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Born in Israel in 1969, Guy Deutscher studied mathematics and earned a Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Cambridge, where he became a research fellow in 1998. A widely acclaimed scholar of ancient Semitic languages, Deutscher is at the University of Leiden in Holland.

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The Unfolding of Language

Owl Books (NY)

Chapter One

- why German maidens are neuter but German turnips are female

- how words manage to accomplish a complete U-turn in their meaning over a relatively short time-like the word "resent," which, in the seventeenth century, meant "appreciate" or "feel grateful for"

- why Islam, Muslim, and Solomon are all variations on one Semitic root, s-l-m ("be at peace")

- how the design of Sumerian (the language spoken 5,000 years ago by the people who kick-started history) is so sophisticated that even a pause in the middle of a word can convey specific information

- why we have feet and not foots

- how the French came to say "on the day of this day" when they mean "today"

- why most of the world's languages don't have a verb for "have"-and how one goes about expressing the notion of possession without it

- why human intuition-as evidenced by all human languages-discovered the connection between space and time thousands of years before Einstein

Continues...

Excerpted from The Unfolding of Languageby Guy Deutscher Copyright © 2006 by Guy Deutscher. Excerpted by permission.
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