Don't Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language

Language is something key to the life of all humans, yet the study of language is often confined to the ivory tower of academia. This book attempts to provide everybody with insights from the field of linguistics.

Different languages have different ways of expressing things. It is difficult to translate things exactly the same between two languages. Sometimes words have multiple meanings. Some language have very dense construction, while others require many words to say the same point. Grammar and structure differ. Some language have gender, while others do not. Two words may have similar origins in different languages but gradually evolved to have different nuances. It all makes a challenge translating, with the best hope usually a close approximation of the original.

Languages are always changing and evolving. Identifying a "proper" or "correct" version of the language is not nearly as important as understanding. Purists have made efforts to look at the true "original" meaning of words, but these may not bear relevancy to what it means today. (The word decimate was given as an example. It was related to a tenth, but now means destruction.) Language is changing, not necessarily getting better or worse.

The book spends a while discussing Chomsky and universal grammar. Then a lot of time is spent refuting Chomsky's arguments. There is some interesting ways of looking at language as a whole, but it does get fairly erudite. There seemed to be a lot of this that I had seen before.