Clearly there are a lot of us who find the English language to be interesting and worth thinking about. On this topic, I would like to recommend a challenging new book: Linguistics: Why it Matters by the linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum.
A few sentences from the introduction:
"This book is about the point of studying human language scientifically, and what importance that study has for broader concerns. The relevant scientific study is known as linguistics...
"Linguistics is not at all the same as the study of particular languages or their literatures. ...
"I'm not trying to give any sort of introduction to linguistics in this relatively short book; plenty of other books do that. What I'm trying to do is to survey just a few topics that I feel make a clear case for saying that linguistics is not just an intellectually intriguing academic subject but a practically important one." (pp. vi-vii)Each chapter of the book covers a topic that's studied by linguists, and explains its importance. I enjoyed each one, but I find the last chapter, "Machines that Understand Us," especially intriguing. In it, the author explodes some common misconceptions about seemingly very capable machines like robots, search engines, and iPhones. Often people become convinced that these devices understand language and use it in a human way; newspaper articles often hype such understanding in an exaggerated way.
It's so easy to be fooled by a computer! Many programs such as Google search, Alexa, or Siri seem to respond in a human way to a wide variety of questions, either typed or spoken. However, the book explains the critical difference between producing a convincing response, based on a machine's vast databases and a few tricks, and actually "understanding what the question said." (p. 88)
The chapter on machine understanding also includes a thought-provoking (and I would say rather difficult) discussion of what would be involved in effective processing of natural languages -- a task that hasn't yet been accomplished.
This is subtle -- I hope you decide to read it for yourself!
5 comments:
I'm adding this to my Christmas wish list - it sounds fascinating.
This sounds interesting. I remember that my linquistics class in college was one of my favorites but I think what I liked most was learning to write in the phonetic alphabet. I wish I remembered more of that -- for a long time I used it to take notes in college. When we were on Portobello Road, I think we heard just about every language except English (although some was no doubt English with local dialect!)Henry Higgins would have had a ball!
Sounds like an interesting book.
Sounds like another good read to me. Language changes over time and it would be interesting to take a linguistics class. I've always wondered why so many people around the world have learned English when so few of us English speaking people don't bother to learn another language. And why do we pronounce the "e" in "team" but not in "bed." And how did it become "ya'll" im the South? So many questions that maybe this book will explain. Thanks for the review!
This book looks interesting. Learning Japanese and teaching English in Japan makes me more curious about language than I used to be.
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