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Language Families of the World
Listening Length: 15 hours and 54 minutes
Language, in its seemingly infinite varieties, tells us who we are and where we come from. Many linguists believe that all of the world's languages - over 7,000 currently - emerged from a single prehistoric source. While experts have not yet been able to reproduce this proto-language, most of the world's current languages can be traced to various language families that have branched and divided, spreading across the globe with migrating humans and evolving over time.
The ability to communicate with the spoken word is so prevelant that we have yet to discover a civilization that does not speak. The fitful preservation of human remains throughout history has made tracing the ultimate origin of sophisticated human cultures difficult, but it is assumed that language is at least 300,000 years old. With so much time comes immense change - including the development of the written word. There's no doubt that over centuries, numerous languages have been born, thrived, and died. So how did we get here, and how do we trace the many language branches back to the root?
In Language Families of the World, Professor John McWhorter of Columbia University takes you back through time and around the world, following the linguistic trails left by generations of humans that lead back to the beginnings of language. Utilizing historical theories and cutting-edge research, these 34 astonishing lectures will introduce you to the major language families of the world and their many offspring, including a variety of languages that are no longer spoken but provide vital links between past and present.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
Language, in its seemingly infinite varieties, tells us who we are and where we come from. Many linguists believe that all of the world's languages - over 7,000 currently - emerged from a single prehistoric source. While experts have not yet been able to reproduce this proto-language, most of the world's current languages can be traced to various language families that have branched and divided, spreading across the globe with migrating humans and evolving over time.
The ability to communicate with the spoken word is so prevelant that we have yet to discover a civilization that does not speak. The fitful preservation of human remains throughout history has made tracing the ultimate origin of sophisticated human cultures difficult, but it is assumed that language is at least 300,000 years old. With so much time comes immense change - including the development of the written word. There's no doubt that over centuries, numerous languages have been born, thrived, and died. So how did we get here, and how do we trace the many language branches back to the root?
In Language Families of the World, Professor John McWhorter of Columbia University takes you back through time and around the world, following the linguistic trails left by generations of humans that lead back to the beginnings of language. Utilizing historical theories and cutting-edge research, these 34 astonishing lectures will introduce you to the major language families of the world and their many offspring, including a variety of languages that are no longer spoken but provide vital links between past and present.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
16 pages, Audible Audio
First published February 1, 2019
61 people are currently reading
1016 people want to read
About the author
John McWhorter
47 books1,712 followersJohn Hamilton McWhorter (Professor McWhorter uses neither his title nor his middle initial as an author) is an American academic and linguist who is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he teaches linguistics, American studies, philosophy, and music history. He is the author of a number of books on language and on race relations. His research specializes on how creole languages form, and how language grammars change as the result of sociohistorical phenomena.
A popular writer, McWhorter has written for Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Politico, Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Daily News, City Journal, The New Yorker, among others; he is also contributing editor at The Atlantic and hosts Slate's Lexicon Valley podcas
A popular writer, McWhorter has written for Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Politico, Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Daily News, City Journal, The New Yorker, among others; he is also contributing editor at The Atlantic and hosts Slate's Lexicon Valley podcas
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 149 reviews
June 2, 2019
I really got it wrong. I have always been interested in why there is a Native American language that is closely related to Ket, a Siberian language that has no other language relations. My little fantasy (jump to **) I wrote when I started the book was so wrong. DNA and analysis of language tells a different story. The Siberian people, about 1,000 trekked to a land, now drowned - the Bering Sea was then land, called Beringia and stayed there about 15,000 years before moving in small groups through Alaska and up the Pacific North West. Wherever they settled their language developed over the millenia to be different from other tribes, but still, to a linguist, recognisably part of the Na-Dene language family. Ket, in Siberia, being the only other related language.
The book was full of fascinating insights into people and their migrations, into how languages differ, how some languages lack almost all vowels, others have no numbers, and others only three verbs! Some have vast numbers of vowel sounds, others six levels of tone affecting the meaning of a word and the click languages can have five different clicks and cannot be learned, you have to be brought up speaking some of them.
The more complex a language the more it is likely to be spoken by a limited number of people. Languages tend to become easier (this is a linguist's view, not mine). There are languages that seem as though they are related, like Korean and Japanese but are from different language groups, and others that look like they are completely different, like Arabic and Hebrew, but are very closely related indeed.
The book was long, complex and very interesting. I listened to it and had the course book (which I didn't even look at). One point the author made was that although we tend to think of language as written, that is a different thing altogether and whether or not a language is written has nothing to do with it's complexity or otherwise. So now I want to read a book on writing.
Despite the boring bits, like whether the subject comes before the verb and if prefixes and suffixes are important not to mention whether the language has regular rules for verbs or not, the book is really fantastic. Humans were a nomadic people and all these languages, all 7,000 of them are the result of that.
_______
Notes on reading. Mostly about how wrong I was. Did you know that there are 170 language families in the world and none of them have a relationship with the other? Proto-Indo-European, PIE, which we think of a 'the' ancestral language, is but one of these 170.
**There is a (dying) language in Siberia that is the only European representative of a group of languages, Na-Dene, spoken by Native Americans. The DNA bears out the origins of the people being in three waves and originating from Siberia.
You can just imagine what happened. People, fed up of the cold and the hard work to scrape a living in Siberia got together large groups of people who trudged across the land bridge and ended up in the sunny climes of America and dispersed in small groups. At some later point, when they were settled and had stores of food, some of them thought, let's go back and tell the others of this paradise of sunshine. So back and forth they went, each journey taking years and years.
That's just my imagination, but how else?
The book was full of fascinating insights into people and their migrations, into how languages differ, how some languages lack almost all vowels, others have no numbers, and others only three verbs! Some have vast numbers of vowel sounds, others six levels of tone affecting the meaning of a word and the click languages can have five different clicks and cannot be learned, you have to be brought up speaking some of them.
The more complex a language the more it is likely to be spoken by a limited number of people. Languages tend to become easier (this is a linguist's view, not mine). There are languages that seem as though they are related, like Korean and Japanese but are from different language groups, and others that look like they are completely different, like Arabic and Hebrew, but are very closely related indeed.
The book was long, complex and very interesting. I listened to it and had the course book (which I didn't even look at). One point the author made was that although we tend to think of language as written, that is a different thing altogether and whether or not a language is written has nothing to do with it's complexity or otherwise. So now I want to read a book on writing.
Despite the boring bits, like whether the subject comes before the verb and if prefixes and suffixes are important not to mention whether the language has regular rules for verbs or not, the book is really fantastic. Humans were a nomadic people and all these languages, all 7,000 of them are the result of that.
_______
Notes on reading. Mostly about how wrong I was. Did you know that there are 170 language families in the world and none of them have a relationship with the other? Proto-Indo-European, PIE, which we think of a 'the' ancestral language, is but one of these 170.
**There is a (dying) language in Siberia that is the only European representative of a group of languages, Na-Dene, spoken by Native Americans. The DNA bears out the origins of the people being in three waves and originating from Siberia.
You can just imagine what happened. People, fed up of the cold and the hard work to scrape a living in Siberia got together large groups of people who trudged across the land bridge and ended up in the sunny climes of America and dispersed in small groups. At some later point, when they were settled and had stores of food, some of them thought, let's go back and tell the others of this paradise of sunshine. So back and forth they went, each journey taking years and years.
That's just my imagination, but how else?
April 8, 2021
There are approximately 7,000 languages in the world, and these lectures describe the theories of their origin and what led to differences and similarities between them. To communicate by voice using language seems to be an innate human characteristic. No human group has ever been found that did not use some form of language. But there’s no standard or normal way for a language to be organized. The variety of ways in which the languages can be organized is overwhelming.
There’s lots of interesting information in these thirty-four lectures, and there is no way this short review can do it justice. The following are a few items I found of particular interest.
The distribution of languages and their gradation of differences have much to teach about the history of human migrations and invasions. The study of linguistics has been revolutionized in recent years by the development of human DNA testing. DNA can now confirm and in come cases disprove theories regarding the timing and path of the probable spread of humans and their languages around the earth.
Many of the lesser known languages have or will soon become extinct (i.e. no longer spoken). Ironically, the most threatened languages tend to be extremely complex and difficult to learn, thus making them difficult to preserve by teaching to adults. It seems to be a natural process for languages from isolated communities, spoken only by those who have learned the language as children, to develop into very complex grammars which are almost impossible for outsiders to learn. Other widely spoken languages usually have a history of many adults learning to speak the language which causes it to become increasingly simplified as it spreads.
One of the most bizarre group of spoken languages are the click languages of Africa. These lectures discuss the possibility that they may be the closest of today’s languages to the world’s first language. Two groups of click speakers are divergent genetically by 70,000 years, which is when humans first left Africa. Thus it can be concluded that the use of clicks dates back at least that far.
There was also brief mention of language in an isolated area of the Andes Mountains that can be whistled. It makes extensive use of tones and rhythm which allows distant communication across mountain valleys.
Speaking of tones, that’s another language technique that’s difficult for English speakers to comprehend. Many languages make use of tones, but Mandarin and Cantonese are two of the most widely spoken.
Speaking of Chinese languages, Mandarin and Cantonese are actually different languages. They share a common writing system which is possible because it’s not phonetic. There are indications from old Chinese writing that they used to have prefixes and suffixes that have been dropped over time as the language morphed into a language of single syllable words.
Korean and Japanese use similar grammar but different words. It’s interesting to try to speculate what sort of history led to that combination.
One of the most difficult languages to learn to speak is Navajo. It has no regular verbs. I thought learning Spanish verb conjugations was a pain, but I can't imagine learning verb conjugations with no regular pattern to follow.
