Reddit reviews The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language

The Power of Babel by John McWhorter is a good standby

>increase my likelihood of getting hired abroad

Getting hired doing what? Where abroad?

Why do you want a minor in French? There are at least a few million other Haitians who are bilingual in French, so how are you bringing extra value to the marketplace with that minor? Wouldn't a Spanish/German/Russian/Chinese/etc. - Haitian bilingual be a rarer commodity?

This all really depends on where you want to go and what you want to do.

As for books:
My intro to ling. class used the book Language Files.
The Language Instinct is pretty good.
I really liked The Unfolding of Language.
The Power of Babel doesn't get too technical, but is an introduction to language change.

I don't have to be a linguist to read books written by linguists, like the one i linked in that argument. Or see the evolution of English in common words such as "goodbye". Contractions, contractions, contractions, gotta love em.

I read it in The Power of Babel.

https://www.amazon.com/Power-Babel-Natural-History-Language/dp/006052085X

My life would be amazing if I wasn't a huge pedant, but I'm going to go another round on this. Hopefully we can close this discussion afterwards.

Let's start at the beginning. You say:

>The present day surfice forms are actually identical in Slavic and proto- Dravidian/Tamil 'kur-u' and 'kur-va' "voice" resp. "voice-less".

Right. But the other examples you've cited aren't at all identical, and so my previous description of your phonetic basis for these relationships is more or less correct, right? Or are we down to just these Slavic examples now?

If so, you should realize that most languages share at least a few sounds (the /k/ and /u/ sound being present in the vast majority of the world's languages, and some sort of rhotic r-like sound in a fair share as well). Given the enormous number of words needed in most languages, and the limited set of phonetically possible words in most languages, there's going to be many unrelated languages that have a few similar or identical words. I believe it's John McWhorter, in some recent editions of his book The Power of Babel, who provides a lengthy list of words which have similar form and meaning but which come from demonstrably unrelated languages, or which can be shown to have formed recently, by coincidence. He does this specifically to explain why this isn't a reliable way of showing that languages are related.

>I don't have a theory, it's a sound and meaning comparison with some analogies.

Then what have we been discussing for the past few days? You've been fairly intensely debating with me (and now a few other people, it seems) to prove that there's a relationship between a very specific set of languages, based on a very specific set of words which appear similar. You started this thread by saying that people should more commonly acknowledge that Tamil influenced PIE. Both of these would be theories. That's why we're having this discussion. If you have no opinion on this matter, why have you been defending it?

For what it's worth, my understanding of your most recent theory is that it's this:

• You believe that Indo-European languages, some Uralic languages, and the Dravidian languages share a relatively recent common ancestor. This ancestor is recent enough that the relationship can be demonstrated by a number of words in European languages and Sanskrit which resemble the Tamil word kuru in meaning and shape. Across these languages, this root has been realized in numerous different ways, often with meanings relating to bird, voice or a derogatory term.
  
  If I'm wrong on the details, correct me, but regardless, that's a theory, and a big one. This discussion has been going on for quite a while and it's all here on this thread if you want to review. It really doesn't look like you're just presenting a collection of comparisons, but that you're trying to argue for a specific thesis about the reason for these comparisons.
  
  On the other hand, if you're trying to say that you don't support those points I've listed above anymore, that's fine. But if you've backed away from your hypothesis in light of what's been said here, it would behoove you to graciously admit your evidence isn't as strong as you'd initially assumed. Pretending that you've not actually been promoting this theory is a pretty weak way out.
  
  Now, let's get back to the discussion.
  
  >The historical reconstruction of 'guru' to PIE heavy is a formal reconstruction and there is no meaningful semantic link behind it while this is not the case if we accept there was a common shared Eurasian ancestor between IE and Dravidian languages claimed by the study.
  
  I believe I've provided evidence here that guru was understood to be an ordinary word for "heavy" in Sanskrit, even at the time in which its other, better-known, meaning was coined.
  
  >However the study does not by default acknowledge linguistic historical reconstruction (often contradictory and highly hypothetical for a variety of reasons) to be 100% precise but does provide for and give green light for searching cross-family references no matter what some linguists think.
  
  First of all, no one thinks that we shouldn't be searching for cross-family references. Linguists are constantly trying to prove that languages are related in larger and larger families. The proposed Dene-Yeniseian family is one of the more interesting larger families to be well-received recently, though it's not yet consistently regarded as having been proven. The problem is that linguists require really, really solid scientific proof. And since you're on /r/linguistics, it might suit you to get less defensive when people ask for it from you (though I apologize about the people who are just acting like assholes instead of contributing actual points - they weren't my doing).
  
  Second, even if we do accept the study as valid (which I don't) it makes very specific claims about what sort of words are habitually "ultraconserved" and should be used as evidence for "deep language ancestry". It doesn't even remotely suggest that any pair of similar sounding words would constitute this kind of evidence. Frankly, your examples don't seem to fall within the scope of its very narrow claims.
  
