The Story of Human Language: The Great Courses (Literature & English…

The Story of Human Language is a college-level introduction to linguistics, from the basics of what language is and how words change to the development of pidgins and creoles. The author, John McWhorter, includes interesting examples from many languages, including languages that most Westerners have never heard of.

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the CDs (I had the audio not DVD version) and reading the course guidebook. McWhorter knows the material and presents it clearly with interesting examples. He covered many topics, but left me wanting to read more on this topic. And that is what a good teacher does -- inspire students to learn more!

My only complaint is that occasionally he went on for 2-3 sentences about something tangential to the topic. I know this was his personal style, but I wanted maximum linguistic knowledge in my 30-minute lecture!

Would I read/listen to this again? Yes, and I already did. I would whole-heartedly recommend the CD version to anyone who wants an introduction to linguistics and has a long commute! ( )

I took a course on linguistics in college, but still learned a ton from these lectures. For instance, McWhorter describes how languages acquire grammar when words which originally meant something specific gradually turn into suffixes, prefixes and particles. Obviously, people don’t come together one day and say, “Let’s add ‘ed’ to all the action words when we talk about what happened in the past to show that we’re talking about the past.” The author uses as example the French negative which has “ne” in front of the verb, like most European languages, but then also “pas” after it. According to McWhorter, it started like an affectation when people said that somebody won’t walk a step (pas), won’t drink a drop, or won’t eat a crumb, by way of strengthening a negative. Eventually, the fad with drops and crumbs passed, but the one with steps remained, faded from a colorful to a normal expression (as many colorful expressions which don’t disappear with time do, the author says), became normal, and then became the norm for all negative sentences – by then nobody thought of “pas” as “step” – it simply began to mean the negative in this context.

McWhorter also says that languages tend to become increasingly and unnecessarily complex if not checked by vast waves of new arrivals or spreading literacy which tends to slow down any language change. He explains the fact that English is considerably simpler in comparison with most other European languages and Old English by the big numbers of Vikings who settled there, intermarried and generally intermingled with the natives, but didn’t bother learning the “whole” language and passed their simplified version – no gender for nouns and adjectives, no conjugal verb endings, except for “s” in 3rd person singular in the simple present tense, no case endings for nouns – to future generations. But even with these simplifications, English has plenty of unnecessary grammatical features, such as articles and a plethora of past tenses. (Consider the grammatically correct phrase “I have finished the book that the teacher had given me” and the phrase “I finished book that teacher gave me.” Has any meaning been lost?) And if a language doesn’t have articles and multiple past tenses, it may have sentence-final particles which lets the other person know that the statement was meant assertively, or is a reply to his/her question, or marks some other kind of attitude which English speakers leave to context or intonation. Many East Asian languages have such particles; Cantonese has 30 of them. And you can’t omit them, anymore than articles in English – it’s part of grammar. Many of these languages also have classifiers used with plural nouns. Like in English one can’t say “three cattle” and has to say “three heads of cattle,” in these languages one has to use classifiers like “heads” with every noun. Moreover, all the nouns are divided into dozens of groups, each of which has its own classifier. And if a language doesn’t have any of these features, it may have evidential markers, which signify whether you’ve come by the information you’re sharing by hearing it, or seeing what’s happened, or by one of the other myriad of possible ways of obtaining information. The author doesn’t say what exactly compels languages to develop unnecessary grammatical categories, such as genders, conjugations, articles, more than three tenses, sentence-final particles, evidential markers, classifiers and many other curious features, the cumbersome uselessness of which one often doesn’t think about till one tries to learn a foreign language – or teach one’s own language to a foreigner. Do all such features start with an affectation? And where does that come from? A elite’s desire to separate itself from the masses who in turn start mimicking the elite? Youth’s desire to be different which is then passed on to their children? In short, is it the human desire to show off that drives languages to become overly complex in all sorts of bizarre ways? Or is it an attempt to find a stronger, more colorful expression that eventually begins to sound normal and then sometimes becomes fossilized in our speech? In short, is it our emotion that produces this overabundance of grammatical categories? Or is it our tendency to classify everything into groups – that is, our logic? Or, perhaps, all of the above? The author doesn’t discuss what drives this phenomenon, and so I’m left to wonder.

He does discuss at length how new languages are born and how languages die (in the same stages, happening in the opposite order), shows how the distribution of languages, as well as their influences on each other, illuminate history too ancient to be recorded, and how the languages which originated the current language families are reconstructed.

