» The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language

The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: The first book to trace breakthroughs in the new field of language history
Comment: Language's use and development has received much discussion elsewhere, but this is the first book to trace breakthroughs in the new field of language history, showing how a handful of scholars took evolutionary linguistics from speculation to fact-supported science, and surveying how words were made and disseminated. An excellent reader both for college and high-school level linguistics collections and for general readers interested in literary development.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

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Customer Rating:
Summary: An overview of the discussion
Comment: If you're looking for details on the various schools of thought for the origins of language, go to the sources - Chomsky, Pinker, et al. Several of the reviewers here thought that's what this was (or should have been), but as one remarked, it would have to have been four times longer than it was.

The First Word is not a technical deep dive; it is an overview of the debate, and as such mirrors many of the biases in the debate. For example, much is said about how Noam Chomsky had (and in many respects still does) dominated the field as its creator, and similarly the book - unwittingly or not - comes back to Chomsky time and again.

The First Word is a decent read, but not one that made me want to go check out a tome by Chomsky (or others) from the library. As a neophyte to the entire subject (aside from the odd TV special about ape sign language), I found Kenneally's treatment to be the right level of detail for me, and found the ideas and story of the debate to be moderately interesting. I suppose this suggests the book was successful in what it wanted to accomplish and warrants a higher rating than the 3 stars I've given it, but...

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Very Informative and Approachable
Comment: I thought this was a very fair and balanced approach to the biological and social history behind the development of human language. Though it does not draw any particular conclusions, it presents the reader with several well researched expert opinions on the subject and makes heavy use of science as backup. I am sure it wasn't the absolute authority on the subject of evolutionary linguistics, and there may well be some issues with the book, but I thought it was a great and approachable read for those of us with no background in the actual science of linguistics.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: The Search is the Thing
Comment: The key word in the title of this book is "search." No one knows much about the evolution of the capacity for language in humans, and even the current state of the capacity is the subject of fundamental debate. Kenneally is best at describing the history and sociology of the conflicting parties to the debate. In the process, the reader will learn a good deal about the structure of the human brain, the nature of adaptation in evolutionary theory, the physiology of sound production, the relationship between communication in animals and humans, and several other basic facets of human biology and behavior. This is a great book for someone who has not studied these issues in the past decade or two.

The reader will also learn that we don't know much about the issue, and the intense parti pris attitudes of the researchers in this area are an inverse reflection of their level of firm knowledge.

Kenneally has a knack for making really hard issues (such as generative grammar) seem really easy to understand, and for making clear the basic contrasting positions in the evolutionary theory of language. The book is a pleasure to read. On the other hand, these issues are in fact quite difficult, and some of the beauty in the study of language comes from intrinsically difficult theoretical issues in linguistic theory and game theory. Indeed, game theory, which supplies the basics of signaling theory, supplies basic insights that are missing from this book. Also missing are accounts from behavioral ecology and bio-anthropology on the relationship between social organization and brain size, a subject which I consider a basic background for the study of the evolution of language. Finally, humans are special in that we cooperate in large groups of unrelated individuals, a subject with a voluminous literature that Kenneally ignores. Yet, language is first and foremost a prerequisite and central element in the capacity of humans to cooperate. The notion that one could model the evolution of language while abstracting from these issues in not plausible. However, the book is a great read, and would have to be four times as long to fulfill my wish list, so I recommend it as a nice place to start.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: difficult read; don't try to read on vacation (as I did)
Comment: this was a tough read; I had to force myself to pick it up each time; tough read while on vacation (and I'm a neurologist interested in language...)

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