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# The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

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Susanne K. Langer Award Winner Named One of A.S. Byatt’s Favorite Books of the Year in The Guardian “A lively and thought-provoking exploration of why language change appears to be haphazard yet is fundamentally orderly. Exciting, witty, and a masterpiece of contemporary scholarship.”―Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and English, Stanford University Blending the spirit of Eats, Shoots & Leaves with the science of The Language Instinct , an original inquiry into the development of that most essential ― and mysterious ― of human creations: language. Language is mankind's greatest invention-except, of course, that it was never invented." So begins linguist Guy Deutscher's enthralling investigation into the genesis and evolution of language. If we started off with rudimentary utterances on the level of "man throw spear," how did we end up with sophisticated grammars, enormous vocabularies, and intricately nuanced degrees of meaning? Drawing on recent groundbreaking discoveries in modern linguistics, Deutscher exposes the elusive forces of creation at work in human communication, giving us fresh insight into how language emerges, evolves, and decays. He traces the evolution of linguistic complexity from an early "Me Tarzan" stage to such elaborate single-word constructions as the Turkish sehirlilestiremediklerimizdensiniz ("you are one of those whom we couldn't turn into a town dweller"). Arguing that destruction and creation in language are intimately entwined, Deutscher shows how these processes are continuously in operation, generating new words, new structures, and new meanings. As entertaining as it is erudite, The Unfolding of Language moves nimbly from ancient Babylonian to American idiom, from the central role of metaphor to the staggering triumph of design that is the Semitic verb, to tell the dramatic story and explain the genius behind a uniquely human faculty.

Review: Bursting with new ideas - 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.
Review: Creative destruction in philology--brilliantly elaborated - A brilliant solution to the conundrum: why does language so often proceed from more to less complex structure, as one sees in comparing Sanskrit, ancient Greek, or Latin to the derived modern languages? Filled with fascinating and informative examples of the continual and ongoing "degeneration" of language, the author is quite versed in changes in English back to the Anglo-Saxon era, as well as other Indo-European languages. I wish I had known his explanation for the origin of the system of declensions and conjugations when I was studying Latin in high school. My fascination with this question, when I later studied, French, Spanish, and German in college, is what led me to a life-long interest in philology. The author is also a native speaker of modern Hebrew and quite knowledgable in ancient Semitic languages. His explanation of the evolution of the 3-consonant root characteristic of Semitic languages is informative as well as fascinating. The only shortcoming I find is that the thesis is presented without reference to who discovered it. If it is entirely the work of the author, this should be stated; or the contributions of others should be acknowledged. It is not so much a matter of who gets the credit, as to understand the evolution of the concepts. The view he puts forth is undoubtedly quite controversial in academic circles, and one suspects that this is the reason for his omitting this aspect of the subject. Perhaps he drew the lesson from the reception given Merritt Ruhlen, who is often criticized for being overly polemical in his advocacy of Greenberg's work pointing to monogenesis. The reactionary nature of academia when confronted with a new paradigm is well-known, and as bad, or worse, in the field of philology as in any other. The author's work rates 5 stars in my view. I have reduced my review of the product review to 4 stars because of a production defect in two successive copies I received from desertcart. I returned one copy but received a replacement with the same defect-- a small pucker in all the central pages, probably caused by the fingers of the stitcher grasping too tightly. One expects a perfect copy when buying a new book. Although a minor annoyance, it did not affect the readability of the type, and is not noticeable from the outside.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #120,350 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #79 in General Anthropology #80 in Linguistics Reference #344 in Evolution (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.5 out of 5 stars 921 Reviews |

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Bursting with new ideas
*by C***D on September 11, 2007*

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.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Creative destruction in philology--brilliantly elaborated
*by S***R on July 6, 2014*

A brilliant solution to the conundrum: why does language so often proceed from more to less complex structure, as one sees in comparing Sanskrit, ancient Greek, or Latin to the derived modern languages? Filled with fascinating and informative examples of the continual and ongoing "degeneration" of language, the author is quite versed in changes in English back to the Anglo-Saxon era, as well as other Indo-European languages. I wish I had known his explanation for the origin of the system of declensions and conjugations when I was studying Latin in high school. My fascination with this question, when I later studied, French, Spanish, and German in college, is what led me to a life-long interest in philology. The author is also a native speaker of modern Hebrew and quite knowledgable in ancient Semitic languages. His explanation of the evolution of the 3-consonant root characteristic of Semitic languages is informative as well as fascinating. The only shortcoming I find is that the thesis is presented without reference to who discovered it. If it is entirely the work of the author, this should be stated; or the contributions of others should be acknowledged. It is not so much a matter of who gets the credit, as to understand the evolution of the concepts. The view he puts forth is undoubtedly quite controversial in academic circles, and one suspects that this is the reason for his omitting this aspect of the subject. Perhaps he drew the lesson from the reception given Merritt Ruhlen, who is often criticized for being overly polemical in his advocacy of Greenberg's work pointing to monogenesis. The reactionary nature of academia when confronted with a new paradigm is well-known, and as bad, or worse, in the field of philology as in any other. The author's work rates 5 stars in my view. I have reduced my review of the product review to 4 stars because of a production defect in two successive copies I received from Amazon. I returned one copy but received a replacement with the same defect-- a small pucker in all the central pages, probably caused by the fingers of the stitcher grasping too tightly. One expects a perfect copy when buying a new book. Although a minor annoyance, it did not affect the readability of the type, and is not noticeable from the outside.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Why language is not degenerating
*by S***T on October 16, 2012*

A great book, well-written, humorous, knowledgeable. The main accomplishment of this book,for me, was to explain why, over the centuries of written language, prominent commentators have bemoaned the decline of their language by fellow citizens, grousing over how nobody speaks correctly any more, and citing examples of poor usage, ungrammatical forms, distortions of original meanings of words, etc. It apparently happens in every generation. And no commentator of language has ever (to my knowledge) claimed that language usage is improving in his generation. But if things have only gone down hill forever, how then did any langauge ever start out in "good" condition? The author explains that languages change as people find quicker and shorter ways to say things (from "going to" to "gonna"), add or change words to make things clearer, and generalize from one example to parallels. The net effect of all these changes is the evolution of a language, eventually to the point where it seems like a different language. The old guard cites Latin, with its declensions (suffixes to words indicating a word's grammatical role in a sentence), as an example of a "perfect" language. Language descendants of Latin (and for English, descendant of Old German) have tended to drop these suffixes and use word order and other markers to indicate the part of speech a word fills in a sentence. What the grousers don't know is that the classic Latin endings were once probably separate words that indicated the grammatical function of the previous word, but that those separate words were eventually shortened and attached to the previous word, until they remained only as a one or two or three letter ending. So classical Latin is an example of "degeneration" from its earlier form. I'm not trained in linguistics or languages, but I found the book fascinating and fun to read.

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