the narrative and make it zesty. John McWhorter makes linguistics fun!
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