Don't Believe A Word
The Surprising Truth About Language
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
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'Wonderful. You finish the book more alive than ever to the enduring mystery and miracle of that thing that makes us most human' STEPHEN FRY
'Most popular books on language dumb down; Shariatmadari's smartens things up, and is all the more entertaining for it' THE SUNDAY TIMES, a Book of the Year
'A meaty, rewarding and necessary read' GUARDIAN
'Fascinating and thought-provoking . . . crammed with weird and wonderful facts . . . for anyone who delights in linguistics it's a richly rewarding read' MAIL ON SUNDAY
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- A word's origin doesn't tell you what it means today
- There are languages that change when your mother-in-law is present
- The language you speak could make you more prone to accidents
- There's a special part of the brain that produces swear words
Taking us on a mind-boggling journey through the science of language, linguist David Shariatmadari uncovers the truth about what we do with words, exploding nine widely-held myths about language while introducing us to some of the fundamental insights of modern linguistics.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Guardian editor Shariatmadari's mostly accessible debut about modern linguistics aims to debunk certain prevailing beliefs about language. He begins by showing the long history of an often-voiced opinion that English is now in a state of unprecedented decline citing a 14th-century complaint that too much Danish and French had entered the language. Shariatmadari follows up by demonstrating how commonly words change meaning (such as the verb "like") and argues that language is "change." Other chapters take on etymology, pronunciation, and accent. While Noam Chomsky, and his theory of a universal grammar, is one of the author's idols, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and his hypothesis that language shapes our perception of reality, is one of his whipping boys. Shariatmadari argues at length that Whorf's characterization of Hopi as a kind of "mysterious code" was both condescending and simply inaccurate. Shariatmadari has a gift for making obscure linguistic concepts plain, such as the function of recursion in grammar, which "means that there is no longest' sentence in a language you can just keep adding to it," as illustrated by the nursery rhyme "The House That Jack Built." Shariatmadari, however, does have a tendency to belabor his points (as in his overlong discussion of dialect vs. language). Nevertheless, this is an engrossing introduction to some basic problems in contemporary linguistics.