PLANET WORD
The story of language from the earliest grunts to Twitter and beyond.
By J.P. Davidson
Michael Joseph, 445pp
Reviewed: 19 November 2011
If you are the sort of person who reads book reviews, you will probably find this omnibus tour of (mostly) human language entertaining and gently informative. If your interests in language are more technical or academic, you may find yourself picking arguments with the absent author.
The author, John Davidson, is an anthropologist and long-time BBC documentary producer of travel and exploration programs hosted by personalities like Michael Palin and Stephen Fry. In fact, this book is advertised as the “companion” to accompany a BBC series, presented by Stephen Fry, that has just begun airing in Britain. As ‘the book of the series’, it can draw on the generous research and travel budgets of a major television production.
The result is a book that reflects the episodic, anecdotal, fast-paced style of a television treatment. It is at once easy to read in short bursts, endlessly diverting, and lacking a coherent thesis or narrative drive. Rather like a Stephen Fry television program.
As a book, this takes us back to the days before television or radio offered passive consumption of such edutainment. Individuals and families used to read encyclopaedias and non-fiction miscellanies for entertainment and self-improvement. As a child I browsed Coles Funny Picture Book or an old Pear’s Encylcopedia, puzzling with their Edwardian understandings of the world. Now I can get lost in a maze of hyperlinks on Wikipedia, launched from any conceivable Internet query. Fry and Davidson seem to share what psychologists have called “divergent” thinking, and I enjoy the rambling that results.
They have given themselves a vast terrain across which to fossick, like gentlemen explorers on a world tour. They begin with the most primitive indications of language in animals, and the extent to which the human body and brain are shaped for language. More than half the large human brain is involved with language one way or another, yet much is still unknown about how verbal and non-verbal communication interact with memory or with control of our physical bodies.
At the next level, we review the place of language in identity. This ranges from micro-dialects within individual families to the grand political projects of nationalism, such as the forced extinction of regional dialects in Republican France. Mediaeval Emperor Charlemagne had said, approvingly, that “to have a second language is to have a second soul”, but the Academie Francaise consider this unpatriotic. Hebrew was re-invented as a Zionist program to provide a national language in Israel for people who had shared a religion, but not a language, for two thousand years. Irish Gaelic is practically extinct in once-Gaelic villages, but is revived and renovated as a cultural project by urban Irish nationalists.
The primary audience being British, it’s no surprise to find examination of English dialect as a social class marker. Did you know that the Queen’s accent is less “posh” than it used to be? This has been tracked by Australian researchers from recordings of her annual Christmas broadcasts. The range of Australian accents is scanned, but American English is barely mentioned.
Beyond the reach of royal role-models, English vocabulary and usage is continually enriched and extended by slang, cant and jargon rising up from the unwashed and the uninhibited. New dictionaries include words or usages invented by our own Barry Humphries, and by the creators of Homer Simpson, following the innovative tradition of Shakespeare as the most prolific individual source of new language (over 400 citations) in the Oxford Dictionary.
We owe our written culture to the innovation of the alphabet, attributed here to the Phoenicians. Originally Canaanites of the Levant, they were driven out of Canaa by their cousins the Hebrews, and in diaspora created the first trading network to unify the Mediterranean, founding many cities including Carthage and Barcelona. They needed a flexible, easily learned writing system to facilitate their trade, and built one from symbols including elements of cuneiform and of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Greek and Roman alphabets developed from the Phoenician, and the rest is (written) history.
Alphabets also made mechanical printing economical, leading to exponential expansion in the sharing of knowledge. Our modern information-based societies are defined by education, shared science, propaganda, literature and even advertising. The development of each is given generous anecdotal examination with examples of the word in action.
Though the spin-off an ephemeral television show, this book is a solid object you can hold in your hand and admire on a shelf. Most books published today are cheap-as-chips content wrappers, but this one is nicely designed and built to last, as a classy hardback on good quality paper, generously illustrated and with an attractive slip-cover. It’s about the right size, price and task-level to make a decent Christmas present to someone you like, or even yourself.
Disappointing, then, that after all their investment the publishers have skimped on proof-reading. My first graduate job in publishing enforced proof-reading as part of the apprenticeship, but perhaps current publishing recruits hold too many degrees to stoop to it. In any case, this entertaining and handsome book about words is the last place you would expect to find the name of the printer Gutenberg misspelt Gutenburg, among quite a few oversights.
Richard Thwaites has loved words since his earliest memories and misconceptions.