David Shariatmadari

3.5 stars

There is so much fascinating information here! I would definitely recommend it to the budding hobby linguist. I can't imagine there's anything new here for professionals.

A couple drawbacks:

Two chapters were very boring, and added virtually nothing to the book: the one on animals, and the last chapter. It was so boring, I can't even remember what it was about.

The author refereneces evolutionary theory as fact a few times.

Shariatmadari also uses the F-word as an example for some point, when something else could have been easily used instead (and been much less offensive).

He misinterprets a word in the Bible in a big way. "Word" with a capital W is always used to reference Jesus, and he acted as if it meant a literal word.

Definitely worth reading, still; and now I'm very curious to find similar books that are even better.… (más)

Shariatmadari, David. Don’t Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth about Language. Norton, 2020.
Guardian editor David Shariatmadari says that as his interest in language was sparked in childhood by listening to his Iranian farther speaking on the phone in Farsi to relatives in Tehran. He did not understand what was being said, but he could detect some of the language’s repeated phrases. That interest led him to study linguistics, the scientific study of language on its most general level. In Don’t Believe a Word he offers a refreshingly almost jargon-free introduction to the field. He debunks a number of commonly held beliefs about language, such as that some languages are innately superior to others, that the “true” meaning of a word is found in its etymology, and that there is a clear distinction between dialect and language. Along the way, he offers some interesting perspectives on why it is so difficult to program computers to pass the Turing test and, a bit more arcanely, on the evolution of Noam Chomsky’s ideas about language development and what features of human language are difficult for animals. I do wish he paid just a little attention to philology, the general study of written language. Don’t Believe a Word is as gentle an introduction to linguistics as you will ever find.… (más)