The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention

The first half or so of the book is a fascinating look at the evolution and origins of language. Later it gets bogged down in asides, strange fake conversations which do little to advance the story. It felt like two books merged, and that didn’t really work.

Produit en excellent état et arrivé bien avant le délai indiqué! Très contente!

The book is excellent. It gives verisimilitude to the existence of an Indo-European language.It is not a very easy read, but the effort is worthwhile.It is a pity that on the paperback edition the cover illustration,printed on a film, ends up unglued from the paper cover curling up unsightly.

An enjoyable read. The sections that are at a higher level are better than the in-depth parts which tend to get hard going unless you are crazily into linguistic stuff.

Starts off very good, but than, as so many books nowadays, goes for quantity over quality. Everything becomes diluted and pretty much repetitive. As if the page count target had to be achieved by any means.

This is an EXCELLENT book, extremely well-written and informed, BUT I agree 100% with what another customer said in his review:"I cannot understand how Amazon can release Kindle versions of books where some portions of the text are POSITIVELY UNREADABLE. The font is microscopic, causing the reader to have to skip some of the text. In my view this is quite inexcusable, as the technology is there to avoid the problem. This reflects at best a sense of carelessness from the people in charge of formatting the Kindle text, at worst a complete contempt toward the customer. A book SHOULD NOT BE KINDLE-RELEASED if it is not 100% readable."The biggest problem is that the font is microscopic when the author gives examples to illustrate his point--which is very often. It is literally impossible to read. DO NOT buy this otherwise excellent book in the Kindle format!!

Für mich ist dieses das wichtigste Linguistik-Buch zumindest in diesem Jahrtausend.Das vor allem als KI-Entwickler, was ich wohl erklären muß. Die derzeitige Künstliche Intelligenz leidet darunter, daß die Programme nicht wirklich und effizient Wissen erwerben können. OK, die Lernenden Algorithmen "lernen" durch Versuch und Irrtum - aber nicht so wie intelligente Menschen: durch Gespräche mit uns und durch Lesen von Büchern und anderen Texten. Einfach weil sie natürliche Sprache nicht verstehen, sondern bestenfalls so tun.Zwar versuchen wir, den Intelligenten Digitalen Objekten Sprache beizubringen. Aber das ist verdammt schwer.Jetzt wird es anders. Deutscher erklärt, wie sich Sprache entwickelt hat. Dazu verwendet er ein (geniales) linguistisches Modell. Denn die ältesten Sprachen, die wir kennen und verstehen können, Akkadisch und das alte Hebräisch, sind etwa 5000 Jahre alt. Und sie waren damals schon ziemlich fertig entwickelt - denn keiner weiß, wann und wie die ersten Menschen "die Sprache erfanden"; die zeitlichen Schätzungen dafür liegen zwischen 40 und mehr als 100 Tausend Jahre zurück.Um das für unsere Digitalen KI-Geschöpfe nachzuvollziehen, müssen wir Software-Programmierer es nacherfinden und nachprogrammieren - verdammt schwer für Amateur-Linguisten.Aber jetzt hat uns endlich ein professioneller Linguist erklärt, wie es zumindest gehen kann. Und in einer Form, daß wir es direkt in Software umsetzen können, zum Beispiel den raffinierten Mechanismus, mit dem die Hebräer ihre Verben konstruierten. Das habe ich gerade probiert, und es funktioniert sogar für ein ganz anderes linguistisches Wortschöpfungs-Problem perfekt.Auch falls Sie nicht Software entwickeln sondern einfach nur so an Sprache interessiert sind: lesen Sie das Buch trotzdem. Deutscher schreibt sehr unterhaltsam und sehr kreativ. Deshalb macht die Lektüre - wie bei seinen anderen Büchern - auch sehr viel Spaß.

Somehow I inherited a gift for finding patterns, and that's why I bought this book, to see what this author had unearthed. It is lucid and flowing, and interesting, or at least I found it so. I must say that the history and evolution of language has a high correlation with the history of gold as a monetary standard over the millenia, beginning as a pure item and then being constantly debased, only to return in the next empire and restart the cycle. I suppose anything that humans can manipulate, they do. Whether that increases or decreases its value is another matter. We are becoming lazier, fatter, and more self-centred as a specie, and anything we touch reflects that trend. Including language.

We all talk and when you meet someone who speaks your language, but in a different dialect, you understand that there must be machinery in play. Because language is solely within us, everything that happens to (our) language must be shared between us. Or, in other words, when you learn about how languages change, you learn about yourself. The book is for laymen.Deutscher argues well, with lots of examples, for the mechanisms that are in play. And he shows how a language can change, he gives believable paths words and constructs can have moved.I highly recommend this book for anyone interesting in what it is to be human.

