The summary

Hello there! Here we are again. It's Friday evening and I have exactly thirty minutes left before I'll have to go to work. Luckily I was quick enough to write most of the summary that we were asked to do in the classroom today. To confirm that I'm not going to forget the rest of the text, I'm going to write it down now. During these thirty... I mean 25 minutes I've got left! So here we go:

The summary of the introduction of Guy Deutscher's book: "The Unfolding of Language" (2005).

The author starts his book by saying: "Language is what makes us human." Without language we could never have reached the position in which we are now, above all animals and nature. Language is our greatest invention- even if it was actually not invented. It was probably born by accident. Deutscher tells us the story of the history of language. He also tells us how he first became interested about languages. Language is an instrument we use everyday but we normally don't think about. We only start to think about it through foreign languages. That's what also happened to Deutscher: he became interested about languages in his early Latin lessons. He started to think who invented language in the first place. He was not the only one who had thought about this.
Earlier people used to think that language was created by God. (Remember the story about the Towel of Babel?) In the 19th century the scientific community came to a conclusion that evolution of languages moves from complex systems to simple ones. (Late Latin for example didn't have cases anymore.) Already in the ancient times in Greek and Rome, people were dreaming about the "Golden Age", the period of time when language was perfect. So, they were thinking that language was always becoming worse and worse. It took a long time, until our days almost, before scientists noticed that any kind of language also has creative forces- and that it's constantly changing. If we can be sure about one thing concerning languages it has to be it's perpetual restlessness. The writers of language history also realised that they can start writing and searching for the secrets of a language very close, from the language of our own time! There's always something left of the way our ancestors used to speak some 100 or 10 000 years ago.
Deutscher was also asks in his book how we can know when languages started to develop. The answer is simple: we cannot. It's still interesting to try finding out the answer to the question and in the end of the introduction he lists different things that scientists have tried in order to find out when and where human language was born.

Okay, now I really have to go to work but I have some good news! On Sunday when I'm not working I'm going to read some articles and probably write one or two critical essays about them. See you then!