There’s an isolated community in Siberia that has a language with similarities to Navajo but no DNA link has been found between the two communities. Professor McWhorter says he finds it hard to believe that there’s no connection of some sort for these two languages. He’s waiting for development of future refinement of the linguistic and DNA analyses.
There are several lectures that discuss the use of writing. It appears that writing was independently invented three times in human history, in the Middle East, China, and Maya. The idea of writing, but not necessarily the details, spread from those places. One thing emphasized by these lectures is the fact that the concept of using a phonetic alphabet is counter intuitive. Pictographic or syllabary hieroglyphics are more intuitive. The earliest archeological evidence of a phonetic alphabet has been found among Egyptian laborers at a turquoise mine in the Sinai who used it as a shortcut to avoid using the complicated hieroglyphics used at the time. The Phoenicians were the ones that spread the use of a phonetic alphabet around the Mediterranean.
There’s lots of interesting information in these thirty-four lectures, and there is no way this short review can do it justice. The following are a few items I found of particular interest.
The distribution of languages and their gradation of differences have much to teach about the history of human migrations and invasions. The study of linguistics has been revolutionized in recent years by the development of human DNA testing. DNA can now confirm and in come cases disprove theories regarding the timing and path of the probable spread of humans and their languages around the earth.
Many of the lesser known languages have or will soon become extinct (i.e. no longer spoken). Ironically, the most threatened languages tend to be extremely complex and difficult to learn, thus making them difficult to preserve by teaching to adults. It seems to be a natural process for languages from isolated communities, spoken only by those who have learned the language as children, to develop into very complex grammars which are almost impossible for outsiders to learn. Other widely spoken languages usually have a history of many adults learning to speak the language which causes it to become increasingly simplified as it spreads.
One of the most bizarre group of spoken languages are the click languages of Africa. These lectures discuss the possibility that they may be the closest of today’s languages to the world’s first language. Two groups of click speakers are divergent genetically by 70,000 years, which is when humans first left Africa. Thus it can be concluded that the use of clicks dates back at least that far.
There was also brief mention of language in an isolated area of the Andes Mountains that can be whistled. It makes extensive use of tones and rhythm which allows distant communication across mountain valleys.
Speaking of tones, that’s another language technique that’s difficult for English speakers to comprehend. Many languages make use of tones, but Mandarin and Cantonese are two of the most widely spoken.
Speaking of Chinese languages, Mandarin and Cantonese are actually different languages. They share a common writing system which is possible because it’s not phonetic. There are indications from old Chinese writing that they used to have prefixes and suffixes that have been dropped over time as the language morphed into a language of single syllable words.
Korean and Japanese use similar grammar but different words. It’s interesting to try to speculate what sort of history led to that combination.
One of the most difficult languages to learn to speak is Navajo. It has no regular verbs. I thought learning Spanish verb conjugations was a pain, but I can't imagine learning verb conjugations with no regular pattern to follow.
There’s an isolated community in Siberia that has a language with similarities to Navajo but no DNA link has been found between the two communities. Professor McWhorter says he finds it hard to believe that there’s no connection of some sort for these two languages. He’s waiting for development of future refinement of the linguistic and DNA analyses.
There are several lectures that discuss the use of writing. It appears that writing was independently invented three times in human history, in the Middle East, China, and Maya. The idea of writing, but not necessarily the details, spread from those places. One thing emphasized by these lectures is the fact that the concept of using a phonetic alphabet is counter intuitive. Pictographic or syllabary hieroglyphics are more intuitive. The earliest archeological evidence of a phonetic alphabet has been found among Egyptian laborers at a turquoise mine in the Sinai who used it as a shortcut to avoid using the complicated hieroglyphics used at the time. The Phoenicians were the ones that spread the use of a phonetic alphabet around the Mediterranean.
September 6, 2019
My undergraduate degree was in Linguistics, so I'm predisposed to find the subject matter more interesting than many people might, but this is a fantastic series of lectures for anyone who is interested about the bazillions of languages that exist, and have existed, in the world.
McWhorter is a humorous guy and cracks a lot of jokes (some funnier than others) but he's also a linguistics professor, so this is his bread and butter and he loves it.
Most of the lectures cover a very broad language family: Afro-Asiatic, Indo-European, Nilo-Saharan, etc. One of the things McWhorter hits early is the fact that linguistic classification is even more subjective than biological classification. The lines between "dialect" and "language" are fuzzy, and linguists love trying to trace relationships between languages, and have been arguing about it for centuries. There are, as McWhorter puts it, "lumpers" who like to group languages more broadly into smaller groups (he is one) and "splitters" who consider every language "family" to actually be dozens, sometimes hundreds, of distinct groups and subgroups.
He covers the entire world. The tiny little languages of Amazonian and New Guinean tribes, the "click" languages of Africa, the vast swath of Indo-European languages, and where the hell Basque came from. Chinese and its neighbors and how writing systems relate to languages. The distinctness of Japanese and Korean. (This one has always been odd to me. Linguists insist that Korean and Japanese are unrelated, in completely different families. But I've studied both, and while it's true the vocabulary is different - there are few loan words between them - the grammar is very similar. But that's language for you!) Ancient languages that no longer exist, and how we reconstruct them. Even the theory currently popular with some linguists that there is a single "proto-language" that is the ancestor of all languages, and that we can reconstruct it. McWhorter is clearly skeptical about this, talking a bit about why they think, for example, that they have identified what the "original" words for "two" and "water" were, 10,000 years ago. But is it impossible? Maybe not - as he points out, biologists say that everyone in Europe can trace ancestry to Charlemagne, because that's how genetics and ancestry work.
Some of the information is surprising, some of it isn't if you've ever had an interest in linguistics. One of the more interesting lectures to me was one of the final ones where he talks about recent linkages of genetic research to linguistics. For example, it's long been known (or at least, a strongly supported theory) that American Indians are descended from people who crossed the Bering Strait from what is now Siberia. And in fact there is a Siberian language called Ket which linguists have identified as being unmistakably descended from a common ancestor with Navajo and Apache and related North American languages. So that's strong support for the ancient connection between these remote populations. And yet... recent DNA tests have indicated... no genetic common ancestry.
It's a conundrum. Evidence that the theory is wrong? Or do languages just spread and evolve in ways that don't always mirror the patterns of the people speaking them? McWhorter talks a lot about how words and grammatical patterns spread, how creoles are formed, how languages that are spoken by more people, especially non-native speakers, tend to become "simplified." (There is a reason why the hardest languages in the world, the ones that are pretty much impossible to become fluent in unless you're a native speaker, tend to be ones that are only spoken by small populations with little intermingling with outsiders.)
I could wax on and on about all the interesting things in this course, but I'd just highly recommend it for all language nerds.
McWhorter is a humorous guy and cracks a lot of jokes (some funnier than others) but he's also a linguistics professor, so this is his bread and butter and he loves it.
Most of the lectures cover a very broad language family: Afro-Asiatic, Indo-European, Nilo-Saharan, etc. One of the things McWhorter hits early is the fact that linguistic classification is even more subjective than biological classification. The lines between "dialect" and "language" are fuzzy, and linguists love trying to trace relationships between languages, and have been arguing about it for centuries. There are, as McWhorter puts it, "lumpers" who like to group languages more broadly into smaller groups (he is one) and "splitters" who consider every language "family" to actually be dozens, sometimes hundreds, of distinct groups and subgroups.
He covers the entire world. The tiny little languages of Amazonian and New Guinean tribes, the "click" languages of Africa, the vast swath of Indo-European languages, and where the hell Basque came from. Chinese and its neighbors and how writing systems relate to languages. The distinctness of Japanese and Korean. (This one has always been odd to me. Linguists insist that Korean and Japanese are unrelated, in completely different families. But I've studied both, and while it's true the vocabulary is different - there are few loan words between them - the grammar is very similar. But that's language for you!) Ancient languages that no longer exist, and how we reconstruct them. Even the theory currently popular with some linguists that there is a single "proto-language" that is the ancestor of all languages, and that we can reconstruct it. McWhorter is clearly skeptical about this, talking a bit about why they think, for example, that they have identified what the "original" words for "two" and "water" were, 10,000 years ago. But is it impossible? Maybe not - as he points out, biologists say that everyone in Europe can trace ancestry to Charlemagne, because that's how genetics and ancestry work.
Some of the information is surprising, some of it isn't if you've ever had an interest in linguistics. One of the more interesting lectures to me was one of the final ones where he talks about recent linkages of genetic research to linguistics. For example, it's long been known (or at least, a strongly supported theory) that American Indians are descended from people who crossed the Bering Strait from what is now Siberia. And in fact there is a Siberian language called Ket which linguists have identified as being unmistakably descended from a common ancestor with Navajo and Apache and related North American languages. So that's strong support for the ancient connection between these remote populations. And yet... recent DNA tests have indicated... no genetic common ancestry.
It's a conundrum. Evidence that the theory is wrong? Or do languages just spread and evolve in ways that don't always mirror the patterns of the people speaking them? McWhorter talks a lot about how words and grammatical patterns spread, how creoles are formed, how languages that are spoken by more people, especially non-native speakers, tend to become "simplified." (There is a reason why the hardest languages in the world, the ones that are pretty much impossible to become fluent in unless you're a native speaker, tend to be ones that are only spoken by small populations with little intermingling with outsiders.)
I could wax on and on about all the interesting things in this course, but I'd just highly recommend it for all language nerds.
June 12, 2024
Extended review July 30, 2022
John McWhorter takes us on a fascinating survey of the roughly 170 language families of the world. He starts with Indo-European, as most listeners of these lectures are native English speakers, but also because linguistics started in Europe. Indo-European is the most studied and currently most widely spread language group of the world. He introduces the basic concepts of language development and features using this group. After this he goes on a tour around the world, starting in Africa, the cradle of humanity, with the suspected first languages of the world, the click languages.
