The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language

I've been reading books about language and linguistics for many years and have rarely been as disappointed by a book.

If you extract all McWhorter's own self-referential little comments about his childhood, stories about television shows and comic books, and "cute" footnotes (example: 6. "Hats off to the 'Simpsons' house composer...." 7. "I like that one too." 9. "Dino fans: Yes, I know....", to take just one chapter), there is scarcely any new or interesting information in his book.

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.

Book was very dry and the guys neo-con beliefs leak into the book in a way I found annoying enough to stop reading.

For anyone with the least interest in that mysterious human quality called "language" this is the book for you. The marginally curious can skim through it and pick out the gems in the midst of the much the more detailed examination of humankind's current stock of 6,000 languages. For those who are fascinated by the sciene of linguistics and want more than a cursory examination of what it has to offer, this book is a treasure. But McWorther's mastery of his mother tongue is what makes this work truly fascinating. It measures up to his outstanding lectures made for the Teaching Company.

The book starts from the idea that there was an original language, back when humans came to be. This seems to me, a non-linguist, to be rather speculative, but McWhorter gives a few arguments for that, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. The most interesting parts of the book are those that detail the ways in which languages change over time. It turns out that most of the change is random, and has little to do with culture. McWhorter gives 5 ways in which languages change: the first involves the tendency of unaccented vowels to get dropped over time, such that the Latin 'femina' becomes 'femme' in French.
The other interesting parts of the book have to do with the way languages break down (in pidgin) and get recreated (as creoles). The new language has very streamlined grammar, which leads people like McWhorter to speculate that the first, original language, was likewise streamlined.
There are many other fascinating tidbits in this book, but, overall, I enjoyed the grand picture: that of language as almost an organic process of perpetual (but regular and understandable) change.
Enjoy!

This book is written at an _extremely_ rudimentary level; everything covered here can be learned much more easily and concisely, with a much less galling and obnoxious authorial voice, in any halfway-decent discussion of language. In my case, I found that already being familiar with the "Language Construction Kit" ([...]), oriented towards the building of fictional languages, gave me enough grounding that this was like reading Dr. Seuss after learning feline biology, or reading Jared Diamond after reading Fernand Braudel.

In a word: If you the vaguest idea what a creole is, or know that sounds change regularly over time, or recognize the word 'ablaut,' you'll find yourself wasting your time with this book -- especially when McWorter irresponsibly endorses Proto-World.

For those not familiar with the subject already, there is some useful information here, but the sheer level of flippancy would be galling nonetheless; I recommend the Language Construction Kit and a good biography of JRR Tolkien (or, better, Tom Shippey's _The Road to Middle-Earth_) instead.