Review by New York Times Review
Consider the simple command, "Stop the car at the stop sign!" Many people reading this will be part of the American driving culture, and so will know what this means: "Bring the vehicle to a complete stop roughly one to five feet before the front of the car passes the stop sign." But to someone unfamiliar with our traffic customs, the order might appear rather vague. Should you stop 200 yards in front of it? Ten feet in front of it? What if you stop so that the sign is lined up with the back seat? It's an example of the way that language is "underspecified for meaning," which, to Everett, supports his hypothesis that culture is inextricable from language. Contra Noam Chomsky - who argued that humans have an instinct for language, right down to the structure of our sentences - Everett believes that language is not innate. It's best understood as something we create. If this is true, then it is conversation, and not grammar, that should be considered the "apex" of language, by which he means that conversation is the entire point of human language and the most useful way to study it. "Language did not fully begin when the first hominid uttered the first word or sentence," Everett writes. "It began in earnest only with the first conversation, which is both the source and the goal of language." "How Language Began" is a dense, ambitious text, attempting to explain the origin story for 60,000 generations of language; this may cause the nonexpert to occasionally feel as if she has wandered by mistake into a lecture at a linguistics conference. But Everett's amiable tone, and especially his captivating anecdotes from his field studies in the Amazonian rain forests, will help the neophyte along. It's worth it in the end to get a glimpse of conversation through his eyes, as humanity's most impressive collective invention.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 25, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
A century and a half after Darwin posited a natural origin for human language, Everett fills in the evolutionary details. Moving far outside historical linguistics, Everett credits Homo erectus with having invented language nearly two million years ago. This communicative invention came not in Everett's view in one revolutionary breakthrough but, instead, at the slow pace typical of evolution, as early hominids gradually organized themselves in ever-more-complex social groupings, eventually learning to fashion culturally weighted symbols and then to manipulate such symbols in communicative strings, so setting the evolutionary stage for the planet's only loquacious species: Homo sapiens. In advancing this theory, Everett challenges the quite different perspective of Noam Chomsky, the pioneering American linguist who has posited an innate, genetically primed human capacity for grammar as the key to understanding language. Everett attacks not only Chomsky's conclusions but also his Cartesian mind-brain linguistic premises, detecting in those dualistic premises evidence of residual religious beliefs incompatible with Chomsky's own rational materialism. Certain to spark that liveliest form of language debate!--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
In this provocative and ambitious book, linguist Everett (dean of arts & sciences, Bentley Univ., MA; Dark Matter of the Mind) demonstrates the complex and expansive nature of human language and its many communicative forms. Reaching back beyond 6,000 years and replete with many anecdotes and examples, Everett's work describes how humans moved from using "mere communication to language." Applying semantics, linguistic theory, cultural history, and popular culture, he makes a convincing case for the multimodal nature of language-a phenomenon that engages "the whole person-intellectual emotions, hands, mouth, tongue, brain." The richness and intricacy of his ideas seem in part shared with those of psychology professor Michael C.-Corballis in The Truth About Language, that human language evolved gradually over time and did not come about as a "sudden emergence." Although detailed and rather sophisticated in its approach and argument, there are no scholarly citations; however, the author does provide a useful "Suggested Reading" list. VERDICT This volume will be of interest to linguists, cultural critics, and anthropologists as well as informed readers interested in the evolution of language.-Herbert E. Shapiro, Lifelong Learning Soc., Florida Atlantic Univ., Boca Raton © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A noted linguist explores "the evolutionary history of language as a human inventionfrom the emergence of our species to the more than 7,000 languages spoken today."Everett (Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious, 2016, etc.), the dean of arts and sciences at Bentley University, mixes esoteric scholarly inquiry with approachable anecdotal interludes to surmise how humans developed written and spoken language and why it became vital for survival and dominance. As in his previous books, Everett energetically attacks the long-accepted theory of Noam Chomsky that humans are born with the language instinct, including innate rules of structure. Everett believes that communication with other humans is a learned activity involving multiple parts of the brain. The author began to formulate his overarching theories of language while studying contemporary hunter-gatherers in the Amazon region of Brazil. His research led him backward through the millennia to the dawning of Homo erectus. Because these early humans formed communities rather than living in isolation, Everett emphasizes that the culture helped develop language and that language in turn advanced culture. In Everett's schematic, language and culture are inseparable, although he states without qualification that language is the "handmaiden" of culture. A major draw of this book is the author's extensive theorizing about not only the origins of human language, but also why something akin to the Tower of Babel developed, with clans living in proximity unable to easily understand one another. Many books about the origin of language aimed at nonexperts tend to skim over the Tower of Babel conundrum. That Everett is skilled at leavening an intellectually challenging treatise with humor is evident on the first page of the introduction: he follows the biblical phrase "In the beginning was the word," attributed to John 1:1, with the quotation "No, it wasn't," attributed to Dan Everett. A worthy book for general readers not well-versed in anthropology, neurology, linguistics, and other technical sciences. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
