Don't Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language
-
-
4.0 • 6 Ratings
-
-
- $23.99
-
- $23.99
Publisher Description
A linguist’s entertaining and highly informed guide to what languages are and how they function.
Think you know language? Think again.
There are languages that change when your mother-in-law is present.
The language you speak could make you more prone to accidents.
Swear words are produced in a special part of your brain.
Over the past few decades, we have reached new frontiers of linguistic knowledge. Linguists can now explain how and why language changes, describe its structures, and map its activity in the brain. But despite these advances, much of what people believe about language is based on folklore, instinct, or hearsay. We imagine a word’s origin is it’s “true” meaning, that foreign languages are full of “untranslatable” words, or that grammatical mistakes undermine English.
In Don’t Believe A Word, linguist David Shariatmadari takes us on a mind-boggling journey through the science of language, urging us to abandon our prejudices in a bid to uncover the (far more interesting) 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, Shariatmadari is an energetic guide to the beauty and quirkiness of humanity’s greatest achievement.
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.
