Review: Language Families of the World

Language Families of the World by John McWhorter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I think I found my new go-to to recommend for people who are interested in learning about linguistics, or languages in general (although I still love Empires of the Word). I found this book fascinating, and McWhorter extremely entertaining.

Some of my notes:
The more adults have had to learn a language throughout its history, the more simple it tends to be. The longer a language is left to itself, the more complicated it will get.

"I went to the store" said Edward
This is an awkward sentence structure that is never spoken, only written. It never was a natural manner of speaking in English, but it's a holdover from English's germanic roots. Namely, how German likes to have the verb in the second place, as in:
"Ich gehe ins kino", and
"Morgen gehe ich ins kino"
We don't have that anymore, but we have some awkward ways of using sentences because of it.


If we didn't have written Latin, many language families would be much more of a problem. For example, "cheese" in Italian is Formaggio, in French is Fromage, in Spanish is Queso, and in Portuguese is queijo, while in Romanian it is branza. So what was the root word? Btw, in Romantsch it is Cascio, while in Sicilian it is caccio. We know that in Latin it was caseus formaticum thanks to writing, but without those writings it would be almost impossible to figure out. This is the case for most language families.

Apparently Estonian has triple consonants.

Also, I've been looking for a place to learn Cherokee online now, thanks to this book (although without much luck)

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