Language A to Z

Okay, so the marginal added value of this (“GREAT”) course is low if you've already read/listened to John McWhorter's Words on the Move or his podcast, Lexicon Valley. Most of the same ground is covered: the way elderly people in early 20th century shows/movies spoke with rural accent (and this reflected generational urbanization), the “back shift” in cadence as verbs become nouns (“I susPECT him”, “the usual SUSpects”), the way defining “languages” and “dialects” is primarily socio-political and cultural, rather than scientific, McWhorter's fanboying over old timey Hollywood, and so on.

But! That said, I love John McWhorter, he be my fave linguistic prof, so I always love to hear his stuff. In this series, he advances his two usual theses: (1) that language is an ever-changing organic thing, the “blob in a lava lamp”, and that contrarian grammarians (heh) slash obnoxious pedants often seem to be a few steps behind on that one, LITERALLY (ho ho, come at me), and (2) that language is oral first, written second, but that's really the first point told another way.

Anyway, this lecture series is organized into 24 bite-sized lecturettes - actually, no, that sounds sexists and WHY SO FRENCH? - lecturini, one for each letter of the alphabet. It's perfect for a short commute, since each lecturino is ~15 minutes long, which, on 1.5x speed, is a mere 10 min! The “Great Courses” (registered trademark) canned applause which bookends each lecture is awkward af, but no matter, I love John McWhorter's JOIE DE VIVRE, his overabundance of personality, his cheesy dad jokes and his extremely nerdy (in a non-ironic, non-“cool” nerd way) interests. That man loves Looney Tunes. And black and white movies! What a nerd! Love that guy.

None of this - neither his theses, nor his interests and cheesy impressions - is new, again, if you've listened to his other audiobooks or heard his podcast. But I still enjoyed this a lot, and loved the new stuff I learned:
- About how languages, when isolated, can get really baroque and ridiculous, and that that baroque-ness has nothing to do with how “complicated” the lives of the speakers are. To whit: KET! From Siberia! I think McWhorter called it a magisterial Gothic cathedral, anyway it made me lol.
- About how we always assume that language “reflects” reality, rather than creating it (SAPIR WHORF HYPOTHESIS, PEOPLE), and thus we always assume that certain words or concepts MUST be givens. For example, gendered pronouns - “he” and “she”. But no! There are several languages than never developed gendered pronouns (Finnish, Japanese), and McWhorter quotes one of those speakers as asking, “Well, why would you need it?” The same way many English speakers feel with gendered nouns in other languages, like Italian lady-tables (la tavola) and man-books (il libro) and irregular-because-originally-Greek-drama (il drama).
- About how old “like” is.
- About how vague and hard it is to count words in a language, given all those words that - via idiom - are becoming new words (e.g. “pick” and “up” which become “pickup” (the truck) and “I tried to pick him up” (flirting/asking on a date) and “I really need a pick-me-up” (slice of tiramisu)).

Recommended.