The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention Paperback – May 1, 2006

I've read a goodly amount of material on linguistics, so I expect each new book to go over much the same ground as previous books, but this one took me by surprise -- it's chock full of new and interesting ideas. Other reviewers have already explained the basic structure of the book; allow me to offer some of the tidbits that stuck to my mind:1. The concept of erosion. People always shorten words, cut off consonants, simplify vowels. His working example, and an excellent one it is, is "gonna", an eroded form of "going to". Erosion wears down words to the point that they start to lose expressiveness, at which point people tack on something else to clarify their meaning. He presents one case of a French word; I can't recall the details but here's an analogy: suppose that "gonna" someday gets eroded to 'gon' and later to 'g'. At some point, people will need to flesh it out, so perhaps they'll tack 'will' onto it to get 'gwill', which in turn might get eroded down to 'gill'. And so on and on and on. Many of the words in our language are eroded, compressed, multi-layer fossils of much longer original expressions.2. Complementing erosion is back-formation, a process by which people extend patterns in the language to other words. One example might be the child who says, "I goed with mommy." The trick is, there are lots of patterns scattered all through the language, and ofttimes a pattern can be recruited to a word when that word has been dangerously eroded. This is especially likely when two words are similar in pronunciation. "sing sang sung" leads to "ring rang rung" -- but should past tense of the fairly new verb "wing" be "winged" or "wang" or "wung"? With so many patterns to choose from, there's always grist for language change.3. He starts off with a delightful point on the common plaint that English is going to hell, that people nowadays don't know how to use it properly, how just 30 years ago the language was so much more pristine. He presents a modern quote to this effect; then another quote from 30 years ago saying the same thing; then another quote from 30 years before that saying the same thing; and so on all the way back to 1620. The more things change, the more they stay the same.4. I was particularly impressed by his explanation of how the weird Semitic word system (every word has a root of three consonants, and the vowels that are filled in specify its gender, case, number, and so forth.) He starts by pointing out that this system is too intricate, too well-ordered, to have simply arisen by chance. Or is it? He proceeds to demonstrate just how it could have happened using erosion and back-formation.5. Vowel coloring. This is another concept that I had seen mentioned but never explained. Some vowels can affect vowels near them in a word. The example he gives is the Germanic "gest", whose plural was "gestiz". [I'm probably screwing up the spelling here.] The 'i' in the plural form "colored" the 'e' and caused it to shift into an 'a'. Later on, the 'iz' was eroded down to a schwa (spelled as an 'e', but pronounced as a short "uh"). Thus, the singular is "Gest" but the plural is "Gaste".All in all, a surprising and fascinating book. This guy is definitely on my list of authors to watch.

Guy Deutscher will be your new favourite linguist. His sincerity and wide-ranging admiration for linguistic achievement win one over. As a bonus, Deutscher is truly funny, no smart-ass élitist like Steven Pinker or John McWhorter. An eccentric feature of Unfolding is its incorporating fictional dialogues among two non-professional linguists and a linguistics professor. Not the character in the dialogue Deutscher hovers nearest to but only by his sufferance present in the dialogue at all is a representative of the (also fictional) “Royal Society for the Protection of English.” Elsewhere, in a similar vein, Deutcher recalls the great 19C romantic-linguist August Schleicher with qualified approval. Compare such allowances to the up-front hostility of Bas Aart’s Modern Grammar: “Readers hoping to find confirmation [here] that the so-called split infinitive is odious…will be disappointed” (Preface). Deutscher’s relative openmindedness in these regards bodes well for our opinion of the book as a whole.The thesis of Unfolding is that changes in language are the work of opposing cyclical forces. The Gothic word for “guest” was “gast,” and the plural of “gast” was “gastiz.” The “a” and “i” of “gastiz” requiring different mouth positions in quick succession, “gastiz” underwent what is known as a-mutation: the colouring of an “a” by a subsequent “i” that makes the “a” easier to pronounce (120). After a-mutation, which made {a} into {eh}, the singular-plural pair became gast/gestiz. Emphasis being on the first syllable of “gestiz” and the pair already being distinguishable from each other by this vowel-shift, the terminal “z” wore off leaving only “i,” which was soon even further eroded to “ə” (schwa). The mid-word a/e feature caught on as a paradigm—as students of modern German know, or wish they knew, all too well. Thus did one “blind change” (194), which destroyed part of German word structure, prompt analogical extension and lead, ultimately, to the shining new edifice of nominal German umlaut.Deutscher’s is a brilliant model of language change, but I have a few questions for him. One involves the fact that some blind changes seem to have lead to permanent destruction. According to Benjamin Forston III, a barrage of syncope and apocope “[devastated]” Old Irish verbs and especially verbs compounded with one or more preverbs (323); as a result, the absolute and conjunct forms even of relatively simple verbs can look entirely and preposterously unalike (324). What but confusion did such erosion bring for the Insular Celts and the students of the Celtic language thereafter? Shouldn’t they have fought (negative) change off insofar as they could? And regarding the possibility of fighting off change, isn’t Sanskrit, whose very name means “[carefully] assembled,” an instance of a language consciously defying erosion? And isn’t conservative Senatorial Latin another instance? Deutcher needs standards of positive and negative change.

It didn't quite go down like this, I know, but if I had to summarize what I remember of the history and classic languages that I learned back in school, mankind was grunting and depicting animals in a cave one day, only to be speaking greek and latin one day later! How did man go from guttural sounds to the complex grammar we find in classical latin? Some steps are obviously missing and school was never really bothered to tell us about them. Well, this book (which will probably be boring to 99% of common people) is a marvel for the 1% who care about understanding one thing or two about the mechanics of languages. I skipped the part about the Semitic languages (with the author's explicit approval LOL) because I only have 24 hours in my day, but that was not essential. I finished the book with a much deeper understanding of what human languages really are. I feel much more confident now.One word of caution: if you are a grammar Nazi, steer clear of this book. Discovering that you are a despicable human being might be depressing for you :)