  I do want to acknowledge that it is absolutely true that we "might as well explore the hypothesis of [a] Eurasian common linguistic superfamily". Linguists have been debating many hypotheses for what this - or other, non-Eurasian superfamilies - could look like for years. That's not an issue. The issue is that I don't think that the evidence you're presenting demonstrates any linguistic superfamily. I think it's better explained by the current etymologies we already have, not the ones your propose. I also think there's no Tamil influence on PIE, and that Proto-Dravidian and PIE, if related, are removed by too much time and history to demonstrate a linkage by pointing to a tiny set of similar words. Those are points that I've been trying to make for some time now, and it seems like I'm getting a lot of agreement on them from others - no surprise, as they're what pretty much any linguist would think.
  
  As for the "contradictory and highly hypothetical" nature of linguistic reconstruction, that's not really the case either. While there's debate about the validity of certain proposed families (e.g. Altaic), the debate stems from issues around insufficient data, or proposals that suggest relationships across very long periods of time, to a degree in which we can no longer accurately trace the sound changes which must have occurred. No one doubts the accuracy of reconstruction as a method, just its applicability to certain cases.
  
  Over appropriate periods of time, and with enough data, linguistic reconstruction is remarkably accurate. I've referenced this briefly before, but the PIE laryngeals are a great example. Saussure, one of the fathers of modern linguistics, suggested in 1879 that PIE had a certain set of sounds which hadn't survived into any descendant language, based on evidence from sound correspondences across modern Indo-European languages (this is the kind of data standard reconstruction methods use). Sure enough, when we discovered a previously unknown ancient Indo-European language, Hittite, decades later, we found direct evidence that PIE had sounds in the positions predicted by Saussure based on evidence from one of the oldest Indo-European languages we'd ever seen. Essentially, rather than being "hypothetical" or "speculative", the present understanding is that linguistic reconstruction is demonstrably accurate enough to predict how data from languages we've never seen will look.
  
  Unfortunately for your theory, it's your evidence that's "highly speculative". The only third party evidence is a forum posting which even you have discredited now, and a study which doesn't really have all that much to do with your theory. Basically, you have no real scientific evidence to support your point. The current reconstructions for these words have a much greater weight of real, scientific evidence behind them.
  
  This is a forum about a science called linguistics. I certainly don't think anyone needs to be interested in linguistics. But if you're posting on this forum, there's a reasonable expectation that everyone else is interested in linguistics and knowledgeable of the field. Getting annoyed because people with knowledge of the field disagree with you based on this science is basically the definition of "butt hurt".
  
  TL;DR No tl;dr. Read it.

For those of you interested in regional dialects and colloquialisms (and also for those of you who get irritated by such things) I highly recommend The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language by John McWhorter

I'm skeptical that it's "almost the same as when the island was settled."

I'm no expert, but in reading The Power of Babel The author notes that even in isolated cultures, the language still changes to the point that 2 or 3 generations later natives can tell the difference. That is, they'll say things like "That's Old Tangier, like my grandma used to speak."

I've read a bunch of sci-fi/fantasy that have made me think deeply, but I don't think they've enlightened me in any specific way, so the three here are the ones that have had the most effect on how I think.

• The Discoverers, The Creators, and [The Seekers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seekers_(book) by Daniel Boorstin. A Western viewpoint on the development of society, ideas, and technology (but not too Western-centric as to be ignorant). My dad turned me onto these when I was 10 or so (and I've read them more recently too), and to this day they remain the most personally influential academic works I've ever read.
  
  
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and what I consider to be its companion (although slightly drier), Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, both by Jared Diamond. A lot of people have already mentioned/talked about GG&S, but Collapse is an analysis of how societies have failed and the main reasons for those failures from cultural ans geographical perspectives.
  
  
• The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. I have no idea why I read this, and parts of this book are exceedingly dry, but (especially with the annotated version) ideas are laid out clearly, and it is important as essentially the foundation work in the study of economics.
  
  Along with these, I could mention A Short History of Nearly Everything, [The Mother Tongue](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_Tongue_(book), and [Made in America](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_America_(book), all by Bill Bryson, The Power of Babel by John McWhorter, The Prince by Machiavelli, The Art of War by Sun Tzu and a dozen classical discourses and histories. A Short History should really be grouped with the top three, but I feel like I chose the most enlightening ones for me, at least (my family is filled with scientists, so a lot of A Short History of Nearly Everything was more of a well written piece containing a lot of facts I already had some idea about, rather than truly enlightening).
  
  As an aside, if you really enjoyed learning about the eccentricities of many scientists from A Short History of Nearly Everything (along with some of the facts), I would really recommend buying The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of Its Greatest Inventors by John Gribbin. It's a fantastic anthology of a bunch of biographies of scientists, from the Enlightenment in Europe almost up to modern times, containing some of the wierdest bits of information about well-known and less well-known (but very important) scientists, mathematicians, and engineers and their most famous and not-so-famous work.
  
  Edit: Formatting. Sorry if some of the links don't work (just add a closed paranthesis to the end of the link in the address bar to make it work). Check out the Amazon pages for the books that I've given Wikipedia links for to get reader reviews (and not analysis) if you plan on buying them.