My only complaint with McWhorter’s lectures is that he has a bias in favor of oral languages which he often describes as “natural” and “real” languages, while “the Oxford Standard Dictionary and the prose of Milton are historical curiosities, departures from the ‘natural,’ similar to dogs that bring in the newspaper.” Of course, the major difference here is that no dog starts bringing in the newspaper on its own accord, no matter how many times it sees its humans reading it, while writing systems and literatures arose independently in vastly different cultures over 5,000 years of human history. McWhorter himself once slips out of his PC stance when he writes the following introduction to Lecture 18 in his course guidebook: “Written languages do have certain what you might call advantages over oral languages. Sometimes you’re not supposed to say this too loud, like many things that are true, but a written language has a larger and richer vocabulary than a solely oral language. And in many ways, it has a more elaborate kind of syntax and other ways of arranging its words to convey meaning.” As I was reading this, I couldn’t help smiling wryly over the contradiction between our society’s outward emphasis on always telling the truth and the fact that “many things that are true” “you’re not supposed to say… too loud” and even more so over the awkward phrasing of this paragraph – of written language, no less. Why “do have certain what you might call advantages” rather than simply “do have certain advantages”? And why “a more elaborate kind of syntax” instead of simply “a more elaborate syntax”? As a linguist, McWhorter can’t be unaware of these filler words in his sentences; so it feels like he’s trying to apologize for once letting slip something somebody somewhere may not be happy to hear by manifesting his discomfort over having to admit this fact. It seems to me that his bias towards oral languages leads him to overemphasize the difference between the written and spoken language, for instance, by claiming that some features of spoken American English generally considered ungrammatical, such as the use of double negatives, substitution of “who” for “whom,” or constructs like “Bill and me” are much more widespread than I personally have observed them to be in real life, apparently to be able to claim that universality should bring these practices legitimacy (Hey, no one really talks “correctly” outside of the classroom!). And since he exaggerates this gap with English, I don’t know how much I can trust him when he makes similar claims for other languages, e.g. that the difference between Standard Arabic used in print and media and spoken Arabic (different in each country) is so great that it’s practically like different mutually-unintelligible languages, or that ever since the Middle Ages everybody in France has been dropping “ne” in negative phrases in conversation, leaving only the “pas,” and that “French people on all levels of society” have been saying “on” with 3rd person singular instead of “nous” with 1st person plural for “we” for centuries. (Curiously enough, on the other hand, he doesn’t even mention the two practices in the English language which really are very widespread, occurring even in written language, including his own course guidebook, but that quite a few people still disapprove of, namely the splitting of the infinitive and relegating the preposition in certain cases to the end of the sentence.)

On the whole, however, I quite enjoyed these lectures. McWhorter has a very engaging presentation style and certainly knows how to keep his audience interested. ( )

I don't usually get Teaching Company courses that cover material I took in college, but McWhorter is the expert on creoles and pidgins, which wasn't covered in my linguistics class, so I thought I'd get it just for that. However, the whole course was excellent: supplementing and updating information I'd already covered and introducing topics I hadn't encountered.

What I liked most about McWhorter as a lecturer was that he was very patient and thorough with his explanations of the tenets of linguistics that seem counter-intuitive to the non-linguist. He was also very fair in dealing with controversies in the field and presenting the current consensus well. If you're interested in what we know about how language works, I highly recommend this course. ( )

Human language is a fascinating subject. We don't appreciate how complex language speaking skills are until we try to learn a new language as adults. It's one thing that children can do better than adults. Brain studies suggest that human brains are uniquely programmed to use language, and children's brains are uniquely adept at learning languages. This adeptness is lost as we age.

The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter is a collection of thirty-six lectures on the history and study of human languages. It includes some discussion of the tools used by linguists. However, I see that there's a whole separate set of lectures on 'Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language.' I haven't listened to this other set of lectures so I'm not sure how they differ. Presumably these lectures (Story of Human Language) has more focus on history and less emphasis on the technical aspects of linguistics.

Some things I've learned that I find interesting:

1. Differences in languages can be used much like gene technology to track prehistoric movements of humans. Changes in languages occur more quickly than changes in human genes, so whereas genes may be used to indicate humans migrations over a span of 100,000 years, language can indicate movements over the past 10,000 years.

2. Ninety-nine percent of the words in the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language are from sources other than Old-English. However, Sixty-five percent of the commonly used words are part of the one percent that comes from Old-English.

3. The most complex and difficult languages are spoken in areas that are isolated from exposure to other languages. In other words, primitive peoples sometimes have very complex languages. Languages can become complex when everybody who speaks the language learned it as a child.

4. More widely spoken languages that need to be learned by adult speakers of other languages tend to become simplified over time.

5. Languages tend to either (1) have prefixes and case endings, or (2) be tonal. They seldom have both. (But there are exceptions.)

6. The majority of the world's languages do not have definite and indefinite articles (i.e. 'a' and 'and'). Speakers of European languages can't believe it to be possible to speak without them.

7. The majority of the world's population (including much of Europe) speak a different dialect (i.e. local vernacular) of their language at home than what is taught in their schools or used in official government business. This phenomenon is called diglossia. Americans are unique in having relatively little diglossia.

8. We can thank the influence of the invading Norsemen of the 9th century for the fact that English is the only European language that doesn't have gender markers for inanimate objects. (Thank you, Norsemen.) Other invaders who didn't learn Old English well were probably responsible for the simplified verb conjugations in English. (Thank you other invaders.)

9. Non-phonetic English word spellings are a remnant of an earlier time when they were phonetic. Unfortunately, word spellings change more slowly than the spoken language. The development of printing has essentially fossilized spelling conventions. (Thank goodness for computerized spell-check.)

A rich look into the development of language through an examination of what we know about English. Professor McWhorter leverages his age to connect well with his audience and uses accessible examples to make points. A native of Philadelphia, he uses the city and its accent and dialect to make points about American English. A fine work from The Teaching Company. I haven't had a loser yet. And I only buy the "sale" items. ( )