Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language by John Mcwhorter
BUY IT NEW
- $13.99 List price$11.19 Online price$10.07 Member price(Save 28%)Limited Time Offer! Everyone receives the Member Price on books.
See Details
Reserve it at BN.com & pick it up in 60 minutes at your local store.
Enter a zip code
(Paperback - Reprint)
- Pub. Date: December 2002
- 352pp
- Sales Rank: 47,155
Buy it Used: 15 copies from $4.94 See All Available
Customers who bought this also bought
Product Details
- Pub. Date: December 2002
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
- Format: Paperback, 352pp
- Sales Rank: 47,155
- Series: Harper Perennial
- ISBN-13: 9780060520854
- ISBN: 006052085X
- Edition Description: Reprint
Synopsis
There are approximately six thousand languages on Earth today, each a descendant of the tongue first spoken by Homo sapiens some 150,000 years ago. While laying out how languages mix and mutate over time, linguistics professor John McWhorter reminds us of the variety within the species that speaks them, and argues that, contrary to popular perception, language is not immutable and hidebound, but a living, dynamic entity that adapts itself to an ever-changing human environment.
Full of humor and imaginative insight, The Power of Babel draws its illustrative examples from languages around the world, including pidgins, Creoles, and nonstandard dialects.
Biography
John McWhorter, associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Word on the Street. He lives in Oakland, California.
loading...