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. How did they all develop? What happened to the first language?". "In this tour of territory too often claimed by stodgy grammarians, linguistics professor John McWhorter ranges across linguistic theory, geography, history, and pop culture to tell the fascinating story of how thousands of very different languages have evolved from a single, original source in a natural process similar to biological evolution. While laying out how languages mix and mutate over time, he 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. McWhorter also discusses current theories on what the first language might have been like, why dialects should not be considered "bad speech," and why most of today's languages will be extinct within one hundred years.". "The first book written for the layperson about the natural history of language, The Power of Babel is a dazzling tour de force that will leave readers anything but speechless."--BOOK JACKET.
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What Hacker News says
- All language is "random stuff arbitrary people make up".
"Rules" are just discovered patterns in the arbitrariness of language, convenient ways to capture and communicate how most people within a certain linguistic context express a certain idea. They are point-in-time observations of an evolving natural system, sharing much more in common with aphorisms like "April showers bring May flowers" than with the law of gravity or the tax code.
The English language is whatever English speakers and hearers agree it is. No linguistic "authority" can stop the inexorable evolution of language.
(Language evolution has dramatically slowed, but that's because of the printing press, the radio, the television, and the Internet creating massively larger and more durable linguistic communities than ever existed before, not because of authority.)
And to the original point of this thread... all of these so-called names for groups are nonsense. "A group of owls is called a parliament"... by whom? No one ever. Thus a group of owls is not called a parliament or a stare or a hoot or anything else cute. A group of owls doesn't have a name because owls don't form groups. In the unlikely event someone discovered a large group of owls together, I am quite certain they would call it a "flock", no matter what someone who thought they were clever wrote in a book.
Yeah, this is a trigger for me. (:
Dr. Geoff Lindsey is a great reference. Another is John McWhorter, specifically his books The Power of Babel and Words on the Move.
Linguists are scientists of the natural world, not law-makers.
- You should read Power of Babel if you like this topic!
https://www.amazon.com/Power-Babel-Natural-History-Language/...
- I think that's about right. And there's a more market-based take on this: McWhorter politics audience is swelling at the moment and he's trying to take advantage. There are a lot of broadly intellectual para-conservatives right now feeling cast out of the conventional conservative media environment (occupied as it is with fighting a civil war between the MAGA insurgents and traditional republicans). This site, in particular, is absolutely filled with them.
And a message like this, aimed squarely at the woke left and requiring no compromise on the part of a conservative reader, is pure mana for that audience. The Greenwald essay that spiked here (briefly) yesterday is in the same genre.
Basically: straw men arguments aimed at the seemingly ascendant left are going to be big business around here for the next few years.
[1] To be fair: he's also a professional linguist with a real day job as a professor at Columbia. Go find and read his Power of Babel book at some point, it's great.
- Most of English's "problems" come from a sort of natural drift that all languages experience all the time. There's no way to freeze a language in its "most useful" form, because a billion different speakers are simultaneously pulling it in different directions. It either ends up as a sort of democratic consensus, or eventually fractures into mutually unintelligible dialects.
1. Shakespearean pronunciation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s
2. Problems that would be caused by simplifying spelling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...
3. Power of Babel: http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Babel-Natural-Language/dp/00...
4. Toastmasters speech about "Manglish": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDanVi6byKo (Toastmasters has its own version of English, full of over the top gestures. Also recommended, search for Singlish on Youtube.)
- If you're into this sort of stuff, John McWhorter describes this theory and many others in his introductory book to (mostly historical) linguistics, The Power of Babel [http://www.amazon.com/Power-Babel-Natural-History-Language/d...].
- That sounds right. I appreciate the added detail.
I learned what little I know on this from John McWorther's book "The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language": https://a.co/d/edvzLuB
