Goodbye Chomsky, and Other Essays on Language

By Robert D. King

The idea of this book is that language is too interesting to be enjoyed exclusively by linguists.

This is undoubtedly unfair to linguists—not people who speak several languages but academic linguists (for whom linguistics is the scientific study of language). Though this book is informed by linguistics, it is not a linguistics book, rather a language-not-linguistics book. It is a book about topics involving language that interest me and that I hope will be interesting to the intellectually curious reader.

Its topics include J.R.R. Tolkien’s languages of Middle-earth, invented and artificial languages, language and gender, dialects, American versus British (Noah Webster), the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis, African-American vernacular English, the history of English, English as the world’s language, language death, the rebirth of Hebrew in Israel, the Yiddish language, language in India, language and nationalism, DNA and the origins of language, the dilemma of the postcolonial writer, and more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Aug 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781645759553

Robert D. King

Robert D. King was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, attended Georgia Institute of Technology where he received a B.S. and an M.S. in mathematics, then the University of Stuttgart as an exchange student in 1957–1958, finally the University of Wisconsin where he received an M.A. in German and a Ph.D. in Germanic linguistics. He worked as a computer programmer at Cape Canaveral in 1960–1961 and did linguistic fieldwork in India beginning in 1963 down to 2005. He joined the linguistics faculty at the University of Texas at Austin in 1965 and published extensively on theoretical linguistics, specializing in historical linguistics, later focusing on Yiddish and India. He was the Founding Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas, serving in administration from 1974–1999. His books include Historical Linguistics and Generative Grammar (1969) and Nehru and the Language Politics of India (1997). He has published in The Atlantic Monthly and the journals Commentary, Mosaic, Quillette, National Review, and Tablet.

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Goodbye Chomsky, and

Other Essays on Language

Robert D. King

Austin Macauley Publishers

Goodbye Chomsky, and

Other Essays on Language

About the Author

Dedication

Copyright Information ©

Acknowledgment

Preface

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1: Linguistics Lite

Chapter 2: Language Myths

Chapter 3: Language, Behavior, Thought, and Reality: The Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis

Chapter 4: Invented Languages; Twin Languages

Chapter 5: Elvish and the Tongues of Middle-Earth: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Secret Vice

Chapter 6: Language and Gender

Chapter 7: Dialect Versus Standard: The Case of African-American Vernacular English

Chapter 8: History of English: Highlights

Chapter 9: English As the World’s Language

Chapter 10: British Versus American: Noah Webster

Chapter 11: Language Death

Chapter 12: The Rebirth of Hebrew

Chapter 13: Language as a Means of Survival in Diaspora: The Yiddish Language

Chapter 14: Ethnicity and Language

Chapter 15: Language as Politics I: Language and the Building of Nations

Chapter 16: Language as Politics II: India: A Many-Languaged Cornucopia

Chapter 17: Language as Politics III: The United States

Chapter 18: Case Histories: Language and Country

Chapter 19: The Dilemma of the Postcolonial Writer

Chapter 20: On the Origins of Language: The DNA Revolution

About the Author

Robert D. King was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, attended Georgia Institute of Technology where he received a B.S. and an M.S. in mathematics, then the University of Stuttgart as an exchange student in 1957–1958, finally the University of Wisconsin where he received an M.A. in German and a Ph.D. in Germanic linguistics. He worked as a computer programmer at Cape Canaveral in 1960–1961 and did linguistic fieldwork in India beginning in 1963 down to 2005. He joined the linguistics faculty at the University of Texas at Austin in 1965 and published extensively on theoretical linguistics, specializing in historical linguistics, later focusing on Yiddish and India. He was the Founding Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas, serving in administration from 1974–1999. His books include Historical Linguistics and Generative Grammar (1969) and Nehru and the Language Politics of India (1997). He has published in The Atlantic Monthly and the journals Commentary, Mosaic, Quillette, National Review, and Tablet.

