Power of Babel A Natural History of Language

Name: Power of Babel A Natural History of Language
Price: 10.43 USD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9780716744733

ISBN-10: 0716744732

ISBN-13: 9780716744733

Edition: 2001 (Revised)

Authors: John McWhorter, John H. Mcwhorter

List price: $26.00

30 day, 100% satisfaction guarantee!

Marketplace

4 new & used from $10.43

what's this?

Rush Rewards U
Members Receive:

You have reached 400 XP and carrot coins. That is the daily max!

Description:

There are approximately 6000 languages on earth today, the descendants of the tongue first spoken by homo sapiens some 150,000 years ago. How did they all develop? What happened to the first language? In this irreverent romp through territory too often claimed by stodgy grammarians, McWhorter ranges across linguistic theory, geography, history, and pop culture to tell the fascinating story of how thousands of very different languages have evolved from a single, original source in a natural process similar to biological evolution. While laying out how languages mix and mutate over time, he reminds us of the variety within the species that speaks them, and argues that, contrary to popular…

Book details

List price: $26.00
Copyright year: 2001
Publisher: W. H. Freeman & Company
Publication date: 1/15/2002
Binding: Hardcover
Pages: 336
Size: 6.50" wide x 9.75" long x 1.25" tall
Weight: 1.342
Language: English



Introduction



The First Language Morphs into Six Thousand New Ones



The Six Thousand Languages Develop into Clusters of Sublanguages



The Thousands of Dialects Mix with One Another



Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones



The Thousands of Dialects of Thousands of Languages All Develop Far Beyond the Call of Duty



Some Languages Get Genetically Altered and Frozen



Most of the World's Languages Went Extinct


Epilogue: "Extra, Extra! The Language of Adam and Eve"


Notes


Acknowledgments


Index