Sometime around 2012-2015, I had an epistemological crisis which had me visiting many of my beliefs. One of the beliefs I decided to revisit was the whole notion of linguistic determinism alla Sapir-Whorf. This led me to two books by two different authors – John McWhorter’s The Language Hoax (the negative position), and Guy Deutscher’s Through the language Glass (the positive position). McWhorter won the debate for me, not because Deutscher was in any way wrong, but because (by my assessment) what people refereed to when they spoke about Sapir-Whorf did not in any way resemble what Deutscher was talking about in his very nuanced, academic and scientific analysis of the phenomenon. McWhorter was right because people (idiots) I went to university with actually considered that the native Americans were unable to see the arriving ships of the Europeans because they had no word for arriving ships. McWhorter was right about it being a very stupid set of beliefs, while Deutscher’s research on the ability of people with varying words for blue to be then able to distinguish different shades of the color microseconds faster than people without just seems academic.
I then continued to read books by John McWhorter, because I guess to the victor go the spoils. I never did read anything else by Deutscher despite having liked his book, and having been very glad that I had read it. The Unfolding of Language has been on my shelf for sometime, and I finally decided to give it a read.
The Unfolding of Language is about the dynamic changing nature of languages, and the forces at play that shape and define it. If you have taken (and passed) a general linguistics class, nothing here will be new to you. It will, however be better explained than your class might have been. I found myself saying ‘yea, that’s a good way of explaining it’ pretty often.
At times, this book is a little bit more niche than some of the other ‘pop’ linguistics books I have read in the past. I feel like I know a little bit more about languages than the average reader (I have something of a background in it) and I thought some parts of this were a bit of a slog to get through.
As a slight aside, I would like to say that I regret reading a digital copy of this book. My Kobo seems to do a dogshit job of rendering some of the images that the book has. Unfortunately, these images were sometimes cited examples of a point the author was trying to make. No fault to the author, but these issues made the reading a bit harder.
I feel like it is a little bit mean for me to go back to talking about John McWhorter in a review about a person who I see as being his opponent. But it seemed I could not read a chapter of this book without thinking to myself ‘McWhorter’ is a better writer. I also thought about Steven Pinker being a better writer. This is really unfair, as the Deutscher is a good writer, and this is a well written book. It just appears that linguists tend to write well as a rule, and the bar seems to be set unusually high. Paradoxically, I think I would recommend this book to someone, but at the same time the completionist in me is rather happy that Deutscher’s only other published book is on a topic so niche as to be of no interest to me.
Failures in Polymathy 