Dedication

To Karen; Irene, Kevin, and Michael; Isabel, Sophia, Taylor, Kathryn, and Jonathan.

Copyright Information ©

Robert D. King (2021)

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King, Robert D.

Goodbye Chomsky, and Other Essays on Language

ISBN 9781645759546 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781645759539 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781645759553 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021909732

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Acknowledgment

I am grateful to the following publishers for permission to use articles I had published earlier, as indicated, in the chapters of this book:

John Wiley & Sons, Inc., ‘The Beginnings,’ in The Handbook of World Englishes, ed. Braj B. Kachru, Yamuna Kachru, and Cecil L. Nelson; incorporated into Chapter 8, ‘History of English: Highlights.’

Cambridge University Press, ‘Language Conflicts,’ in Language and Culture in South Asia, ed. Braj B. Kachru, Yamuna Kachru, and S.N. Sridhar; incorporated into Chapter 16, ‘Language as Politics II, India: A Many-Languaged Cornucopia.’

To my colleague, Tony Woodbury, I give thanks for his encouragement at the beginning to write the kind of book that has eventually grown to be the present book. Tony also suggested the title ‘People and Linguistics’ which I used as a working title for many years.

I am especially grateful to Noam Chomsky for his good-natured permission to use his name in the title of this book. He replied briskly to my request: ‘Sure. No Problem’.

Preface

The theme of this book is this: that language is too interesting to be enjoyed exclusively by linguists. This is undoubtedly unfair to linguists—not people who speak several languages but academics (like me)—to whom linguistics is the scientific study of language.

In other words, though this book is informed and shaped by linguistics, it is not a book about linguistics. It is not a textbook. It is a book about certain topics involving language that interest me and that I hope will be interesting to the general, intellectually curious reader. Nor is this book about politics despite the ‘Chomsky’ in the title.

It originated as a set of essays for a class I taught for many years at The University of Texas, designed for advanced undergraduates who were interested in language, often after having taken an introductory course in linguistics, but who weren’t much interested in the formal science that forms so significant a part of academic linguistics today. And so, this book was born. Some of the chapters were adaptations of papers I had published elsewhere, some were written from scratch. Even the chapters based on articles I had already published have been extensively modified by me.

Though this book started out as a textbook to satisfy a language-rather-than-formal-linguistics interest, after I retired from teaching in 2016, I began to see my audience as the general, educated reader—the kind of person who, in America, reads Harper’s Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly and subscribes to the New York Times or The Washington Post. Language is the thread that binds these essays which touch on history and prehistory, ethnicity, social issues, gender, the English language, its history and its role in the world today, and myths about language among other topics such as invented languages, Tolkien and the languages of Lord of the Rings, ‘American’ versus ‘British,’ and the role of language in Jewish history.

There is something of a soapbox—a soapbox of modest height I hasten to add—from which I have written this book. When I got into linguistics in the early 1960s, something was true which is no longer as true: linguistics was a big-tent discipline. Regional dialects in the U.S.A. and throughout the world, literary criticism, language history, language planning, foreign-language learning, language and propaganda, the history of individual languages—all were topics that linguists in linguistics departments were routinely studying and teaching in their classes. Linguistics as formal theory was a part of the discipline, but it didn’t become huge until the Chomsky revolution swamped linguistics in the late 1960s. I became an enthusiastic Chomsky disciple then in my approach to linguistics after having been trained otherwise. I remain a disciple of the linguistic Chomsky today. Finally, I must again express my gratitude to Noam Chomsky for his cheerful response to my request for permission to use his name in the title of my book (‘Sure. No problem.’).

Formal linguistic theory continues to dominate the discipline as it should, and I did my part back when. But I think there should be more to linguistics than theory. Even historical linguistics, my first love in linguistics, is often not a required course in a contemporary linguistics department in America. Nor is dialectology or a course on language in society.

My modest soapbox then is simply this: that language is grander than formal theory. My aim is to demonstrate that in this book.

