The Secret Life of Language

by Simon Pulleyn

Back cover:
Explore the fascinating world human language and discover, the hidden stories behind every word.

From Cantonese to Xhosa, from the origins of writing to
the invention of Elvish, from articulation to syntax,
the history and diversity of human communication
are brought to life in this fascinating book.

Beginning with the anatomy of speech and the early
development of verbal communication, The Secret Life
of Language goes on to unlock the secrets of the written
word, from Egyptian hieroglyphs to Japanese kanji, offering
a wide-ranging tour of the major languages of the world.

Genres: Nonfiction, Language

415 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 30, 2018

Reviews

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This looked like a book aimed at primary school students, but it is a topic of interest and I was at a library I had never been in before, so I checked it out. I was pleasantly surprised. In the first 52 pages it gives a solid introduction to what linguistics is about, and the terminology. Later on in the book that was a problem because I didn’t remember what some of the terms meant and they were not in the small glossary at the back of the book.

The chapter comprising the middle of the book has a few pages on a several of language groups. This was the least interesting part for me. I don’t have interest in getting that specific right now.

The chapter on writing systems was quite interesting, and included descriptions of famous decipherments.

Language Variety discusses dialects and language death.
One of my favorite quotations is traced in the following Wikipedia article.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_lan...
Linguists lament language death in much the same way that biologists lament the death of a species.

Artificial languages are also give a brief but interesting chapter.

[Rekha Shane · Rating 4 out of 5]

What languages do you speak? Ever noticed similarities across languages and wondered why? If you're curious about the human ability to communicate then The Secret Life of Language by Simon Pulleyn is the book you've been waiting for.

The Secret Life of Language is truthfully more of a text book than the kind of armchair or bedside reading most people enjoy, but don't people read text books? I have a friend who was so into coding as a kid his mum had to ban him from taking C++ text books on holiday. These are the extremes of text book revelry, but I say to myself that surely it's not just the geeks and freaks that read text books for fun. Surely the rest of society is allowed to read a text book too?

The Secret Life of Language is a book that is relevant to everyone. I genuinely loved it. I had been thinking for a long time how it is uncanny how many of the world's languages have similarities you wouldn't expect. I learnt French at school for example and was astounded to find out the word for one hundred is 'cent'. Why? Well the word for one hundred in Hindi is 'soh'. Ignoring the spellings and apart from the slight nasal inflection in the French word, these two words are practically pronounced the same. It tickled my fancy to think that a French man could be understood in an Indian village (if he was talking about one hundred of something of course!) Pulleyn uses precisely this numerical example to draw out the similarities in the roots of language. Both Hindi and French belong to the Indo-European group of languages and this is why some words do sound similar.

If you're a bit curious about these things, about how language started out and the spread of languages then this book is a wonderful place to start. It's packed full of pictures, diagrams and fun facts! It gave me a fantastic insight into the origins of language and speech.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is basically an overview of all the languages in the world, which is of course an amazingly difficult topic to understand let alone cover in a book. Some of the more unusual features didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, and discussion of phonetics inevitably leads to me poking my tongue in odd places and going "T t th d dh D nope don't get it", but I think those problems were due to my lack of experience rather than any weakness in the book. I have decided there is no way I will ever learn Chinese, although Japanese would be nice to try.

[Letitia Mason]

Fascinating read. Interesting to learn just how many sounds the human voice can make, and to discover how languages originated and spread. I had not realised just how much grammer differs from one language family to another.
The book is admirable because it is succinct but detailed with amusing pictures to illustrate the main points. Occasionally I felt I needed more explanation or information but this is a complex subject and to go any further would probably have created more confusion not less. This book has encouraged me to read further on how languages develop,

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

While it didn't go as deep as I'd hoped on many language families or linguistic ideas (which are pretty confusing), this was a good, broad introduction to the fascinating world of languages and linguistics

[Martha Mahoney · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first part was interesting, like a basic linguistics course. The 2nd half examined indiosyncracies of several languages, at a very basic level. A good intro. I stopped reading after I got through about half the languages discussed.

[Ashish · Rating 3 out of 5]

A 3.5

Not sure who the target audience is.
Is certainly interesting in parts. Gets overly technical in others for the lay reader.

[Brad McKenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book covers many (all?) areas of language; from biological to cultural; from philology (the study of languages) to phonology (the study of sounds that make up a language); from writing to dialect. It’s a great book. It’s also a textbook. Which I was surprised to find to my liking. Though I shouldn’t’ve been; ‘tis not the first time I’ve read, and enjoyed, a textbook having to do with words and languages.

He goes over the evolution of the Proto-indo-European (PIE...mmmmm, pie) languages, which I’m familiar with, but also goes over African and Asian and Native American languages, which I’m not. It also touches about the development of writing, which was fascinating. Here’s the high-level evolution of writing and alphabets:

Pre-Alphabetic
3500 BCE = Summarian Cuneiform
2100 BCE = Middle Egyptian Hieroglyphics
1400 BCE = Minoan Linear B

Start of Alphabets (need to write vowels to be considered one)
1200 BCE = Phoenician Alphabet
1200 BCE = Chinese Oracle Bones
1000 BCE = Roman Alphabet (adapted the Greek Alphabet which had adapted the Phoenician)
900 BCE = Cyrillic Alphabet (also from Greek)
900 CE (not a typo) = Japan created Katakana and Hiragna scripts out of the Chinese one they’d been using up till then to represent their sounds, which they called Kanji. Crazy part? All three can be used in writing at the same time.

Now for some random highlights:

Before Bill Jones, in 1786, Dutchman Marcus Zuerius, in 1647, and Frenchman Gaston-Laurend Coeurdoux, in 1767, both hypothesized the existence of PIE. (55)

There are 500 languages in Nigeria (58)

Humans could have separated before they developed speech. If so, going bath further than PIE won’t yield a single mother tongue. (61)

Many areas of Russia speak a form of Turkish, which may have originated in northern Mongolia. (86)

Papua New Guinea is 179,000 sq miles and has 8 million people. It has 830 languages. That’s the number of people that live in NYC. (109)

The Japanese call their land nihon. Ni means sun and hon means origin. Hence Land of the Rising Sun. (forgot to get page #)

Because the Inuit (though he used Eskimo in the book) language is agglutinal, it adds suffixes to a root word to give additional info about the state of the word you’re describing, people thought they had buckets of words for snow when they don’t. This is called The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. (120)

The Russian Cyrillic alphabet is named after St. Cyril who brought Christianity to the Slavs. (145)