Story of Human Language
The Story of
Human Language
Part I
Professor John McWhorter
THE TEACHING COMPANY ®
John McWhorter, Ph.D.
Senior Fellow in Public Policy, Manhattan Institute
John McWhorter, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, earned his Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford University in 1993 and became Associate Professor of
Linguistics at UC Berkeley after teaching at Cornell University. His academic specialty is language change and language contact. He is the author of The
Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, on how the world’s languages arise, change, and mix. He has also written a book on dialects and Black
English, The Word on the Street. His books on creoles include Language
Change and Language Contact in Pidgins and Creoles, The Missing Spanish
Creoles, and an anthology of his creole articles called Defining Creole. Beyond his work in linguistics, Dr. McWhorter is the author of Losing the Race and an anthology of race writings, Authentically Black. He has written on race and cultural issues for The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington
Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The National Review, The Los
Angeles Times, The American Enterprise, and The New York Times. Dr.
McWhorter has appeared on Dateline NBC, Politically Incorrect, Talk of the
Nation, Today, Good Morning, America, The Jim Lehrer NewsHour, and Fresh
Air and does regular commentaries for All Things Considered. His latest book is
Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music in America and Why We Should, Like, Care.
©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership
i
Table of Contents
The Story of Human Language
Part I
Professor Biography ........................................................................................... i
Course Scope ...................................................................................................... 1
Lecture One
What Is Language?
Human Language
Part I
Professor John McWhorter
THE TEACHING COMPANY ®
John McWhorter, Ph.D.
Senior Fellow in Public Policy, Manhattan Institute
John McWhorter, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, earned his Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford University in 1993 and became Associate Professor of
Linguistics at UC Berkeley after teaching at Cornell University. His academic specialty is language change and language contact. He is the author of The
Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, on how the world’s languages arise, change, and mix. He has also written a book on dialects and Black
English, The Word on the Street. His books on creoles include Language
Change and Language Contact in Pidgins and Creoles, The Missing Spanish
Creoles, and an anthology of his creole articles called Defining Creole. Beyond his work in linguistics, Dr. McWhorter is the author of Losing the Race and an anthology of race writings, Authentically Black. He has written on race and cultural issues for The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington
Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The National Review, The Los
Angeles Times, The American Enterprise, and The New York Times. Dr.
McWhorter has appeared on Dateline NBC, Politically Incorrect, Talk of the
Nation, Today, Good Morning, America, The Jim Lehrer NewsHour, and Fresh
Air and does regular commentaries for All Things Considered. His latest book is
Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music in America and Why We Should, Like, Care.
©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership
i
Table of Contents
The Story of Human Language
Part I
Professor Biography ........................................................................................... i
Course Scope ...................................................................................................... 1
Lecture One
What Is Language?
Bibliography: Abley, Mark. Spoken Here: Travels among Threatened Languages. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003 Arlotto, Anthony. Introduction to Historical Linguistics. Boston: University Press of America, 1972 Bailey, Richard. Nineteenth-Century English. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996 Baker, Mark. The Atoms of Language. New York: Basic Books, 2001. This complements Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct in describing an area of Norton & Co., 1999. An accessible account of the discovery of historical evidence of the Tocharian-speaking people, knitting the linguistic issues into Baugh, A. C., and T. Cable. A History of the English Language. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978 Bickerton, Derek. 1990. Language and Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990 ———. 1995. Language and Human Behavior. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995 Bodmer, Frederick. The Loom of Language. New York: W.W. Norton, 1944 (paperback edition, 1985) Bryson, Bill. The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1990 Horowitz and S. Jay Samuels, pp. 83–112. New York: Academic Press, 1987. Crystal, David. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 ———. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 ———. Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. The crispest and most down-to-business of the various treatments of this topic Dalby, Andrew. Dictionary of Languages. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998