I am Hungarian and English is my second language; I also (used to) speak German (I rather forgot now as I have not used it). Since Hungarian is not an Indo-European language, I have perhaps a different take from native English speakers on these lectures.
The journey is fascinating. Studying languages makes us realize how many ways humans can express themselves; how many concepts differ between cultures; how structures we might consider essential we can completely dispense with. I have long known, that gender, pronouns, and most tenses are unnecessary, since my native language does without them beautifully; but it is interesting to see English speakers’ reaction, as they take them for granted. Many languages without those, however, have additional complexities: Hungarian, for example, has countless endings, conjugations, and matching of connecting vowels. Or let’s take Chinese, famously mono-syllabic, but also famously difficult due to use of tones. Japanese has many language constructs around social hierarchy and multiples. There are languages where you talk to your mother-in-law in a different dialect, where women talking to men, men talking to women, or their own genders, require different forms.
The number and form of sounds also differs greatly. Click languages have the most, numbering close to a hundred. Some languages have many consonants but only few vowels; one Caucasian languge makes do with only two. Others have many vowels and few consonants. Polynesian languages have few of each, and make up for it by very long words. Given that these languages are the last group that developed, and click languages the first, it might be that languages go from many sounds and drop them over time; albeit that is just conjecture, as most languages have sounds between thirty and fifty.
One of McWhorter’s major points is to get the idea out of his listeners’ head that English is somehow especially complicated, or that “savages” speak less sophisticated languages than the “civilized” people. In fact, the opposite is true: the more isolated a language and spoken by the less people, the more complicated it gets, because it is “allowed to do what languages do”, and increase in complexity. When a language is learned by babies, no grammatical feature, special cases, tenses, conjugations, exceptions to the rule are hard. When a language is learned by many adults, however, such as when two languages mix, a people are conquered, displaced, or use a language for trade, grammar complexities tend to drop. This happened to English, which is quite grammatically stripped compared to most languages, and especially among other Germanic languages, all of which have multiple genders, conjugations and endings.
Some observations as a non-English speaker. When McWhorter picks characteristic features for a language group, it does not mean that other language groups do not have that. For instance, vowel matching of endings as a particular feature of Turkic languages also features in Hungarian. I suspect there are many such examples. His pronounciations are terrible, although I am sure that for the range of languages he covers, are way better than mine. He points out that writing systems are different from the languages, by the example of Chinese characters that can be used for different words in different languages; but fails to mention that Latin script also transcribes many different languages and we don’t think it odd.
McWhorter is engaging and very enthusiastic of his subject. Unfortunately, this is punctuated by tasteless or downright offensive jokes and stories. He calls Polynesian languages “coconut” languages, describes a Swami woman as smelling of fresh fish, tells numerous offputting food and party stories (such as a woman spewing crackers); sprinkles in mildly sexual and creepy comments; and thinks saying that a dead language is “as dead as the Golden Girls minus Betty White” is somehow funny.
He is clearly well educated and highly intelligent, nevertheless he insists on coming off as stupid and shallow: he often says “but that’s boring” about something I actually find interesting; he uses “top” and “bottom” instead of north and south; describes long Polynesian words as something he would like to eat (because, I think, it sounds like mahimahi); insists that “black people don’t get lice”; that some languages are spoken by “minus seventeen people”; and makes passive aggressive comments about other linguists, such as “it is not nice to say they are wrong, so I am not going to say it [end of lecture]”.
Overall, this lecture series is like walking around on the fascinating streets of Paris and taking in the history, culture, atmosphere and the waft of fresh baguettes; but having to watch out for the dog turds. (If you’ve been to Paris, you know what I am talking about.)
John McWhorter takes us on a fascinating survey of the roughly 170 language families of the world. He starts with Indo-European, as most listeners of these lectures are native English speakers, but also because linguistics started in Europe. Indo-European is the most studied and currently most widely spread language group of the world. He introduces the basic concepts of language development and features using this group. After this he goes on a tour around the world, starting in Africa, the cradle of humanity, with the suspected first languages of the world, the click languages.
I am Hungarian and English is my second language; I also (used to) speak German (I rather forgot now as I have not used it). Since Hungarian is not an Indo-European language, I have perhaps a different take from native English speakers on these lectures.
The journey is fascinating. Studying languages makes us realize how many ways humans can express themselves; how many concepts differ between cultures; how structures we might consider essential we can completely dispense with. I have long known, that gender, pronouns, and most tenses are unnecessary, since my native language does without them beautifully; but it is interesting to see English speakers’ reaction, as they take them for granted. Many languages without those, however, have additional complexities: Hungarian, for example, has countless endings, conjugations, and matching of connecting vowels. Or let’s take Chinese, famously mono-syllabic, but also famously difficult due to use of tones. Japanese has many language constructs around social hierarchy and multiples. There are languages where you talk to your mother-in-law in a different dialect, where women talking to men, men talking to women, or their own genders, require different forms.
The number and form of sounds also differs greatly. Click languages have the most, numbering close to a hundred. Some languages have many consonants but only few vowels; one Caucasian languge makes do with only two. Others have many vowels and few consonants. Polynesian languages have few of each, and make up for it by very long words. Given that these languages are the last group that developed, and click languages the first, it might be that languages go from many sounds and drop them over time; albeit that is just conjecture, as most languages have sounds between thirty and fifty.
One of McWhorter’s major points is to get the idea out of his listeners’ head that English is somehow especially complicated, or that “savages” speak less sophisticated languages than the “civilized” people. In fact, the opposite is true: the more isolated a language and spoken by the less people, the more complicated it gets, because it is “allowed to do what languages do”, and increase in complexity. When a language is learned by babies, no grammatical feature, special cases, tenses, conjugations, exceptions to the rule are hard. When a language is learned by many adults, however, such as when two languages mix, a people are conquered, displaced, or use a language for trade, grammar complexities tend to drop. This happened to English, which is quite grammatically stripped compared to most languages, and especially among other Germanic languages, all of which have multiple genders, conjugations and endings.
Some observations as a non-English speaker. When McWhorter picks characteristic features for a language group, it does not mean that other language groups do not have that. For instance, vowel matching of endings as a particular feature of Turkic languages also features in Hungarian. I suspect there are many such examples. His pronounciations are terrible, although I am sure that for the range of languages he covers, are way better than mine. He points out that writing systems are different from the languages, by the example of Chinese characters that can be used for different words in different languages; but fails to mention that Latin script also transcribes many different languages and we don’t think it odd.
McWhorter is engaging and very enthusiastic of his subject. Unfortunately, this is punctuated by tasteless or downright offensive jokes and stories. He calls Polynesian languages “coconut” languages, describes a Swami woman as smelling of fresh fish, tells numerous offputting food and party stories (such as a woman spewing crackers); sprinkles in mildly sexual and creepy comments; and thinks saying that a dead language is “as dead as the Golden Girls minus Betty White” is somehow funny.
He is clearly well educated and highly intelligent, nevertheless he insists on coming off as stupid and shallow: he often says “but that’s boring” about something I actually find interesting; he uses “top” and “bottom” instead of north and south; describes long Polynesian words as something he would like to eat (because, I think, it sounds like mahimahi); insists that “black people don’t get lice”; that some languages are spoken by “minus seventeen people”; and makes passive aggressive comments about other linguists, such as “it is not nice to say they are wrong, so I am not going to say it [end of lecture]”.
Overall, this lecture series is like walking around on the fascinating streets of Paris and taking in the history, culture, atmosphere and the waft of fresh baguettes; but having to watch out for the dog turds. (If you’ve been to Paris, you know what I am talking about.)
December 26, 2019
For any reader interested in other languages but in need of just a primer this is ideal. I learnt so much. For a couple of outstanding and informative reviews see these linked below.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
February 23, 2021
I'm definitely going to have to listen to this again at some point to really let it all sink in. This is a comprehensive overview of linguistics, and there's a lot of info packed into its 16 hours. There is a very handy PDF file that comes with the audiobook, and I would suggest, if you're really serious about learning about linguistics, to listen to one or two lectures at a time (they're each roughly 30 minutes apiece) along with the PDF. It's not a transcript, but has the highlights of each lecture and graphics that will show you the areas and regions he's talking about, as well as graphics about some of the various languages he's explaining. And there are quizzes, if you really want to go that extra mile (and answers, if you want to cheat, lol).
I listened to two or three a day, and even that was a bit overwhelming. What impressed me the most was how much more complex so many other languages are than English, since I've always heard it's one of the hardest languages to learn, and how little writing actually has to do with language development. He goes over the various different language families that we have currently, such as Indo-European, Causasian, Polyensian, the click languages, etc; how to identify when languages belong to a single family; how new languages form through pidgin into creole and some eventually into a full language; and so much more. Really, this is like everything you ever wanted to know about linguistics but didn't know you needed to ask.
Prof. McWhorter is very easy to listen to and follow along with, even without the PDF, and he clearly has a lot of passion for his work. Some of his jokes were a bit on the odd side, but I did laugh or chuckle at most of them.
I listened to two or three a day, and even that was a bit overwhelming. What impressed me the most was how much more complex so many other languages are than English, since I've always heard it's one of the hardest languages to learn, and how little writing actually has to do with language development. He goes over the various different language families that we have currently, such as Indo-European, Causasian, Polyensian, the click languages, etc; how to identify when languages belong to a single family; how new languages form through pidgin into creole and some eventually into a full language; and so much more. Really, this is like everything you ever wanted to know about linguistics but didn't know you needed to ask.
