Books on Language

April 17, 2009, 6:55 P.M. ET
Books on Language
by MICHAEL QUINION

1. The Stories of English 427 C [420s in Dewey are English & Old English; 427 is for variations]
By David Crystal
Overlook, 2004

This richly textured, nontechnical account of the evolution of English is fascinating because it interweaves multiple narratives. In parallel with the standard language, David Crystal discusses varieties usually considered nonstandard -- dialect, slang and the speech of ethnic minorities -- which previously hadn't received the same level of attention. Traditionalist speakers and grammarians deplore such varieties as inferior or corrupt, but they are increasingly becoming accepted as legitimate, not least because only one in three speakers of English now has it as a mother tongue. With a cornucopia of examples that range from "The Canterbury Tales" to "The Lord of the Rings," and from the correspondence of medieval kings to Internet chatroom gossip, Crystal's exposition is a delight.


2. Language in Danger 417.7 D [410s are Linguistics; 417 is Dialectology & historical linguistics]
By Andrew Dalby
Columbia University, 2003
Languages not only change, they also die: World-wide, a language vanishes on average every two weeks. Andrew Dalby argues that each disappearance diminishes us, because a language encapsulates local knowledge and ways of looking at the human condition that die with the last speaker. Stronger languages squeeze out others: An early example is the language extinction that occurred around the Mediterranean in classical times, through the rise of Latin. Closer to our own time, minority languages -- Irish, Welsh, Native American and Australian tongues -- were banned in school to force minority groups to speak the language of the majority. The mood is now swinging toward encouraging minority languages, and some of those in danger may be saved. Dalby's engrossing account documents endangered languages throughout the world.


3. The Thurber Carnival 817 T [810s are American Literature; 817 is Satire & humor]
By James Thurber
Harper, 1945
James Thurber's antic attitude to language was a revelation when, at age 12, I bought this compilation of essays and stories in a British paperback edition. I first understood that grammar could actually be interesting when I read "Here Lies Miss Groby," his recollection of an English-composition teacher who drilled into her charges that metonymy means "Container for the Thing Contained," as in the phrase "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears" -- "ears" is not meant literally; their hearing is. Young Thurber lies awake at night wondering about a wife threatening to hit her husband with the milk -- would "milk" be a case of Thing Contained for the Container? Thurber's whimsical drawings are a joy -- one has a puzzled man sitting on a motionless sled, holding his dog on a leash, as a passing skater, apparently steeped in Swinburne's poetry, shouting: "I said the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, but let it pass, let it pass!" I am glad to have encountered Thurber's storytelling skills and his humor so early in life.




4. Words and Rules 400 P [400s are Language]
By Steven Pinker
Basic Books, 1999

When Americans prefer "snuck" and "dove" to the British "sneaked" and "dived," they're pointing up one of the curiosities of English: the battle between regular and irregular verbs. These two American usages are especially odd because they're 19th-century revivals, reversing what grammarians often assert is an unstoppable historical trend toward regularization. The battle of the verbs can be especially vexing for children, who are avid for rules when they learn a language -- rules that lead to errors such as "breaked" and "holded." Steven Pinker's research confirms that we actually use two tools for making words: rules and memory. Regular verbs pop into mind almost automatically; irregular ones take longer to process because they must be retrieved from memory. Pinker's "Words and Rules" is erudite, readable and funny, leading the reader through a great range of topics, one of which is the cause of the gradual transformation of language over time.

5. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress SF Heinlein
By Robert Heinlein
Putnam, 1966
Science fiction has invented much vocabulary -- "robot," "force field" and "spacesuit," for instance -- that has since reached the mainstream. And linguistic change itself has been a significant sub-theme in many science-fiction works, partly because it contributes to the sense of otherness that is key to the suspension of disbelief, partly because it is a useful indicator of social and cultural distinctness. Anthony Burgess's anglicized Russian slang in "A Clockwork Orange" and George Orwell's Newspeak in "Nineteen Eighty-Four" are two famous examples. Another memorable example is Robert Heinlein's "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress." With a sentient computer as a main character, the story is set in a lunar penal colony in 2075, where the inhabitants speak in an English dialect influenced by Russian and Chinese: not yet a pidgin, certainly not yet a creole, but a form of speech indicative of the changes that happen when disparate language communities are forced to communicate.

Mr. Quinion's most recent book, "Gallimaufry: A Hodgepodge of Our Vanishing Vocabulary" (Oxford), has just been published in paperback.