Ben Waber reviewed A Myriad of Tongues by Caleb Everett
This is the Linguistics + Anthropology + Biology Book You've Been Looking For
5 stars
This book provides an expansive tour of the breadth of humanity's linguistic repertoire, how linguistic differences relate to culture, and even how speech production biology likely influences language. This is both fascinating and gives deep insight into subtle and not so subtle differences in how different people and cultures interact and perceive the world. Even when there are gaps, Everett acknowledges it - the lack of any treatment of sign languages being the biggest hole here. If you speak two radically different languages fluently some of these revelations will be old hat, but unless you have mastered some extremely rare linguistic forms you're guaranteed to learn something unexpected about what form languages can take and what it implies about human cognition and interaction. Highly recommend
This book provides an expansive tour of the breadth of humanity's linguistic repertoire, how linguistic differences relate to culture, and even how speech production biology likely influences language. This is both fascinating and gives deep insight into subtle and not so subtle differences in how different people and cultures interact and perceive the world. Even when there are gaps, Everett acknowledges it - the lack of any treatment of sign languages being the biggest hole here. If you speak two radically different languages fluently some of these revelations will be old hat, but unless you have mastered some extremely rare linguistic forms you're guaranteed to learn something unexpected about what form languages can take and what it implies about human cognition and interaction. Highly recommend