I have enjoyed the books I have read by Tom Wolfe and I enjoyed this one as well. He strikes out at Darwin and evolution when it comes to explaining how language evolved. Then continues hitting at the Linguistic study and especially Noam Chomsky and his study of language & speech. The whole study of this at a desk vs out in the field looking for native peoples that were not influenced by others. This is what a Dr Everett has done with a small tribe in the Amazon and Wolfe feels this shows how wrong Chomsky was. This is an area I don't study & really know little about but it was an interesting read. I just skimmed through the wikipedia page on this & seems more critics feel Wolfe got this wrong but that doesn't change it being interesting and something to think about.
There were 3 WL for the book so I went ahead and posted it and should be getting it mailed off in the next few days.
No comments:
Post a Comment