Book Review: Readings

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

by Guy Deutscher

Metropolitan Books, 358 pp., $26

Did you know that Arabic has no p's? It used to, but they eroded away, one by one, just like those h's are doing over in England, where "hot" is "'ot" and "hello" is "'ello." As it turns out, we humans just like to put as little effort as possible into speaking, and that leads to all sorts of erosion, from harder letters to easier ones, from longer words to shorter ones, and yet, beautifully, keeping us from devolving into snorts and grunts is the impulse toward expression, leading us to combine words to achieve ever more precise and emphatic meanings, which then meld into long words, which then erode again into smaller words, a process that goes on and on, leaving us with the sophisticated and idiosyncratic web we today call language. As a boy wrangling with Latin, Guy Deutscher imagined that the elders of Rome once sat around voting on what the various case endings should be. Now, in The Unfolding of Language, Deutscher uncovers the real elders of Rome – the natural forces that cause, say, "meat" and "great" to look alike but sound quite different – by retracing our steps back to the very beginning, when all we had were a few "thing-words" and "action-words" and, literally, no ifs, ands, or buts. He uncovers the origins of adjectives and prepositions and even the smallest combinations of letters. The familiar "-ly," for instance, started out, surprisingly logically, as a noun meaning "body," which evolved into "manner," which then began to meld with so many words that it could no longer stand on its own. Unfolding is the kind of book that brings new order to the world, making connections leap out at you wherever you look, and it's exciting that Deutscher has made the fruits of linguistics so readily available for us schmoes who thought Shakespeare was just being creative when he wrote "wrinkled front" rather than "forehead" – "front" really just meant "forehead" back then, jeez. Learning such minutiae may sound dreary, but Deutscher, with his always slightly amused tone, manages to turn this ambitiously comprehensive, globe-trotting book – complete with a bonus history of the linguistics discipline itself – into a great layman's read without sacrificing the integrity of the material, packing the juiciest stuff into the front and preserving the rest for the truly hooked in the appendices in the back. For anyone who's ever wondered how we got from Shakespeare's English to ours, Unfolding will more than satisfy.