Prof. McWhorter is very easy to listen to and follow along with, even without the PDF, and he clearly has a lot of passion for his work. Some of his jokes were a bit on the odd side, but I did laugh or chuckle at most of them.
August 8, 2020
I laughed in delight multiple times.
July 19, 2019
So much fun. I need more McWhorter in my life.
Two main take-aways.
The first is that it is very hard to say what the essential parts of a language are. Regular verbs? Not in Navajo. Pronouns? Who needs 'em. Tenses? Forget about it. Left and right? Meet Australia. Phonological complexity? The pacific. Surely you can't whistle a language though? South America. But languages change at about the same rate, right? Romanian is virtually un-recognisable as a romance language, while Icelandic has hardly changed in a millennium. But both genders speak the same language in the same community? Australia again. And so on and so on.
The second is that language change is driven by two opposing forces. The first is linguistic innovation, primarily by the young, which fleshes out langauges (such as from pidgins to creoles), smooths out or simplifies common sayings ("I'm going to" to "imma"), creates new words to express zeitgeisty ideas ("relatable"), steals bits from other languages ("Oppa!"), gradually undergo semantic drift (like euphemism treadmills) and sometimes just changes things for no apparent reason (from regular "sneaked" to irregular "snuck", which has no morphological precedents).
Part of this seems to be that humans have a genetically pre-defined minimum language complexity, and if the local language doesn't meet that complexity threshold, then first generation speakers will fill in the gaps (fun fact: you can peek at the "default" settings of languages by looking at linguistic innovations of first-generation speakers across cultures). The other part is perhaps just that people get bored with their existing language, and like to mess around with new ways of expression (I know I do that a lot).
The net effect of all this innovation is that the language tends to becomes less regular and understandable over time. Leave a language to simmer in peace for thousands of years, and it eventually has no regular verbs and becomes totally unlearnable.
The other force which changes languages is the simplification and regularisation of language, primarily led by the old who are having to learn a second language and can't be abiding with all this irregular nonsense. So they just learn some simple approximation of the language, and if enough people do this it becomes canon. Even sometimes adults with apparently nothing to gain try to stultify linguistic creativity, by forcing children to learn "official" rules of grammar and diction.
This second force tends to come into full swing when imperialists take over some new land, and have to start learning the local language. Most of the commonest langauges have gone through this process, and so tend to also be the most simple languages: English (think Vikings), Mandarin (only four tones!), Spanish, Swahili, etc.
Two main take-aways.
The first is that it is very hard to say what the essential parts of a language are. Regular verbs? Not in Navajo. Pronouns? Who needs 'em. Tenses? Forget about it. Left and right? Meet Australia. Phonological complexity? The pacific. Surely you can't whistle a language though? South America. But languages change at about the same rate, right? Romanian is virtually un-recognisable as a romance language, while Icelandic has hardly changed in a millennium. But both genders speak the same language in the same community? Australia again. And so on and so on.
The second is that language change is driven by two opposing forces. The first is linguistic innovation, primarily by the young, which fleshes out langauges (such as from pidgins to creoles), smooths out or simplifies common sayings ("I'm going to" to "imma"), creates new words to express zeitgeisty ideas ("relatable"), steals bits from other languages ("Oppa!"), gradually undergo semantic drift (like euphemism treadmills) and sometimes just changes things for no apparent reason (from regular "sneaked" to irregular "snuck", which has no morphological precedents).
Part of this seems to be that humans have a genetically pre-defined minimum language complexity, and if the local language doesn't meet that complexity threshold, then first generation speakers will fill in the gaps (fun fact: you can peek at the "default" settings of languages by looking at linguistic innovations of first-generation speakers across cultures). The other part is perhaps just that people get bored with their existing language, and like to mess around with new ways of expression (I know I do that a lot).
The net effect of all this innovation is that the language tends to becomes less regular and understandable over time. Leave a language to simmer in peace for thousands of years, and it eventually has no regular verbs and becomes totally unlearnable.
The other force which changes languages is the simplification and regularisation of language, primarily led by the old who are having to learn a second language and can't be abiding with all this irregular nonsense. So they just learn some simple approximation of the language, and if enough people do this it becomes canon. Even sometimes adults with apparently nothing to gain try to stultify linguistic creativity, by forcing children to learn "official" rules of grammar and diction.
This second force tends to come into full swing when imperialists take over some new land, and have to start learning the local language. Most of the commonest langauges have gone through this process, and so tend to also be the most simple languages: English (think Vikings), Mandarin (only four tones!), Spanish, Swahili, etc.
August 19, 2024
"I love John McWhorter," I said.
"Why don't you marry him?" the juvenile side of you said.
"I would but I am a heterosexual man, and I am already married, and I think he is too, and plus, how do you know he would like me?" I retorted.
(If you listen to these lectures, McWhorter will teach you where the "I said" and "you said" parts of these sentences come from, and make you realize how uniquely strange they actually are — we are just used to them.)
But I really do love McWhorter. His content is good, sure, but his delivery and approach to teaching are superb. I am a big fan of Great Courses, and he is one of my favorite lecturers that I have listened to so far.
This course could have been dry and more of a categorical listing of language families and dialects, but McWhorter goes out of his way to not list all of the different names of the languages; instead, he concentrates on building a schema around the evolution and logistics of the languages as they moved through time and space. This schema is the skeleton to which his students can hook the meat of what they are learning in his lectures. A great approach to teaching permeated by his wonderful, playful, and curious attitude toward his beloved subject. I only wish all teachers were like McWhorter.
"Why don't you marry him?" the juvenile side of you said.
"I would but I am a heterosexual man, and I am already married, and I think he is too, and plus, how do you know he would like me?" I retorted.
(If you listen to these lectures, McWhorter will teach you where the "I said" and "you said" parts of these sentences come from, and make you realize how uniquely strange they actually are — we are just used to them.)
But I really do love McWhorter. His content is good, sure, but his delivery and approach to teaching are superb. I am a big fan of Great Courses, and he is one of my favorite lecturers that I have listened to so far.
This course could have been dry and more of a categorical listing of language families and dialects, but McWhorter goes out of his way to not list all of the different names of the languages; instead, he concentrates on building a schema around the evolution and logistics of the languages as they moved through time and space. This schema is the skeleton to which his students can hook the meat of what they are learning in his lectures. A great approach to teaching permeated by his wonderful, playful, and curious attitude toward his beloved subject. I only wish all teachers were like McWhorter.
September 12, 2025
There are over 7,000 languages in the world, and now you get to learn why. The Great Courses Plus offers this lecture series with a strong average rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars, it has a conversational approach but I would recommend fleshing up on some linguistics to fully appreciate this series.
Professor McWhorter lectures with enthusiasm and clarity to the point he even enjoys correcting his own pronunciation of unfamiliar words. If you have a solid foundation in linguistics or have already sampled McWhorter’s other courses, this series is likely a delightful and enriching wrap-up.
4/5 Iranic languages aren't covered as much as I'd like, despite their significance within the Indo-European family
Professor McWhorter lectures with enthusiasm and clarity to the point he even enjoys correcting his own pronunciation of unfamiliar words. If you have a solid foundation in linguistics or have already sampled McWhorter’s other courses, this series is likely a delightful and enriching wrap-up.
4/5 Iranic languages aren't covered as much as I'd like, despite their significance within the Indo-European family
April 11, 2020
I'm a big etymology fan but my reading/listening as always been Indo-European centred so this came as a breath of fresh air.
McWhorter comes across as an intellectual smug, charismatic man who won't shut up at your dinner party yet you won't stop listening. A stream of consciousness of odd sounds, and him doing voices, drawing weird similes, cracking jokes and personal anecdotes. I am eating it up!!!
As this is an audio course, downside is that unless you sit down and take notes, you won't remember the names of these languages, the reason why they are unique and so different from languages with grammar we are familiar with. That being said, I will definitely want to listen to this again and I guess I'll laugh just as hard at these snippets:
McWhorter comes across as an intellectual smug, charismatic man who won't shut up at your dinner party yet you won't stop listening. A stream of consciousness of odd sounds, and him doing voices, drawing weird similes, cracking jokes and personal anecdotes. I am eating it up!!!
As this is an audio course, downside is that unless you sit down and take notes, you won't remember the names of these languages, the reason why they are unique and so different from languages with grammar we are familiar with. That being said, I will definitely want to listen to this again and I guess I'll laugh just as hard at these snippets:
"Fula. "That business with the genders, it really takes it further than you can imagine any language doing it. It's just delightful to me to imagine that there are people walking around speaking this without tripping over their shoe laces, having a stroke or needing some sort of major medical intervention every time try to rub a noun and a verb together."
[...]
Then there are other languages and they are impressive in different ways. And I don't mean in terms of [nagging voice] all Of mY cHiLdrEn ArE sPeCiAl. I mean really there is some stuff going on with these languages."
[...]
"Ba and ga, did you get it, bga bga. It's like putting a b and a g together. If you're getting bored with life, sit in the tub, do that and drink."
September 3, 2024
This course gets pretty in depth so I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to everyone, unless you really do have a desire to learn more about language (for like 16 hours). I find language to be one of the most interesting things ever, and this course was a little mind blowing. John is a goofy, funny guy who has a passion for this stuff and conveys the information in a way that makes sense, and also makes you want to know more. The whole thing was worth watching for the lecture on Japanese alone, to be perfectly honest, it kind of blew me away, I had no idea the complexity. This course really opens your eyes (at least it did for me) to just how diverse and amazing the world can be, and also how we can have the tendency to think of more “primitive” groups’ languages as simple and not as complex as our own, when in reality, some of those are the most complex languages in the world! It honestly makes English look quite easy by comparison. Absolutely remarkable course.
