It’s dense and technical — certainly not a book I’d recommend to just anyone — but few books have changed my worldview as much as this one.
Several years ago, I stumbled across a book called The Unfolding of Language by linguist Guy Deutscher. It’s dense and technical — certainly not a book I’d recommend to just anyone — but few books have changed my worldview as much as this one. That’s because it provides a brilliant and very compelling argument for how this unsupervised evolution of language emerged. How did we go from our prehistoric days of identifying objects by pointing at them to what we have today: a rich and infinitely adaptable ability to describe anything (tangible or intangible) as combinations of sounds?