A final note. I did not want to use footnotes in this book which is written not for other academics but for ordinary people. I signal when I want to say something that would typically belong in a footnote by using square brackets […]. I have been sparing in this usage.

Foreword

I should probably apologize for putting the name ‘Chomsky’ in the title of my book since I know that 90 percent or more of the readers who recognize the name will think that I am referring to the Noam Chomsky of politics, to the public intellectual Chomsky, to Chomsky, the revolutionary icon.

I am not apologizing. I have nothing whatsoever to say about that Chomsky. However, before there was the Noam Chomsky, the public intellectual, there was the Noam Chomsky of linguistics. To that Chomsky, linguistics today owes a great debt as I myself do despite saying ‘goodbye’ to him in a sense that I would now like to explain.

Linguistics is today a major player in the social and behavioral sciences at any university in the world worthy of the name. It was not always so. It was less than that when I began graduate study in linguistics specializing in the ancient Germanic languages in 1961 at the University of Wisconsin, in a German department. It was still less upfront and central in the century before that. The modern study of linguistics—or philology as it then was usually known—began in the early 19th century with the in-depth study of what we call Indo-European languages such as Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Russian and the ancient Germanic languages such as Old Norse, Old High German, and Old English. This kind of study linguists call ‘diachronic’ linguistics—the study of a language at different periods of its history, the study of language change.

The emphasis shifted from the diachronic (historical) to the synchronic (language study based on the language at one time, not over time) under the influence of the Swiss semiotics scholar and historical linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). This view of linguistics gained a firm grip on the study of language in America by the 1920s, usually as a handmaiden to anthropology. Franz Boas (1858–1942), the charismatic creator of a distinctively American anthropology, focused on recording and documenting the vanishing American Indian cultures, led the way, training an elite cadre of Americans (Edward Sapir, Alfred Kroeber, Morris Swadesh, and others) to do fieldwork on Indian tribes while there was time. This meant learning to record and analyze their languages since language is a major component of culture and is the key to understanding what mattered in those cultures.

Edward Sapir (1884–1939) became one of the two founding fathers of American linguistics, the other being Leonard Bloomfield (1887–1949), a scholar of the Germanic languages who had moved from Germanics to fieldwork on the American Indian languages. Both men, Sapir and Bloomfield, were devoted to the study of language but in different ways. Sapir had, as I see it, a somewhat broader of language as a component of culture than did Bloomfield (this is my view, pace the many others who will disagree). There is an urban myth that Bloomfield was known to refer to Sapir as ‘the witch doctor’ and that Sapir returned the compliment (?) by referring to Bloomfield behind his back as ‘the rabbi.’ Apocryphal these stories may be, but there is cleverness in them.

Bloomfield became enamored with mathematics during his time at Ohio State University (later, he went to Chicago and then Yale). In 1926, he published an article that I do not believe Sapir could ever have wanted to publish: ‘A Set of Postulates for the Science of Language,’ Language, vol. 2, pp. 153–164 (1926). Bloomfield’s ‘scientific’ approach funneled naturally into the creation of a distinctively Bloomfieldian study of language: ‘scientific,’ heavily influenced by the behaviorist psychology in vogue at the time. Bloomfieldian linguistics dominated American linguistics from the 1920s down to the early 1960s (though Sapir’s approach always had many disciples).

I began my study of linguistics in 1961 under one of the most austere of the Bloomfieldians, Martin Joos, whose personal development ran from an undergraduate degree in engineering through the study of medieval German literature to Bloomfield’s kind of linguistics. (During World War II, he contributed significantly to the breaking of the Japanese codes.) Most students were afraid of Joos who was quite eccentric and scary-looking. He always reminded me of Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis, Professor Moriarty, in Sidney Paget’s famous portrait of Moriarty in The Strand Magazine, 1893: high-domed forehead, pronounced supraorbital development, a dolichocephalic skull.

