标题: 2022.06.10 关于语言各方面的好书的黄金时代 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-7-6 21:02 标题: 2022.06.10 关于语言各方面的好书的黄金时代 Economist Reads | Language
Our language columnist, Johnson, picks five of his favourite recent reads
This is a golden age for good books about every facet of language
Economist reads on language books
Jun 10th 2022 (Updated Jun 22nd 2022)
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This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit our collection to discover “The Economist reads” guides, guest essays and more seasonal distractions.
For a long time popular books about language were dominated by cranky editors airing pet peeves and wondering where it all went wrong, while academic linguists wrote impenetrable papers and struggled to explain their work to the public. Then, a couple of decades ago, bestselling books like Steven Pinker’s “The Language Instinct” (1994) and John McWhorter’s “The Power of Babel” (2001) convinced more linguists to try their hand at writing for a non-expert audience. This in turn raised the quality of books by non-linguists. The cranks no longer rule, and it is a golden age for good books about every facet of language.
Memory Speaks. By Julie Sedivy. Belknap Press; 368 pages; $29.95 and £23.95
Julie Sedivy moved from Czechoslovakia to Canada as a small child, and hence far from the home of her first language. Her tale of the gradual loss of her Czech, and her adult work to recover it, is not only beautifully told. It is also packed with a tour of the science on bilingualism, in which she is an expert, as well as the controversial topic of how one’s native language influences thought. As if that were not enough for this fascinating book, she embeds herself within the fight to prevent indigenous North American languages from disappearing entirely, and illuminates what is lost when a language dies. As Johnson I assessed the book, and the painful loss of native languages, early in 2022.
You Talkin’ to Me? By E.J. White. Oxford University Press; 216 pages; $19.95 and £14.99
In many countries, people are taught to revere and even strive to emulate the educated speech of their grandest city. Think of Parisian French. Not so the English of New York. On screen, for example, it is reserved for gangsters or wise-cracking sidekicks (why does the parrot in “Aladdin” have a New York accent?), never for heroes (such as Captain America, whose Brooklyn origins are inaudible in his speech in the Marvel films). That was not always so. Both presidents Roosevelt had an upper-class New York accent once considered respectable. Its disappearance is a tale of immigration and the relocation of an imaginary “real America” to the Midwest, rather than its world-bestriding metropolis. Johnson reflected on the book late in 2020.
More Summer reads
• Our Bartleby columnist explains how to avoid the most overused words in business
• What’s at stake in Ukraine is the direction of human history, writes Yuval Noah Harari
• The pandemic has given economists a new lease of life
• Flashman, Victorian England’s foremost rotter, would have made a great journalist
•Six guides to biology as seen at different scales
What the F: What Swearing Reveals about our Language, Our Brains and Ourselves. By Benjamin K. Bergen. Basic Books; 288 pages; $10.99
Your pulse speeds up, and your palms start to sweat ever so slightly, upon hearing a swear word. People can tolerate more pain if allowed to cuss, and many victims of strokes and brain injuries lose all speech but the taboo variety. The words in question may be avoided in polite company, but they make for a fascinating scientific study by Benjamin Bergen, a cognitive scientist. Of the main sources of swear words, some are losing their bite (those concerning religion, for example) while some still hurt (slurs, especially). But Mr Bergen examines the claims of harm from swear words overall (America seems to regulate them more than guns), and dismantles them skilfully. Swearing is a core part of human life. To be used with care, but not to be abjured. Johnson wrote about the book, and weapons of crass construction, a few years ago.
The Prodigal Tongue. By Lynne Murphy. Penguin Books; 368 pages; $17. Oneworld; £16.99
Lynne Murphy is a linguist at the University of Sussex, married to a British husband and raising British children. But she is American, and years of experiencing polite (and sometimes not-so-polite) commentary about her native English in her adopted home prompted her to write this myth-shredding book about the relationship between British and American English. She is not a partisan of either, but in her close examinations of beloved beliefs she finds some that hold (Britons really do say “please” and “sorry” a lot) and many that do not. Time after time, for example, she shows that a perceived “Americanism” deprecated in Britain emerged there. You can listen to our interview with the author (first released late in 2018).
How We Talk. By N.J. Enfield. Basic Books; 272 pages; $30
Interruptions, “uh”, “um” and sentences beginning with “So,” are all considered bad linguistic form. But it seems odd that so many people would display such linguistic ineptitude. As a result, linguists like to investigate what functions and causes these behaviours have. A great introduction to the study is “How We Talk” by N.J. Enfield, who describes what he calls the “conversational machine”. Speakers take turns with only split-second pauses, which requires them to pay careful attention to each other; “um” and “uh” thus play a role in holding the floor. These and other mechanisms fill a surprisingly brisk book about elements of language most people disdain—when they think about them at all. Johnson, er, considered the topic and the book in 2017.■
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Johnson, who speaks nine languages, writes a regular column about language in the weekly edition of The Economist and helps update its official style guide. He is also the author of two books of his own:
You Are What You Speak. By Lane Greene. 336 pages. Delacorte Press; 336 pages; $25
On language and the politics of identity. An analysis of the politics and mythology of language
Talk on the Wild Side. By Lane Greene. PublicAffairs; 240 pages; $26. Profile Books; £14.99
On the untameable but robust nature of language
Do you have your own recommendations? Send them to summer@economist.com with the subject line “Language” and your name, city and country. We will publish a selection of readers’ suggestions.