September 4, 2019
I think I found my new go-to to recommend for people who are interested in learning about linguistics, or languages in general (although I still love Empires of the Word). I found this book fascinating, and McWhorter extremely entertaining.
Some of my notes:
The more adults have had to learn a language throughout its history, the more simple it tends to be. The longer a language is left to itself, the more complicated it will get.
"'I went to the store' said Edward"
This is an awkward sentence structure that is never spoken, only written. It never was a natural manner of speaking in English, but it's a holdover from English's germanic roots. Namely, how German likes to have the verb in the second place, as in:
"Ich gehe ins kino", and
"Morgen gehe ich ins kino"
We don't have that anymore, but we have some awkward ways of using sentences because of it.
If we didn't have written Latin, many language families would be much more of a problem. For example, "cheese" in Italian is Formaggio, in French is Fromage, in Spanish is Queso, and in Portuguese is queijo, while in Romanian it is branza. So what was the root word? Btw, in Romantsch it is Cascio, while in Sicilian it is caccio. We know that in Latin it was caseus formaticum thanks to writing, but without those writings it would be almost impossible to figure out. This is the case for most language families.
Apparently Estonian has triple consonants.
Also, I've been looking for a place to learn Cherokee online now, thanks to this book (although without much luck)
Some of my notes:
The more adults have had to learn a language throughout its history, the more simple it tends to be. The longer a language is left to itself, the more complicated it will get.
"'I went to the store' said Edward"
This is an awkward sentence structure that is never spoken, only written. It never was a natural manner of speaking in English, but it's a holdover from English's germanic roots. Namely, how German likes to have the verb in the second place, as in:
"Ich gehe ins kino", and
"Morgen gehe ich ins kino"
We don't have that anymore, but we have some awkward ways of using sentences because of it.
If we didn't have written Latin, many language families would be much more of a problem. For example, "cheese" in Italian is Formaggio, in French is Fromage, in Spanish is Queso, and in Portuguese is queijo, while in Romanian it is branza. So what was the root word? Btw, in Romantsch it is Cascio, while in Sicilian it is caccio. We know that in Latin it was caseus formaticum thanks to writing, but without those writings it would be almost impossible to figure out. This is the case for most language families.
Apparently Estonian has triple consonants.
Also, I've been looking for a place to learn Cherokee online now, thanks to this book (although without much luck)
August 27, 2019
Really enjoyable lecture series. I had two niggling complaints after finishing. The first was that McWhorter only ever adopts a pejorative tone when describing the effects of empires when the imperialism was done by people with white skin, e.g. the British or the Russians. He skips every opportunity to moralize when it's brown-skinned folks who did the raping, enslaving, and language-diversity-destroying. The second was that in the final lecture he missed an opportunity to discuss the South American khipu as a form of writing which may rival cuneiform for antiquity based on recent archeology.
June 24, 2020
Those who know me, have realized at some point that I know a lot of random things about languages. Among which:
* in Australia, languages have very free word orders. They also tend to have limited sets of vowels: a,e,i,o,u, done! There's also a language which only has 3 verbs: to come, to go and to do... why not! :p
* In Papua, there are a lot of languages! There are 4 (or more? I foegot :p) unrelated language families there. It's the most diverse place on Earth when it comes to languages. The languages there do tend to have this in common though: when changing topic, they have words which mark that. Basically they use words instead of punctuation (not unlike what Korean has - afaik)
* In south-east Asia, all languages got chinesified! They all have simple syllable structures and tones. That's because there really was an influx of sino-tibetan people and they did to those languages what the vikings did to English. That except for the languages in unaccessible places, where the sino-tibetans couldn't get as easily. Some of the chinesified languages however evolved, and instead of tones, they made lots of vowels. As such, vowel lengths, and creakiness/breathiness, and also just the large number of vowels might have replaced tones.
* Africa - 4 language families there, but one of them (nilo-saharan) is just a category that uncategorizable languages got put :p
* North America - not sure anyone knows how many language families are there (or maybe I forgot :p ) but those people came up with very cool features - long words which mean as much as we can say in English using a few sentences
* South America - has languages that don't have numbers or colors!
...well most things that I kmow about languages I know from professor McWorther and Wikipedia.
This is a 5/5 for me, but I'm very excited about languages! Even so, I think the cool way of teaching would appeal to large audiences!
* in Australia, languages have very free word orders. They also tend to have limited sets of vowels: a,e,i,o,u, done! There's also a language which only has 3 verbs: to come, to go and to do... why not! :p
* In Papua, there are a lot of languages! There are 4 (or more? I foegot :p) unrelated language families there. It's the most diverse place on Earth when it comes to languages. The languages there do tend to have this in common though: when changing topic, they have words which mark that. Basically they use words instead of punctuation (not unlike what Korean has - afaik)
* In south-east Asia, all languages got chinesified! They all have simple syllable structures and tones. That's because there really was an influx of sino-tibetan people and they did to those languages what the vikings did to English. That except for the languages in unaccessible places, where the sino-tibetans couldn't get as easily. Some of the chinesified languages however evolved, and instead of tones, they made lots of vowels. As such, vowel lengths, and creakiness/breathiness, and also just the large number of vowels might have replaced tones.
* Africa - 4 language families there, but one of them (nilo-saharan) is just a category that uncategorizable languages got put :p
* North America - not sure anyone knows how many language families are there (or maybe I forgot :p ) but those people came up with very cool features - long words which mean as much as we can say in English using a few sentences
* South America - has languages that don't have numbers or colors!
...well most things that I kmow about languages I know from professor McWorther and Wikipedia.
This is a 5/5 for me, but I'm very excited about languages! Even so, I think the cool way of teaching would appeal to large audiences!
August 31, 2019
What to say about these lectures? I’ll start with John McWhorter. Wow. I wish I had more professors like him. He is incredibly knowledgeable, is almost certainly a polyglot although he assiduously avoids telling us how many languages he speaks, is crazy good with accents (that’s a vast understatement, he is seemingly close to perfection with them all and there are thousands), is incredibly enthusiastic about the subject, is funny, is engaging, and is someone I’d love to be friends with. He did a fantastic job introducing us the the many language families in the world and gave us a sense as to how most of them sound, are organized, and how they work. It’s fascinating to stick a toe into a subject about which I knew nearly nothing. And my toe came away with lots of unexpected information. I can’t believe how strangely organized and how difficult certain languages are to learn. The click languages forget about it. Estonian? I think not. Japanese with its three alphabets and social hierarchies? Nope. How about them asiatic languages with 6-12 tones? Not for this 53-year-old. I often think about what I’d rather do for a living and linguistics was always on my list without really knowing much about it. But as interesting as I found these lectures, I can now safely remove linguistics from my wish list. It’s way too complicated, massive, and tedious for me. It was fun to visit and learn about, but it’s not an area to which I could spend my life studying. That said, bravo to John McWhorter, this was a great course.
February 14, 2022
It's a good thing that the subject matter was fascinating because Professor McWhorter's tangents and asides ranged from uncomfortable to distracting to mildly offensive. This man literally just said he pities people trying to learn Navajo as adults in the same way he pities people who don't know that earwax tastes kind of good... And lets not get into him talking about getting early-pubescent tingly feelings for some adult woman that he's apparently mentally linked to the Romance languages. That tremendously uncomfortable moment (and a few more like it) aside, it was great to learn about the connections and disconnections and the ebb and flow of languages all over the world, how they develop and change, and how some are surprisingly linked. This would easily be at least 4 stars if not for the side commentary, but the dread I was forced to feel as I wondered if the meandering story about everyone being drunk at a party where someone may or may not have spiked the wine would turn out to be relevant (not really) knocks it down significantly.
November 15, 2021
(Listened to audio version of the course a few months back, but never got around to reading the supplemental material, and finally decided to let it go, as too much time has elapsed.)
Interesting, enjoyable, gives one much to think about. Sometimes the lack of charts and maps while listening is a hindrance. Still, it’s a great intro and provides plenty of things to follow up on.
I also found McWhorter fun to listen to, with his personal idiosyncrasies… “And so!”
Interesting, enjoyable, gives one much to think about. Sometimes the lack of charts and maps while listening is a hindrance. Still, it’s a great intro and provides plenty of things to follow up on.
I also found McWhorter fun to listen to, with his personal idiosyncrasies… “And so!”
May 13, 2020
John McWhorter is quite possibly the single most irritating lecturer I have ever forced myself to listen to. Unfortunately the material he presents is very interesting and generally worth suffering through the endless digressions and sad attempts at humour and being relatable.
September 2, 2020
This may be the best “Great Courses” course I’ve ever listened to. John McWhorter knows his stuff and presents it in a highly entertaining way – with jokes, fake accents, and relevant personal asides. That said, this is such a complex subject! McWhorter talks about how languages spread and how they change. He takes the listener on a tour of the entire world, discussing the language families and isolates (like Basque in Europe) virtually everywhere. Much of this becomes a story of how the world was settled by mankind, who was invaded by who and how long ago. It’s interesting how genetic analysis confirms or negates some of the theories. I also found it interesting how pockets of languages that don’t resemble those in surrounding areas usually are due to a remnant of earlier people who were subsequently overrun by another group. (An example of this are pockets of Dravidian languages in northern India, amidst languages that are now Indo-European.)
Will I retain most of this course? No, I won’t remember a lot of the information presented. But I will remember the basic concepts of how languages develop and change. I’ve gained a deep appreciation of the complex field of linguistics. I personally have the most trouble following explanations of how different sounds make by human beings can produce very different languages – the easy examples being click and tonal languages. I appreciated that the PDF that came with the course summarized the material presented, rather than printing it out verbatim.