Joos didn’t frighten me, quite the contrary. I was immediately drawn to him, and we remained very close up until his death in 1978. He directed my dissertation in 1965. Early on in our friendship, he put me onto Bloomfield’s Postulates. I was not impressed, a judgment I concealed from Joos out of respect. As a ‘real’ mathematician (two degrees in applied mathematics, a year as a computer jock at Cape Canaveral), Bloomfield’s postulates struck me as sophomoric, the sort of thing a clever undergraduate with a smattering of poorly digested knowledge of Peano’s Postulates and an interest in language might cobble together over a boring weekend.

But Bloomfield’s notion of what linguistics should be dominated the discipline when I got into it. What Bloomfieldian linguistics and its eventual successor, Neo-Bloomfieldian linguistics (not a dime’s worth of difference between the two, actually), were, I do not want to get into any detail. Bloomfieldian linguistics regarded itself as scientific. I thought it was not so much scientific as Jesuitical. In particular, it insisted on two things that bothered me as I continued to get deeper into my first love in linguistics, viz. historical linguistics—the study of language change.

The first of these is easy to explain. Bloomfieldian orthodoxy insisted on ruling semantics, the study of meaning, out of linguistics. Why? Because ‘meaning’ is not observable. You can observe, that is to say, you can hear the difference between the sounds [p] and [k], therefore, phonetics can be a part of linguistics. Though the ts in tar and star are phonetically different (the t in tar is aspirated [thar], the t in star is not aspirated [star]), speakers of English don’t ordinarily notice the difference. Because we can observe this reaction among speakers, strict Bloomfieldians would say that this part of language, we call it phonology or phonemics, can be a part of linguistics. Because house and houses are different, morphology—the study of grammatical forms and endings—can be a part of linguistics. You can ‘observe’ the plural marker -s.

But meaning? Well, you can’t see a meaning. You can’t look inside somebody’s brain and see what they mean. You can’t observe meaning. Therefore, so says Bloomfieldian orthodoxy, meaning cannot be a part of linguistic science. This always bothered me from the get-go. We’re not supposed to discuss meaning because we can’t directly observe it? Whoa! As the great Russian linguist and man of letters, Roman Jakobson (no Bloomfieldian by a long shot), is reputed to have said: Language without meaning is meaningless. Just so.

I accepted this orthodox rejection of meaning, but I didn’t like it. The second thing I didn’t like in Bloomfieldian linguistics is more parochial and harder to make sensible to non-linguists, but I’ll give it a try. This was the stricture against the ‘mixing of levels’ in linguistic description.

When we describe a language—this is after all the most basic thing that linguists do—my rigidly Bloomfieldian mentor, Martin Joos, always insisted, "Never mix levels!" What he meant was this. A linguistic description consisted of ‘levels:’ in ascending order phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax—from sound through words to sentences. The idea was that each of these ‘components’ was hermetically self-contained. You couldn’t use a morphological fact to describe the phonology of the language—that’s ‘mixing levels.’ So, would be using morphology in your analysis of syntax.

Take English for example. Consider noun/verb pairs like cloth/clothe, bath/bathe, breath/breathe, thief/thieve, grass/graze, wreath/wreathe, and others. Ignore the spelling if you can and you will notice that these words differ in what phoneticians call ‘voicing:’ f/v, s/z, th voiceless in cloth/th voiced in clothe. If, as a linguist, I were writing a description of English, I would want to say that there are a small number of noun/verb pairs in which the noun has a voiceless sound (voiceless fricative technically) and its related verb has a voiced sound.

But, OMG, I have just mixed levels! ‘Noun’ and ‘verb’ belong to morphology, ‘voiceless’ and ‘voiced’ are phonology (also, phonetics), and you can’t ‘mix’ phonology and morphology. No!

