The Power of Babel Publisher: Harper Perennial

Although better known for his books on African-American culture, John McWhorter is a trained linguist. As someone who has had an interest in language and linguistics since coming upon Noam Chomsky's work in the area when I was a philosophy grad student in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I quickly gravitated to this title when perusing the shelves of a bookstore a few years back. I was so fascinated by what McWhorter said, that I wound up buying the book."The Power of Babel" describes in an easy-to-understand manner the fluidity of language, how and why it radically changes over time, how it becomes simpler rather than more complex, and how literacy retards the rapidity with which language changes. (While McWhorter doesn't mention this, the simplification of grammar and pronunciation over time is an example of the "Principle of Least Effort," originally formulated in the early days of information theory. This principle is applicable to language, which is not surprising, the purpose of language being in large measure to communicate information.