What I found most intriguing was trying to imagine how literature would be written in some of the languages that show different ways of thinking. It made me wish I could go back to my youth and learn more languages. New languages are best learned in childhood; they only become harder to learn as we age. McWhorter notes that Navajo is almost impossible to learn unless you are one month old!
Yes, I really enjoyed this course.
Will I retain most of this course? No, I won’t remember a lot of the information presented. But I will remember the basic concepts of how languages develop and change. I’ve gained a deep appreciation of the complex field of linguistics. I personally have the most trouble following explanations of how different sounds make by human beings can produce very different languages – the easy examples being click and tonal languages. I appreciated that the PDF that came with the course summarized the material presented, rather than printing it out verbatim.
What I found most intriguing was trying to imagine how literature would be written in some of the languages that show different ways of thinking. It made me wish I could go back to my youth and learn more languages. New languages are best learned in childhood; they only become harder to learn as we age. McWhorter notes that Navajo is almost impossible to learn unless you are one month old!
Yes, I really enjoyed this course.
February 8, 2022
all reviews in one place:
night mode reading ;
skaitom nakties rezimu
About the Book: We rarely think how the language we speak, the one that is native to us, came to be. What could it tell about our origins, our history, our contacts with the outside world, our very culture? This and many other fascinating things are beautifully told in this book.
My Opinion: A captivating read I highly recommend to anyone who is even remotely interested in the history of the world. Author even mentioned Lithuanian, among one of the very hardest languages, and told a sob-theory that made me laugh. It’s very good, and very approachable.
night mode reading ;
skaitom nakties rezimu
About the Book: We rarely think how the language we speak, the one that is native to us, came to be. What could it tell about our origins, our history, our contacts with the outside world, our very culture? This and many other fascinating things are beautifully told in this book.
My Opinion: A captivating read I highly recommend to anyone who is even remotely interested in the history of the world. Author even mentioned Lithuanian, among one of the very hardest languages, and told a sob-theory that made me laugh. It’s very good, and very approachable.
March 22, 2021
This is an excellent series of lectures by John McWhorter that I would recommend to anybody interested in languages. Dr. McWhorter has a way of speaking that makes any discussion interesting and engaging.
As a South Indian I was very happy that he had an entire lecture dedicated to the Dravidian languages. I learnt a lot about the languages I speak and about those I didn’t even know existed, through this series. The pdf booklet that is available with these lectures has a lot of colourful maps and interesting facts and it complements the lectures very well.
As a South Indian I was very happy that he had an entire lecture dedicated to the Dravidian languages. I learnt a lot about the languages I speak and about those I didn’t even know existed, through this series. The pdf booklet that is available with these lectures has a lot of colourful maps and interesting facts and it complements the lectures very well.
January 7, 2020
Стоит послушать, если хотите научиться говорить Okay.
Слишком много авторских отступлений от темы и метафор на грани фола.
Слишком много авторских отступлений от темы и метафор на грани фола.
July 9, 2020
This was so interesting!
January 25, 2024
I enjoyed how he breaks everything down.
June 30, 2022
An epic tour around the world, hilarious + engaging lecture style, very glad I have an idea now about all these different families, and finally know what "Indo-European" means.
Audiobook Notes
Lecture 34: Language Families and Writing Systems / 15:49:36
Wed, Jun 29 | 10:39:49 PM
Five main lessons: 1. Language is speech 2. European languages are only a small set in the world of languages . 3. European languages are not more sophisticated, modern. 4. Language families aren’t distributed today the way they were before. There used to be more diversity. 5. We are heading toward a future with fewer and fewer languages. . .
Lecture 34: Language Families and Writing Systems / 15:25:44
Wed, Jun 29 | 10:08:23 PM
As far as we know up to now, writing emerged independently in 3 places: Near East, China, and the Mayans
Lecture 30: The Original American Languages IV / 13:58:33
Wed, Jun 29 | 7:49:08 AM
Lecture 30: The Original American Languages IV / 13:50:38
Wed, Jun 29 | 7:41:24 AM
Media went wild with believing that because the Pirahua (sp?) don’t have numbers in their language, that’s why they aren’t good at math. It’s not related to the language. It’s related to them never needing it, using it, in their lives.
Lecture 30: The Original American Languages IV / 13:48:59
Wed, Jun 29 | 7:37:28 AM
You can’t ask a Pirahuanh (sp?) person how many children they have. They may have 5 and look directly at their 5 children, but not be able to answer.
Lecture 30: The Original American Languages IV / 13:47:41
Wed, Jun 29 | 7:35:38 AM
A language that doesn’t have numbers. At all. Not even 1 and 2. Just small amount and big amount. Because they live on the land. They don’t need it.
Lecture 30: The Original American Languages IV / 13:46:00
Wed, Jun 29 | 7:33:19 AM
a Brazilian language with an Object, Verb, Subject word order. Why it’s important to document because no one would have known.
Lecture 30: The Original American Languages IV / 13:42:27
Wed, Jun 29 | 7:29:04 AM
This sounds like the language they speak in the Sims.
Lecture 30: The Original American Languages IV / 13:34:53
Wed, Jun 29 | 7:20:42 AM
Like not needing to learn how to handwrite Chinese characters now with the phone, typing
Lecture 30: The Original American Languages IV / 13:32:49
Wed, Jun 29 | 7:02:02 AM
There are languages in the world that are very whistle-able, in mountain and dense forest areas
Lecture 29: The Original American Languages III / 13:08:15
Wed, Jun 29 | 1:28:47 AM
Wow Cherokee writing system made its way to Liberia and is made up of repurposed Roman alphabet
Lecture 26: The Languages of Australia II / 11:39:50
Tue, Jun 28 | 8:32:52 PM
Lol! JAB at William Strunk of Strunk and White
Lecture 24: Why Are There So Many Languages in New Guinea? / 10:45:12
Tue, Jun 28 | 1:02:14 AM
😲 ~750! Papua New Guinea languages, the most linguistically diverse spot in the world due to varied terrain and remoteness
Lecture 23: Creole Languages / 10:42:01
Mon, Jun 27 | 9:00:34 PM
😆 “agreeing to disagree” except not
Lecture 23: Creole Languages / 10:10:32
Mon, Jun 27 | 8:18:23 PM
There’s no such thing as bragging or claiming “my language is older than yours” (or more ancient) since they all trace back to The One—except creole ones
Lecture 22: Siberia and Beyond: Language Isolates / 10:06:49
Mon, Jun 27 | 8:11:32 PM
Lol “vagina” traces back to Etruscan language
Lecture 22: Siberia and Beyond: Language Isolates / 10:03:52
Mon, Jun 27 | 8:08:15 PM
I learned about Sumerian from Giles in Buffy
Lecture 21: Languages of the South Seas II / 09:38:25
Mon, Jun 27 | 7:43:17 PM
Possibility of reviving language, esp if it’s in writing. Māori, Hawaiian.
Lecture 21: Languages of the South Seas II / 09:26:07
Mon, Jun 27 | 12:53:18 PM
Ok FINE you convinced me not to say “often” with the “t” pronounced
Lecture 20: Languages of the South Seas I / 09:07:55
Mon, Jun 27 | 8:26:54 AM
Wait the standardized version of Malay is Indonesian? A lingua franca spoken by 200 million people
Lecture 20: Languages of the South Seas I / 09:02:41
Mon, Jun 27 | 8:22:12 AM
Madagascar, Malagasie language: an Austronesian language, not related to any of the 4 families from Africa but has Bantu influence due to location and Indian workers were brought over so there’s that too
Lecture 20: Languages of the South Seas I / 08:58:00
Mon, Jun 27 | 8:16:12 AM
Interesting! Austronesian language family (Phillipines, Hawaiian, Malay, Indonesia, etc) arose out of Taiwan. Linguists know this by tracing back to where the languages within the family are most diverse.
Lecture 19: Southeast Asian Languages: The Sinosphere / 08:30:59
Mon, Jun 27 | 7:13:21 AM
Hmong-mien family used to be called Meow-yow lol
Lecture 19: Southeast Asian Languages: The Sinosphere / 08:27:19
Mon, Jun 27 | 7:10:13 AM
A “sprachbun” (sp?) when three different language families (tracing different origins) start to resemble one another: Vietnamese & Khmer (austro-asiatique), Thai, Hmong —> Chinese. This happens over a long period of time when a lot of people living in a region are bilingual / multilingual.
Lecture 17: The Languages We Call Chinese / 07:53:29
Sun, Jun 26 | 9:38:46 PM
Need to look up Chinese syllabic character system for stuff like “SpongeBob SquarePants”
Lecture 17: The Languages We Call Chinese / 07:48:50
Sun, Jun 26 | 9:34:23 PM
Cliche of “oh once you learn the tones, the grammar is so simple!” What one tells moreso themselves
Lecture 16: Japanese and Korean: Alike Yet Unrelated / 07:20:18
Sun, Jun 26 | 9:03:59 PM
Oo McWhorter’s response to “what languages should I learn?” 1. Learn an Indo-European one that’s got lots of cases (will teach you a lot about linguistics) 2. Learn an East Asian one (bc these languages are so principally different that it opens your eyes + for cultural reasons)
Lecture 16: Japanese and Korean: Alike Yet Unrelated / 07:03:19
Sun, Jun 26 | 8:30:25 PM
Omg i am literally listening to this sitting on a bus. HE KNOWS
Lecture 16: Japanese and Korean: Alike Yet Unrelated / 07:02:28
Sun, Jun 26 | 8:29:14 PM
Reminder: language is speech, writing is just something that came along later that approximates what that language is
Lecture 15: Languages of the Silk Road and Beyond / 06:36:24
Sun, Jun 26 | 9:53:39 AM
Toggling between “Turkish” and “Turkic” : an explanation , Turkish sorta begins the “continuum”
Lecture 15: Languages of the Silk Road and Beyond / 06:31:19
Sun, Jun 26 | 9:47:26 AM
Silk Road languages: “Altaic”, Turkic, Mongolian, Tungisic
Lecture 14: Indian Languages That Aren’t Indo-European / 06:29:43
Sun, Jun 26 | 9:45:19 AM
Interesting: being a lumper is being more willing or interested in seeing relationships between languages vs splitters. Counter to what I initially thought.