I first bumped up against this stricture when I was doing fieldwork in Orissa, India, in the summer of 1963 on an indigenous language called Remo. (Orissa is now known as Odisha.) Long story short, Remo had a set of what linguists call ‘morphophonemic’ alternations to describe which the easiest thing would be to mix the levels of phonology and morphology. And that’s what I did when I wrote up the field report of my description of the Remo language. I knew I was being naughty, that that went against the Bloomfieldian orthodoxy I had been taught, and each time I mixed levels, I offered up a silent prayer of forgiveness to my teacher, Martin Joos, in the direction of Madison, Wisconsin, from Orissa as best I could make it out with the aid of a compass (I’m joking).

So, there it was. I was a linguist. I couldn’t talk about meaning even though meaning is probably the most important thing people worry about when they speak. You couldn’t mix levels because…well, why? Because you just shouldn’t. State of mainstream Bloomfieldian linguistics in America circa 1960.

Then came Noam Chomsky with his genius and charisma and his books, Syntactic Structures (1957), Cartesian Linguistics (1965), Language and Mind (1968), Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (1970), his lectures all over the place, his students spreading the word like waves lapping from the Charles River. Chomsky’s dictum: Linguistics is a branch of the study of the mind! Of the mind.

Meaning? Of course, it should be central to linguistic theory. Mixing levels? Mix ’em all you want to if it makes for a simpler linguistic description. Heresy to Bloomfieldians? You bet.

It’s difficult to describe how revolutionary, how liberating the new Chomsky kind of linguistics was for someone like me and for many others. A breath of fresh air in, as I saw it, a discipline verging on hardening arteries. Sensible. Exciting. I left Wisconsin in 1965 a neo-Bloomfieldian, albeit one with private reservations. By 1968, I was a Chomsky convert, totally, without reservations, enthusiastic. I published a book Historical Linguistics and Generative Grammar in 1969 which, while not brilliant, enjoyed a vogue for several years. My publications in the 1970s were all Chomsky-influenced and narrowly confined to linguistic, primarily phonological, theory.

By 1980, I had gotten into university administration and my research and publication dropped off sharply. University administration is one of the more mind-deadening occupations in the academy, or at least it was beginning to deaden my mind after some 15 years of it. I decided to get back to why I had become a professor in the first place, doing research on interesting problems and writing it up. I focused not on theory by then but on the Yiddish language and the language problems of India.

So why ‘Goodbye Chomsky?’ Well, there’s the obvious. One likes people to buy one’s books. A book with ‘Chomsky’ in the title is going to attract more readers than a book with jejune titles like People and Language or The World of Language, titles I had earlier had in mind for my book.

So what’s the deal? Why ‘Goodbye Chomsky’ if I have such respect for him as a linguist and the revolution he brought to American linguistics?

It’s because one to-my-mind unfortunate consequence of the Chomsky revolution was the narrowing of what linguistics was thought to be. The emphasis on formal theory attracted the best and the brightest, and, thus, formal theory became the core of linguistic study as it remains today. In the Preface, I wrote: Formal linguistic theory continues to dominate the discipline as it should, and I did my part. But I think there should be more to linguistics than theory. My [belief] is simply this: that language is grander than formal theory.

I am not under the illusion that my book of essays on language somehow points the way to the reintegration of non-formal linguistics. But I think it is a step in the right direction—bringing language (and a fortiori linguistics) to a broader audience than academics, revisiting topics neglected today in most linguistics departments. If anyone comes away from my book thinking, Hmm, I didn’t realize how interesting language could be, then I will feel I have succeeded. And if a student says, Hmm, I think I could like a linguistics course, well, tant mieux, as the French say, so much the better.

Introduction

Time that is intolerant

And indifferent in a week

To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives

Everyone by whom it lives…

‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats.’

—W.H. Auden

There is language, and then there is linguistics. One has a lot to do with the other, but they are not the same. Linguists, people like me who make their living analyzing and thinking about language, are interested in language—of course. But the converse isn’t necessarily true: you can be fascinated by language but not be especially interested in acquiring the knowledge necessary to navigate the increasingly technical field called linguistics.

