I recently finished reading Guy Deutscher’s book The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention. This book was a pleasure to read, and taught me a lot about how languages change over time. Not only is it informative and clearly written, it’s witty and sometimes hilarious. (Early in the book, when he used the word “cactus” with Latin noun endings to illustrate case systems for nouns [“O cacte!”] I knew I was in for a treat.)
Deutscher draws on examples from many languages to explain the types of change that happen to a language over time, driven by three motives: economy, expressiveness, and analogy. The book explained some things that I had always wondered about—for example, why some languages have such complicated case systems for nouns. For instance, instead of having only the ending “s” or “es” to mark a plural (book, books) and ‘s to mark possession (the book’s call number) as English does, a language with more noun cases, like Latin or Slovene, will have different endings for nouns depending on whether you’re saying “The book is heavy” or “I read the book” or “He asked me about the book”; in Finnish it gets even more complicated. I knew that these systems were not dreamed up to torment people who wanted to learn the language, and that there must be some logic behind them, but I didn’t know how they came about.
He also investigates the puzzle of why language seems always to be deteriorating; it seems unlikely that there really was some golden age of perfection from which language has since declined. He explains the processes of renewal and growth in language, present but not as obvious as those of decay. Toward the end of the book he discusses whether the two tendencies balance each other or whether there really is a trend toward less complex languages (and why). The final chapter describes how language could have grown from very simple elements (action words and words for things) into its present complexities. I enjoyed the big-picture view, and the many interesting tidbits of language history that I picked up along the way. All in all, I highly recommend this book.
