I've just about finished reading
The Unfolding of Language.
I'm on an eight-day business trip, so I left it at home precisely because I have so little left to read in the book; no sense carrying a book I've already finished. I'll finish it next week at home.
I think the book is quite good. There are quite a few laugh-out-loud moments in the book (pretty good for a book on linguistics
) and a fair number of "Oh, my God, I didn't know that!" moments, the kind where a light bulb goes on as you make a connection that you hadn't seen before. In the first two chapters alone, he discusses something like twelve different languages. He never talks down to his readers, he describes various theories and possibilities and he demonstrates many of the processes through which language has evolved and continues to evolve.
Discovering that the Grimm brothers (they of the fairy tales) were linguists and made a fundamental contribution to linguistics was interesting. Seeing how that contribution shows exactly how some English words have ended up they way they are was even more interesting. He sprinkles the book with many interesting tidbits, like the fact that English pronunciation has continued to change since the St. James Bible was published in the early 1600s but that single book helped to stabilize the spelling of English. Consequently, we end up with words like "cough" and "bough" that are pronounced differently but spelled similarly. How interesting to know that many of our spellings preserve the actual pronunciation from the early 1600s.
The book is a good read and one that I think anyone who is interested in words and language would enjoy. At $12 on Amazon, I think it's well worth the price and the time spent reading it.