kvmtennis.blogg.se - The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Linguists put the development of verbal communication at 150,000 years ago because we believe that mutation happened while we were still in Africa.

So-called “primitive languages” (ones that are not written and spoken in smaller, less economically connected societies) are actually more complex than ones spoken more widely, as languages get simpler with more nonnative speakers.

God destroys it, sets humans into an array of languages and spreads them across the world to keep them from conspiring to do something like that ever again.

Following the Great Flood, humans speaking a single language plan to build a tower that can reach heaven.

The title of the book is, of course, a reference to the biblical story in Genesis of the Tower of Babel. (Read the Guardian’s review of this book here.) In the last six months, I’ve become quite a big fan of his - having read his 2016 book on language evolution and his 2009 book on the lesser-known stories of the English language history, I seem to be working through his language books in reverse chronological order. That comes from the 2003 book “ Power of Babel,” the third consecutive book I read by linguist John McWhorter, which I finished early this summer. Today there are 6,000 and by 2100, that might be back to as few as 500.Īlong the way, languages have emerged, influenced each other and continue to change. That grew to as many as 100,000 languages, before we developed farming. There was likely once a single language, first developed 150,000 years ago.