Ich habe dieses Buch auf Empfehlung einer meiner Dozentinnen hin gekauft. Normalerweise lese ich keine Sachbücher, aber nachdem sie so davon geschwärmt hat und es als Kindleversion so günstig war...Es ist wirklich extrem interessant! Deutscher schreibt sehr lustig und einfach, sodass man auch als Normalsterblicher versteht, um was es geht. Ich musste mehrfach laut auflachen (was mir sonst nur sehr selten passiert. Vor allem, wenn ich gerade im Bus sitze).Ich empfehle diese Buch allen weiter, die sich für Sprachwissenschaft und speziell für die Entwicklung der Sprache interessieren. Ich lege den unentschlossenen Käufern auch wärmstens ans Herz, es auf englisch zu kaufen. Ich kann mir nicht vorstellen, dass es auf deutsch sooo gut ist, wie auf englisch.

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.

I have really enjoyed the Unfolding of Language as it is a well written and stimulating book. It is easy to read and uses simple examples to advance the author's ideas. I was familiar with some of the concepts in the book beforehand which was what intrigued me to buy it, however there were still many fascinating examples and theories that I was unfamiliar with, which made it a rewarding read. As a fan of languages I found the book a wealth of information on the bizarre methods languages use to convey their meanings and how these might have come about originally.I was however surprised by some obvious omission from the book, which left me feeling that Guy was searching for answers in the distant past when examples in living language were far more revealing.A case in point is the change of p to f and f to h for which he uses the example of German "vater" compared to the Latin "pater". However far more frequent and varied changes occur in Welsh (and other celtic languages) as part of the everyday language. Welsh has a well developed system of mutations, namely soft, nasal and aspirant. The mutations may be sumarised asnormal->soft->aspirantp->b->pht->d->thc->g->chb->f->bf->dd->dg->w->getc. Where "dd" is pronounced as "th" in the english word "them" and "f" is pronounced as the english sound "v". This is a good example of Guy's softening of consonants.So for the Welsh speaker the concept of Grimm's Law is enshrined in their language. As such I think it makes a better example then the Latin-German example and is a curious omission form the book.In a later section of the book, Guy talks about the principle of erosion where consonants are removed over time to make the words easier to speak. Here again he makes a rather obvious omission. Scottish Gaelic has a peculiar spelling orthography which retains the old consonants long after their pronunciation has been lost. Take for example the word "leabhar" which means "book" and is similar in orthography to the Latin "liber" However the Gaelic pronunciation is "lyower", the "b" sound having been eroded by the surrounding vowels. Medial "bh" sounds are silent in Gaelic". This is not an isolated example in the language either. Examples include "adhaircean" [arkun] ="horns" ; "mathair" [ma-er] = mother. The list is endless.Finally when talking about creating grammar from changes in pronunciation, again an obvious example in Scots Gaelic springs to mind.The past tense was formed using the particle "do" as is "do buail mi" ="I struck". The "b" of "buail" was eroded because it was stuck between two vowels and so became "bh" [v]. "do bhuail mi". Eventually speakers stopped saying the "do" because the aspiration of the "b" to "bh" was sufficient to mark the past tense and in modern Gaelic "bhuail mi " is the past tense. However when the verb starts with a vowel (which can't be aspirated) the "do" remains. However the general rule of aspiration is still applied but in this case it is the "do" that aspirates to "dh" and the past tense of a verb beginning with a vowel is "dh'innis me" = "tell me".Again these are examples from a living language where these changes occur dynamically on a daily basis. It seems strange that he does not mention these important examples and chooses to search in long dead languages for proof of the theories.Having said all that I am still going to buy his other book on why language looks different to speakers of different languages. He really is an inspiring writer!

Deutscher bringt etwas in der Populärwissenschaft sehr Seltenes fertig: Er kann auch komplexe Inhalte bildhaft und klar darstellen, ohne die Intelligenz seiner Leser zu beleidigen. Seine Thesen sind überzeugend und werden in allen Einzelheiten belegt. Ausserdem überlässt der Autor es seiner Leserschaft mittels eines umfangreichen Anhangs, sich in bestimmte Themen zu vertiefen.Wer sich für Sprache interessiert, ohne in die unergründlichen Tiefen der theoretischen Linguistik hinabsteigen zu wollen, ist mit diesem Buch perfekt bedient.