Lecture 14: Indian Languages That Aren’t Indo-European / 06:06:01
Sun, Jun 26 | 9:20:18 AM
The word bamboo comes from the canada language, mango from Malayalam, mongoose from Telegu
Lecture 6: Niger-Congo: Largest Family in Africa I / 02:37:39
Sun, Jun 26 | 8:41:11 AM
The “user friendly” quality of Swahili is what made it an unofficial emblem for Black Americans to connect to Africa
Lecture 13: What Is a Caucasian Language? / 05:45:06
Sun, Jun 26 | 8:39:27 AM
Lol! And now due to this accident of how Georgia the country got named, there is a relationship Georgians have with the southern US Georgians!
Lecture 13: What Is a Caucasian Language? / 05:44:32
Sun, Jun 26 | 8:38:10 AM
How did Georgia, a U.S. state, and Georgia the country get their names: former is king George, latter came from the word gorga (for wolf, since they had wolves in their area) and due to Persian influence, became gorja and eventually Georgia
Lecture 13: What Is a Caucasian Language? / 05:43:13
Sun, Jun 26 | 8:35:08 AM
Freiderich picked up Georgian skull while classifying people and this is the part of the recap of how Caucasian became associated with “white people”
Lecture 11: Is the Indo-European Family Alone in Europe? / 04:53:46
Sun, Jun 26 | 7:43:19 AM
What, Hungarian speakers came from Siberia and got to where they are now in 895 A.D.
Lecture 11: Is the Indo-European Family Alone in Europe? / 04:49:31
Sat, Jun 25 | 11:16:40 PM
😂 encountering a woman at the airport who spoke something that sounded “finstonian”, concluding it’s psalmi, asking her if it is, delighting her that someone knew about her language, and “I don’t know why, but she gave me a pencil” at the end of it
Lecture 11: Is the Indo-European Family Alone in Europe? / 04:46:02
Sat, Jun 25 | 11:11:47 PM
Estonian seems like it’d be indo-european (Slavic-sounding?) but it’s actually in the euralic (sp?) family, along with Finnish and Hungarian
Lecture 7: Niger-Congo: Largest Family in Africa II / 03:00:20
Sat, Jun 25 | 11:02:13 PM
Why African students in China have an ok time picking up mandarin due to similar structure to their language (“fahng bei” sp?)
Lecture 8: Languages of the Fertile Crescent and Beyond I / 03:38:44
Sat, Jun 25 | 8:23:25 PM
Semitic languages: home of the first alphabet! Very remarkable because representing writing by sounds instead of images isn’t an intuitive thing. Tracing back to Egyptian laborers who were working very hard outside and didn’t feel like investing effort into learning hieroglyphics
Lecture 4: Indo-European Languages in Asia / 01:55:54
Sat, Jun 25 | 12:04:39 PM
Africa, where Homo sapiens and languages emerged, clicks: the world’s first languages, formally called the koi-san (sp?)
Lecture 2: The First Family Discovered: Indo-European / 00:35:05
Sat, Jun 25 | 8:56:34 AM
LOL “we can’t know how [guy who initiated indo-european studies] sounded like but I just know he sounded something like this:” :: helium elitist voice while quoting an excerpt::
Lecture 1: Why Are There So Many Languages? / 00:21:59
Sat, Jun 25 | 8:39:19 AM
😂 Austronesian is a “coconut language” + the lil horn sound initiation, whatever that is
Lecture 1: Why Are There So Many Languages? / 00:18:01
Sat, Jun 25 | 8:33:59 AM
Interesting: written language holding language back
Audiobook Notes
Lecture 34: Language Families and Writing Systems / 15:49:36
Wed, Jun 29 | 10:39:49 PM
Five main lessons: 1. Language is speech 2. European languages are only a small set in the world of languages . 3. European languages are not more sophisticated, modern. 4. Language families aren’t distributed today the way they were before. There used to be more diversity. 5. We are heading toward a future with fewer and fewer languages. . .
Lecture 34: Language Families and Writing Systems / 15:25:44
Wed, Jun 29 | 10:08:23 PM
As far as we know up to now, writing emerged independently in 3 places: Near East, China, and the Mayans
Lecture 30: The Original American Languages IV / 13:58:33
Wed, Jun 29 | 7:49:08 AM
Lecture 30: The Original American Languages IV / 13:50:38
Wed, Jun 29 | 7:41:24 AM
Media went wild with believing that because the Pirahua (sp?) don’t have numbers in their language, that’s why they aren’t good at math. It’s not related to the language. It’s related to them never needing it, using it, in their lives.
Lecture 30: The Original American Languages IV / 13:48:59
Wed, Jun 29 | 7:37:28 AM
You can’t ask a Pirahuanh (sp?) person how many children they have. They may have 5 and look directly at their 5 children, but not be able to answer.
Lecture 30: The Original American Languages IV / 13:47:41
Wed, Jun 29 | 7:35:38 AM
A language that doesn’t have numbers. At all. Not even 1 and 2. Just small amount and big amount. Because they live on the land. They don’t need it.
Lecture 30: The Original American Languages IV / 13:46:00
Wed, Jun 29 | 7:33:19 AM
a Brazilian language with an Object, Verb, Subject word order. Why it’s important to document because no one would have known.
Lecture 30: The Original American Languages IV / 13:42:27
Wed, Jun 29 | 7:29:04 AM
This sounds like the language they speak in the Sims.
Lecture 30: The Original American Languages IV / 13:34:53
Wed, Jun 29 | 7:20:42 AM
Like not needing to learn how to handwrite Chinese characters now with the phone, typing
Lecture 30: The Original American Languages IV / 13:32:49
Wed, Jun 29 | 7:02:02 AM
There are languages in the world that are very whistle-able, in mountain and dense forest areas
Lecture 29: The Original American Languages III / 13:08:15
Wed, Jun 29 | 1:28:47 AM
Wow Cherokee writing system made its way to Liberia and is made up of repurposed Roman alphabet
Lecture 26: The Languages of Australia II / 11:39:50
Tue, Jun 28 | 8:32:52 PM
Lol! JAB at William Strunk of Strunk and White
Lecture 24: Why Are There So Many Languages in New Guinea? / 10:45:12
Tue, Jun 28 | 1:02:14 AM
😲 ~750! Papua New Guinea languages, the most linguistically diverse spot in the world due to varied terrain and remoteness
Lecture 23: Creole Languages / 10:42:01
Mon, Jun 27 | 9:00:34 PM
😆 “agreeing to disagree” except not
Lecture 23: Creole Languages / 10:10:32
Mon, Jun 27 | 8:18:23 PM
There’s no such thing as bragging or claiming “my language is older than yours” (or more ancient) since they all trace back to The One—except creole ones
Lecture 22: Siberia and Beyond: Language Isolates / 10:06:49
Mon, Jun 27 | 8:11:32 PM
Lol “vagina” traces back to Etruscan language
Lecture 22: Siberia and Beyond: Language Isolates / 10:03:52
Mon, Jun 27 | 8:08:15 PM
I learned about Sumerian from Giles in Buffy
Lecture 21: Languages of the South Seas II / 09:38:25
Mon, Jun 27 | 7:43:17 PM
Possibility of reviving language, esp if it’s in writing. Māori, Hawaiian.
Lecture 21: Languages of the South Seas II / 09:26:07
Mon, Jun 27 | 12:53:18 PM
Ok FINE you convinced me not to say “often” with the “t” pronounced
Lecture 20: Languages of the South Seas I / 09:07:55
Mon, Jun 27 | 8:26:54 AM
Wait the standardized version of Malay is Indonesian? A lingua franca spoken by 200 million people
Lecture 20: Languages of the South Seas I / 09:02:41
Mon, Jun 27 | 8:22:12 AM
Madagascar, Malagasie language: an Austronesian language, not related to any of the 4 families from Africa but has Bantu influence due to location and Indian workers were brought over so there’s that too
Lecture 20: Languages of the South Seas I / 08:58:00
Mon, Jun 27 | 8:16:12 AM
Interesting! Austronesian language family (Phillipines, Hawaiian, Malay, Indonesia, etc) arose out of Taiwan. Linguists know this by tracing back to where the languages within the family are most diverse.
Lecture 19: Southeast Asian Languages: The Sinosphere / 08:30:59
Mon, Jun 27 | 7:13:21 AM
Hmong-mien family used to be called Meow-yow lol
Lecture 19: Southeast Asian Languages: The Sinosphere / 08:27:19
Mon, Jun 27 | 7:10:13 AM
A “sprachbun” (sp?) when three different language families (tracing different origins) start to resemble one another: Vietnamese & Khmer (austro-asiatique), Thai, Hmong —> Chinese. This happens over a long period of time when a lot of people living in a region are bilingual / multilingual.
