Finished reading "The Unfolding of Language" by Guy Deutscher. There wasn't a whole lot in it that was tremendously new to me, but it was a very well-written presentation of (a) why your favorite language isn't crumbling into decay and ruin because of kids today and their slovenly, lazy speech and (b) how in fact such processes of apparent decay are almost certainly directly responsible for magnificent structures such as the case system of latin or russian or finnish, the tri-consonantal root system of semitic languages, and the acrobatics of polysynthetic languages. This book actually was the first time I had seen an explanation of how a tri-consonantal root system could arise "from scratch", and I thought that was really cool.
Finished reading "The Unfolding of Language" by Guy Deutscher. There wasn't a whole lot in it that was tremendously new to me, but it was a very well-written presentation of (a) why your favorite language isn't crumbling into decay and ruin because of kids today and their slovenly, lazy speech and (b) how in fact such processes of apparent decay are almost certainly directly responsible for magnificent structures such as the case system of latin or russian or finnish, the tri-consonantal root system of semitic languages, and the acrobatics of polysynthetic languages. This book actually was the first time I had seen an explanation of how a tri-consonantal root system could arise "from scratch", and I thought that was really cool.
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