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397 pages, Paperback
First published October 28, 1999
This book tries to illuminate the nature of language and mind by choosing a single phenomenon and examining it from every angle imaginable. That phenomenon is regular and irregular verbs, the bane of every language student.That’s no mean goal the author has set here. At least he didn’t write “will illuminate”, because that, to me, would have been wrong. Elsewhere, however, the author was not so modest in his utterances. It seems to me that the scientific field of linguistics is not void of some strong headed individuals. In the dispute between Noam Chomsky and his early students one even spoke of Linguistics Wars , an expression I do not like at all. On the other hand it doesn’t surprise me much. Language is one of our most valuable possessions and anyone who expresses something about language that does not agree with one’s own opinion must, of course, expect a violent headwind. That’s also the reason why I read this book in the first place. Naturally, as a German native speaker, I instantly felt a little offended by the above chapter title (that is, I took the bait). But I do not want to get involved in any kind of war. In addition, this book is not about linguistics wars at all (well, maybe a little, if your read between the lines).
Children begin to learn words before their first birthday, and by their second they hoover them up at a rate of one every two hours. By the time they enter school children command 13,000 words, and then the pace picks up, because new words rain down on them from both speech and print. A typical high-school graduate knows about 60,000 words; a literate adult, perhaps twice that number.