This is a book about language. More precisely, it is a book about certain aspects of language that I personally am interested in and, in most cases, have done research on and published articles or books about.

I am interested in little things as well as big things about language. Both the trivial and the cosmic have always fascinated me when it comes to language. I am interested in handwriting: can you, for example, tell the gender of someone from their handwriting? That is a little thing (to which the answer is yes, about 60% of the time, at least in America—I have tested that hypothesis in many classes over many years and it usually comes out to around 60%).

Incidentally, my computer put a wavy line under the ‘their’ in the phrase in the last paragraph, ‘…can…you tell the gender of someone from their handwriting’ meaning, ‘Woops; are you sure you want to write this?’ The spellcheck I have in my computer suggests ‘his or her’ (singular) in place of ‘their’ (plural) because the referent in that sentence is to ‘someone’ (singular). We encounter here the first of many ‘which is correct?’ issues, here a ‘singular: plural’ problem.

‘Correctness’ is an index which displays, as do few others as sharply, the difference in approach to language of the modern linguist from the attitudes of many ordinary users of a language. The distinction here is between ‘prescriptive grammar’ and ‘the descriptive approach’ or ‘descriptive grammar.’ Prescriptive grammar is the grammar usage taught in most schools. We are taught that ain’t is wrong, that we should say ‘between you and me’ rather than ‘between you and I,’ and, in my day, that ‘it is I’ should be used and not ‘it is me.’

As an ordinary user of English, I have no objection to prescriptive grammar up to a point. If you use ain’t in formal situations, you may have trouble getting a good job. What you do privately or within your family and friends is your own affair, but it is better to avoid ain’t or he don’t in the job setting. That’s plain commonsense. I have never minded saying and even writing ‘it is me’ regardless of what I was taught in grammar school. ‘It is I’ is, for me, too posh, too snobby to use comfortably.

As linguists, we are much more interested in what people say rather than what they were taught to say. We see our primary function as a descriptive one. One does hear ain’t and he don’t and not infrequently either, hence we as linguists record that fact. We may, and in my opinion should, flag those forms however, in some way, as being less than the best usage, though many and probably most contemporary linguists would consider even that nod to prescriptivism as one nod too many.

This prescriptive: descriptive divide was brought into sharp focus when the authoritative Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged was published in September, 1961. Unlike its predecessor, the highly prescriptive Webster’s Second, Webster’s Third was thoroughly descriptive in orientation. The Webster’s Third unleashed a firestorm of condemnation from many grammar traditionalists. Intellectuals such as the prominent man of letters, Dwight Macdonald, wrote that the dictionary’s compliant stance toward usage and its ‘abandonment’ of standards presaged the ruin of civilization. Some publishers enjoined their writers to adhere only to Webster’s Second. The hellhole of vituperations and frenzied defenses can scarcely be imagined today; one must have lived through it.

There is one paramount lesson that linguistics teaches us: that languages don’t get better or worse; they change. They don’t degenerate. Languages always change over time. The King James translation of the Bible (1611) is awash in ‘thou requirest’ and ‘she doth know’ kinds of usage. This was the best English of the time. The 47 scholars who translated the Bible for King James would have been horror-struck to have been told that, someday, English usage would ‘degenerate’ to ‘you require’ and ‘she knows’ or ‘she does know.’ But there it is. Languages change; they don’t degenerate. Thus ended the sermon.

I am interested occasionally in the difference between ‘capital’ letters and their lowercase counterparts: A a, B b, C c, D d, etc. Uppercase D and lowercase d are not that similar, nor are G and g as well as A and a. Except toward the end of the alphabet, the letters upper and lowercase aren’t very similar: A a, B b, D d, E e, but then U u, V v, W w, X x, Y y, Z z. Why do you suppose that is?

