Tuesday, October 28, 2014

A Little Book of Language by David Crystal



Why I Read This Book
          A couple of my colleagues have recommended David Crystal to me as someone who writes very interesting and engaging books about linguistics.  (These have all been British colleagues, so perhaps David Crystal is better known inside the U.K.?)
            At the moment, this is the only David Crystal book I’ve been able to find out here.  (The selection of English books is always limited here in Asia). 
            This is probably not the book my colleagues had in mind when they recommended David Crystal to me.  It’s a book written for children—part of a series of “Little” books published by Yale University Press [SEE HERE] that introduce various academic subjects to a young audience.

            As I’m no longer a child, this book is much below my current reading level.  But then, I’ve never believed in being a snob about these things.  “Eh, at least it won’t do me any harm to read it,” I thought to myself.  “It will at least give me a rough idea of David Crystal’s views on language.  And, you never know, I might just pick up a thing or two.”
 
The Review
          So, as this is a book for children, you won’t expect to get much beyond a basic introduction to the subject.
            And yet, it would be untrue to say I learned nothing from the book.  There were a few odd facts that David Crystal throws in about language that I was not aware of.  And sometimes even in cases when I knew the basic idea, David Crystal illustrates it with new examples I was unaware of.  Or presents a slightly different way of looking at something.
           
            Mostly for me it was a review of concepts covered in (among other places) An Introduction to Language, but David Crystal writes in such an easy and readable style, that I didn’t really mind.  I was happy just to flip through the pages.  And even if I didn’t get a lot out of the book, I still can’t complain because I had to put very little effort into it. 

            At some point I’m going to have to try to track down an adult book by David Crystal, but this book still gave me a taste for some of his areas of interest (for example, he appears to be quite interested in how the Internet is developing its own dialect in the form of text-speak). 

Notes
* Despite the fact that this book is marketed as a book for children, I wonder a bit about who’s actually reading it.  Would you have, of your own free will, sat down and read an introduction to linguistics when you were ten years old?  I doubt it would have attracted my attention when I was a child.
            Although I doubt data is being kept on this, I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the actual readers of this book were adults like myself—adults who wanted to find out more about linguistics, but are intimidated by the more rigorous academic books.
            I also suspect that when the publishers print these books, they know this full well.

* David Crystal is apparently a big Terry Pratchett fan.  (Terry Pratchett’s stories get referenced several times as examples in this book.)  Another one of David Crystal’s favorite examples is Charles Dickens

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