{"id":219,"date":"2003-11-22T10:52:30","date_gmt":"2003-11-22T16:52:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fantasist.net\/scroll\/?p=219"},"modified":"2003-11-22T10:52:30","modified_gmt":"2003-11-22T16:52:30","slug":"review-of-the-power-of-babel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fantasist.net\/scroll\/index.php\/2003\/11\/22\/review-of-the-power-of-babel\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of The Power of Babel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I finished <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0716744732\/fantasistnet\/002-7694236-0201664\">The Power of Babel <\/a>by John McWhorter this past week.<\/p>\n<p>And, it was pretty damn good!  Okay, allowing for the fact that I&#8217;m interested in linguistics and history and historical linguistics, it&#8217;s still a good book.  As my be guessed from that last sentence, The Power of Babel is about the history of language.  Not <i>a<\/i> language, but <i><b>all<\/b><\/i> of them.  Mr. McWhorter effectively uses examples from numerous languages from every continent and cultural region I can think of that has language.<br \/>\nIn the very first chapter he outlines the five basic ways that language changes and then sets out to describe them in the subsequent chapters.  I think he does and well enough that a rough, amatuer linguist like me can really understand what he&#8217;s saying.  He even has a whole, thick, meaty chapter dedicated to pidgins and creoles, which is a subject that fascinates me.  He talks about the social and economic pressures that drive language change, which I thought was quite insightful.  <\/p>\n<p>Now, I have to admit, I got this book with the sole purpose of getting ideas for conlanging.  I was <i>not<\/i> dissapointed!  The linguistic ideas came hot and heavy.  Everything got touched on in this book: grammar, phonology, morphology and how they all alter over time.  I have to say that I liked this even better than <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fantasist.net\/scroll\/archives\/2003_09.html#000239\">the Language Instinct<\/a>, which was a very good book.<br \/>\nIf you have even a passing interest in historical linguistics, buy this book and read it!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I finished The Power of Babel by John McWhorter this past week. And, it was pretty damn good! Okay, allowing for the fact that I&#8217;m interested in linguistics and history and historical linguistics, it&#8217;s still a good book. As my be guessed from that last sentence, The Power of Babel is about the history of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,23,28],"tags":[352],"class_list":["post-219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-constructed-languages","category-review","category-science-and-technology","tag-john-mcwhorter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fantasist.net\/scroll\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fantasist.net\/scroll\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fantasist.net\/scroll\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fantasist.net\/scroll\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fantasist.net\/scroll\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fantasist.net\/scroll\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fantasist.net\/scroll\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fantasist.net\/scroll\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fantasist.net\/scroll\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}