Lecture 17: The Languages We Call Chinese / 07:53:29
Sun, Jun 26 | 9:38:46 PM
Need to look up Chinese syllabic character system for stuff like “SpongeBob SquarePants”
Lecture 17: The Languages We Call Chinese / 07:48:50
Sun, Jun 26 | 9:34:23 PM
Cliche of “oh once you learn the tones, the grammar is so simple!” What one tells moreso themselves
Lecture 16: Japanese and Korean: Alike Yet Unrelated / 07:20:18
Sun, Jun 26 | 9:03:59 PM
Oo McWhorter’s response to “what languages should I learn?” 1. Learn an Indo-European one that’s got lots of cases (will teach you a lot about linguistics) 2. Learn an East Asian one (bc these languages are so principally different that it opens your eyes + for cultural reasons)
Lecture 16: Japanese and Korean: Alike Yet Unrelated / 07:03:19
Sun, Jun 26 | 8:30:25 PM
Omg i am literally listening to this sitting on a bus. HE KNOWS
Lecture 16: Japanese and Korean: Alike Yet Unrelated / 07:02:28
Sun, Jun 26 | 8:29:14 PM
Reminder: language is speech, writing is just something that came along later that approximates what that language is
Lecture 15: Languages of the Silk Road and Beyond / 06:36:24
Sun, Jun 26 | 9:53:39 AM
Toggling between “Turkish” and “Turkic” : an explanation , Turkish sorta begins the “continuum”
Lecture 15: Languages of the Silk Road and Beyond / 06:31:19
Sun, Jun 26 | 9:47:26 AM
Silk Road languages: “Altaic”, Turkic, Mongolian, Tungisic
Lecture 14: Indian Languages That Aren’t Indo-European / 06:29:43
Sun, Jun 26 | 9:45:19 AM
Interesting: being a lumper is being more willing or interested in seeing relationships between languages vs splitters. Counter to what I initially thought.
Lecture 14: Indian Languages That Aren’t Indo-European / 06:06:01
Sun, Jun 26 | 9:20:18 AM
The word bamboo comes from the canada language, mango from Malayalam, mongoose from Telegu
Lecture 6: Niger-Congo: Largest Family in Africa I / 02:37:39
Sun, Jun 26 | 8:41:11 AM
The “user friendly” quality of Swahili is what made it an unofficial emblem for Black Americans to connect to Africa
Lecture 13: What Is a Caucasian Language? / 05:45:06
Sun, Jun 26 | 8:39:27 AM
Lol! And now due to this accident of how Georgia the country got named, there is a relationship Georgians have with the southern US Georgians!
Lecture 13: What Is a Caucasian Language? / 05:44:32
Sun, Jun 26 | 8:38:10 AM
How did Georgia, a U.S. state, and Georgia the country get their names: former is king George, latter came from the word gorga (for wolf, since they had wolves in their area) and due to Persian influence, became gorja and eventually Georgia
Lecture 13: What Is a Caucasian Language? / 05:43:13
Sun, Jun 26 | 8:35:08 AM
Freiderich picked up Georgian skull while classifying people and this is the part of the recap of how Caucasian became associated with “white people”
Lecture 11: Is the Indo-European Family Alone in Europe? / 04:53:46
Sun, Jun 26 | 7:43:19 AM
What, Hungarian speakers came from Siberia and got to where they are now in 895 A.D.
Lecture 11: Is the Indo-European Family Alone in Europe? / 04:49:31
Sat, Jun 25 | 11:16:40 PM
😂 encountering a woman at the airport who spoke something that sounded “finstonian”, concluding it’s psalmi, asking her if it is, delighting her that someone knew about her language, and “I don’t know why, but she gave me a pencil” at the end of it
Lecture 11: Is the Indo-European Family Alone in Europe? / 04:46:02
Sat, Jun 25 | 11:11:47 PM
Estonian seems like it’d be indo-european (Slavic-sounding?) but it’s actually in the euralic (sp?) family, along with Finnish and Hungarian
Lecture 7: Niger-Congo: Largest Family in Africa II / 03:00:20
Sat, Jun 25 | 11:02:13 PM
Why African students in China have an ok time picking up mandarin due to similar structure to their language (“fahng bei” sp?)
Lecture 8: Languages of the Fertile Crescent and Beyond I / 03:38:44
Sat, Jun 25 | 8:23:25 PM
Semitic languages: home of the first alphabet! Very remarkable because representing writing by sounds instead of images isn’t an intuitive thing. Tracing back to Egyptian laborers who were working very hard outside and didn’t feel like investing effort into learning hieroglyphics
Lecture 4: Indo-European Languages in Asia / 01:55:54
Sat, Jun 25 | 12:04:39 PM
Africa, where Homo sapiens and languages emerged, clicks: the world’s first languages, formally called the koi-san (sp?)
Lecture 2: The First Family Discovered: Indo-European / 00:35:05
Sat, Jun 25 | 8:56:34 AM
LOL “we can’t know how [guy who initiated indo-european studies] sounded like but I just know he sounded something like this:” :: helium elitist voice while quoting an excerpt::
Lecture 1: Why Are There So Many Languages? / 00:21:59
Sat, Jun 25 | 8:39:19 AM
😂 Austronesian is a “coconut language” + the lil horn sound initiation, whatever that is
Lecture 1: Why Are There So Many Languages? / 00:18:01
Sat, Jun 25 | 8:33:59 AM
Interesting: written language holding language back
May 11, 2022
McWhorter's books and Courses are very intense. Intense is not quite the word, more like a contact sport without the contact.
Other of his courses are difficult to follow but a little easier to follow than this one.
"Language Families of the World" I enjoyed. But hands down, this one was the most challenging.
Also the reader really needs to listen to the audio, reading text would not reveal much unless you are a linguist.
None the less, his courses are fun and interesting once you begin to follow, to get the "ear" for it.
Other of his courses are difficult to follow but a little easier to follow than this one.
"Language Families of the World" I enjoyed. But hands down, this one was the most challenging.
Also the reader really needs to listen to the audio, reading text would not reveal much unless you are a linguist.
None the less, his courses are fun and interesting once you begin to follow, to get the "ear" for it.
October 1, 2024
This was a very fun journey for someone like me who enjoys language and linguistics. McWhorter is a great lecturer and engaging personality. Obviously as a young-earth Christian I take some issues with the dating and whatnot, but I can overlook all of that to get to the fun parts about how languages are related. It's difficult to trace languages back much further than the broad families such as Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Altaic, and so forth. I think the Bible's description of the Tower of Babel is helpful here, though that is ignored by secular scholars.
What you will learn:
- the major language families, and major representatives of each group
- some patterns of what each language family is typically like. Do words tend to be multi- or poly-syllabic? Are they tonal? Do they have complicated conjugations? Prefixes and suffixes? What is their grammar like? Do they use noun classes?
- what is the difference between a language and a dialect?
- better understanding of presumed human migration patterns, as inferred from relationships between languages and their geography
- what happens when languages mix? What is a pidgin, creole, media-language, etc.?
- what is the relationship between language and writing?
My one other complaint is that he did not discuss sign languages at all! Not that sign languages are truly a language family in the sense of Indo-European et. al., but they are a sizeable chunk of the languages that exist in the world and they were entirely unrepresented except for a brief mention of plains sign language when discussing intra-language contact among native North Americans.
What you will learn:
- the major language families, and major representatives of each group
- some patterns of what each language family is typically like. Do words tend to be multi- or poly-syllabic? Are they tonal? Do they have complicated conjugations? Prefixes and suffixes? What is their grammar like? Do they use noun classes?
- what is the difference between a language and a dialect?
- better understanding of presumed human migration patterns, as inferred from relationships between languages and their geography
- what happens when languages mix? What is a pidgin, creole, media-language, etc.?
- what is the relationship between language and writing?
My one other complaint is that he did not discuss sign languages at all! Not that sign languages are truly a language family in the sense of Indo-European et. al., but they are a sizeable chunk of the languages that exist in the world and they were entirely unrepresented except for a brief mention of plains sign language when discussing intra-language contact among native North Americans.
June 23, 2019
McWhorter is one of the most likeable people I've had the pleasure to listen to. This course gives you exactly what it says on the tin: a tour of basically all the known families of human language. There are many and the stops are often necessarily brief, but McWhorter gives you a taste-test of each, narrowing in what makes each interesting, and discussing in his characteristic breezy and charming style.
His enthusiasm for language is proud and infectious and the lectures are almost like a steam of consciousness ramble from a charismatic barroom companion. For 17 hours.
He effortlessly mixes linguistic theory with personal opinion, with anecdote, with hilarious innuendo about academic infighting, with snippets of geography and history and anthropology, and with his trademark offbeat 20th-century pop culture references.
After it was done I had to go binge on a few of his Lexicon Valley podcast episodes so as not to go completely cold turkey.
This lecture series is both fascinating and fun, highly recommended.
His enthusiasm for language is proud and infectious and the lectures are almost like a steam of consciousness ramble from a charismatic barroom companion. For 17 hours.
He effortlessly mixes linguistic theory with personal opinion, with anecdote, with hilarious innuendo about academic infighting, with snippets of geography and history and anthropology, and with his trademark offbeat 20th-century pop culture references.
After it was done I had to go binge on a few of his Lexicon Valley podcast episodes so as not to go completely cold turkey.
This lecture series is both fascinating and fun, highly recommended.
November 21, 2019
I never fail to get a linguistics book by John McWhorter. He’s funny and does well to make linguistics concepts fairly easy to understand. He starts with things we know as (most-likely) native English speakers and concentrates on the Indo-European language family.
If you’re at all curious, this is a good educational set. If you’ve listened to lots of linguistics audiobooks, like I have, it’s still a good set. This is just fun, and I recommend it.
McWhorter makes me want to get a PhD in linguistics.
If you’re at all curious, this is a good educational set. If you’ve listened to lots of linguistics audiobooks, like I have, it’s still a good set. This is just fun, and I recommend it.
McWhorter makes me want to get a PhD in linguistics.
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