Mcwhorter's The Power Of Babel: A Natural History Of Language

The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language

John McWhorter, the author of The Power of Babel, gives a brief history of human languages. The title is from the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. The story tells of the people had only one language and decided to build a tower. Then, God gives them different languages. As a result, the event was the derivation of different cultures and languages. Through McWhorter’s view of how languages derived from the past 150,000 years, he states that the one original language transformed into six thousand new languages. The book has seven chapters and an epilogue. The first chapter is “The First Language Morphs into Six Thousand New Ones” discusses the question, “What happened to the first language?”( McWhorter 16). The second chapter is “The Six Thousand Languages Develop into Clusters of Sublanguages.” Then, The third chapter

He describes language change is quite small even though in our lifetime we can not notice it. However, we can find out the huge language changing, what we mean is that the sentence morphed, generation after generation (18). He expresses, because of the continual changing bit by bit, such as Latin to French, a whole new language was born in the world. He uses five faces to describe the processes of language change: “Sound change: Defining Deviance Downward,” “Extension: Grammar Gets a Virus,” “The Expressiveness Cycle: The Bass from Hell,” “Rebracketing: The Story of Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear,” and “Semantic Change: Making Love to Ginger Rogers (18-31).” He gives several cases about languages change. For instance, the author uses the change of the word “husbandry”, from Shakespeare’s basic meaning, “manager of the house,” to the modern meaning in other languages, “thrift” (39). At last of the first chapter, McWhorter says that we cannot know what the first language was, but we know that one must have been