The Power of Babel
A Natural History of Language

By John McWhorter
W.H. Freeman, $26
ISBN 0716744732

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Speaking in many tongues

For readers who ponder the important conundrums of the universe, it has been difficult to find a book explaining, in lay terminology, why humans who started with a common language ended up speaking in tongues unintelligible to one another.

John McWhorter, a linguistics professor at the University of California, has resolved the difficulty. The Power of Babel makes a spirited attempt to solve the conundrum. McWhorter, true to his vow in the introduction, works mightily to explain his research -- and the theories growing from that research.

Unraveling the variations in vocabulary, grammar and sentence structure among the 6,000 or so extant languages on earth, he comments, "This sort of variation within the bounds of a template is analogous to hearing the different uses to which Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins or Lionel Hampton could put the chord sequences and basic melody of 'Body and Soul' . . ."

Explaining the "what" of different languages can be done well through analogies and metaphors. McWhorter understands, fortunately, that such devices work less well when explaining why there are so many offshoots of the common spoken language that probably first appeared about 150,000 years ago in what today is East Africa. So McWhorter uses words straightforwardly to explain the five major types of mutations -- sound change, grammar change, meaning change of specific words and two sorts of meaning change in phrases.

Somehow, the process of language change among once closely related populations is built into human genes. "All five of the processes of change . . . are as natural to language as photosynthesis is to plants and breathing is to animals," McWhorter says. "These processes of change are not only why French is so different from its parent Latin, but also why all 6,000 human languages differ to an equally vast degree from their single East African ancestor."

McWhorter's scholarship lays enough groundwork to keep future linguists busy for centuries. For the lay reader, that scholarship will make traveling from the United States to Mexico, from France into Germany, or even from Upper Manhattan to Little Italy (just 50 blocks away), all the more wondrous.

Steve Weinberg is a book author and magazine writer in Columbia, Missouri.