I am interested in the rebirth of the Hebrew language in Israel, and, in general, the birth or rebirth or even creation of new languages. (If you saw the movie Avatar, you heard a language called Na’vi invented for that movie by the communications professor, Paul Frommer, who has a doctorate in linguistics, of the University of Southern California.) I am interested in the best way to learn a language—one wishes there were an easy one! I am interested in ethnic dialects of language, ‘Spanglish’ for example. I am interested in how many foreign languages a person can learn to speak. I am interested in how that British actor in the hit T.V. doctor show House (Hugh Laurie) learned to speak with so perfect an American accent that no casual listener would take him for anything but an American. And Benedict Cumberbatch in Dr. Strange, or Damian Lewis in Band of Brothers and Once Upon the Time in the West, or Karen Gillan as Nebula in the Marvel movies.

I am interested in why official Belgian T.V. in December, 2006, ran an item saying that the Dutch-speaking (aka Flemish-speaking) northern part of Belgium was seceding from the rest of the country, that the king had fled into exile. This turned out to be a not-very-funny-joke, but everybody took it seriously because the scenario is altogether too possible. In Belgium, as in many other countries, language is an I-am-willing-to-die-for-it issue for many, an issue that conceals vast differences in economics, religion, culture, and sensibility. I am interested in whether Neanderthals possessed language, about how old spoken language is.

I am interested in what can be done about the most serious problem in linguistics today: the fact that languages are dying at a rate far greater than at any time in history. I don’t want to live in a world in which whales and mountain gorillas are extinct, nor do I want to live in a world in which languages (and a fortiori the cultures those languages represent) are becoming extinct. Language is culture or at least a big part of culture, a thread that runs throughout this book. When you lose a language, you lose a culture or at least a major component of a culture, and you lose the principal means of transmitting that culture to the young.

I am interested in dispelling myths about language, such as the myth that there are primitive languages. Or the myth that geography has anything to do with language, like, ‘Southerners drawl because it’s hot in the American South and people naturally slow down when it’s hot.’ I am interested in language as a political issue—how it can unify a country (as English today links Northern India, Southern India, West Bengal, and Bangladesh) or tear a country apart (as language threatened to do in the decade after India wrested its independence from the British in 1947). I am interested in the language of advertising. How do they come up with such clever names for products like the toothpaste for sensitive teeth Sensodyne, Febreze for an ‘air freshener’ (a euphemism for air-stench reducer), Lexus for an expensive automobile, Elvive for a French shampoo made by L’Oréal? The latter comes, I assume, from Elle + vive (French subjunctive) ‘she lives,’ though why the subjunctive vive instead of the indicative vit is used is beyond me. Would you buy a shampoo named Elvit?

I am interested in how and why languages change, in how language affects our behavior, and in animal communication. I am interested in the origins of language: when did spoken language make its appearance? (We believe we know from archaeological remains when written language appeared—some 6,000–7,000 years ago—but spoken language? No: estimates range from 50,000 to 250,000 years.) All, or most of these questions, have found their way into this book. Some of these are ‘big,’ some are ‘small.’

There are matters involving language that interest me, but I don’t have enough firsthand knowledge of to include in this book: language and the brain, for example, or the way social media are changing language: if u don’t know wat I mean so much th better. LOL

Most of what interests me falls technically into the disciplinary subareas of linguistics known as sociolinguistics and historical linguistics. But this is neither a course in sociolinguistics nor is it a course in historical linguistics. It is a collection of readings. If my book has a ‘message,’ it is this: that it’s okay to be interested in language without being interested in linguistics. There are plenty of people who love language, find it fascinating, want to learn more about it, but don’t necessarily want to learn formal linguistic theory. This book is for them.

If I have had any stylistic or thematic guide in the approach to language I have employed in this book, it is that of Edward Sapir, dead for almost a century, who was one of the founders of both the disciplines of linguistics and of anthropology in America (as well as a social critic, a universal-language enthusiast, and an accomplished poet and stylist). In his classic little book Language, first written in 1921 and no longer reliably in print, Sapir struck the tone that sustains me as I have written my own book:

Speech is so familiar a feature of daily life that we rarely