What's up guys today's video is my first ever book review.
And it's about a book called the art of language invention,
which is a linguistics book,
and I think it's gonna be really interesting to anyone who likes languages. Now, when you're reading this book
It doesn't feel like you're reading a linguistics textbook.
It feels like you're in a conversation with a comedian who also happens to be really knowledgeable about
languages because it's so stinking funny. It's easy to understand and it's also really informative at the same time
It's called the art of language invention by David Peterson.
And this book offers a really interesting perspective on linguistics because it was written by the guy who came up with the fictional
languages for a lot of movies and TV shows like Game of Thrones.
And the book is basically about the painstakingly detailed steps that he goes through in order to make his fictional languages
behave and feel like real
languages from the real world, and he beetles a bunch of things that conlangers can do to understand these principles in an easy to
follow way. I'm a linguistics major and I can attest that everything in this book is valid linguistics theory.
It's not just something that some nerdy conlanger came up out of his own brain.
He describes actual phenomena that is attested in real linguistics,
but he does so in such a way that really held my attention. The first time I read this book was before I started
studying linguistics at the university level, so I had no more knowledge than the average Joe.
But he explains some deep linguistic principles in a way that anyone can understand, and my favorite example of this was his chapter on allophones.
The distinction between
allophones and phonemes is a really abstract
relationship. If you've ever taken an intro to linguistics course you probably remember the week on allophones being this
nightmarish section where just everything was totally abstract and nothing made sense and you might remember your professor talking about how a
phoneme is a type of abstract sound that's never actually pronounced
so it's not technically really a sound at all. It's more of a
category of sounds that is in contrastive distribution with another category of sounds which is made up of allophones,
which are in complementary distribution
with one another, and the only way you can tell if two sounds are allophones is if they're in complementary distribution,
except for the case of the glottal fricative and the velar nasal which basically proves that everything I just told you is a lie.
So doesn't make any sense. I've actually taken this book to school and used it to explain allophones to beginning linguistics students
because David does such a good job of making the information
comprehensible. In the chapter about phonology
he compares phonemes to a guy named Tony. And like phonemes, Tony changes depending on his
environment. In most environments Tony is a human, but under the environment of a full moon Tony becomes a wolf.
But in all environments, he's still Tony. So we can say that the abstract
identity of Toni can manifest itself in two different ways: wolf Tony and human Tony.
Where wolf Tony exists only in the environment of a full moon, and human Tony exists elsewhere, in every other
environment, but importantly we'll never find an environment where Tony exists as a wolf and a human at the same time.
I don't want to spend too much time in this video talking about phonemes.
If you still don't understand just read the book. David does a much better job of explaining this than I do.
But it's enough to say that I've never taken a phonology class where they use werewolves to explain the difference between
Phonemes and allophones, even though this is the perfect metaphor, and this is also the perfect example of David's writing style.
He makes it fun and easy to understand the information in a way that college courses
just can't. Like I said, I read this book before I went back to school, and when I did arrive at the
university, I remember my first semester taking a linguistics 100 course,
and it was in a huge lecture hall with hundreds of other undergrad students who were all racking their brains
trying to figure out
what was going on with this linguistics stuff, and I was one of the only
students who actually understood everything that was going on. And I think a big part of it is because I was so well prepared
just from reading this book. So if you're at all interested in linguistics,
or if you think you might ever take a linguistics course someday,
I highly recommend the art of language invention by David Peterson.
I picked this up on Amazon for like ten bucks or something.
I know it's $9.99 on Kindle, and I found this also on eBay.
I think there's one on eBay right now for like $2.69 so if you hurry up and get that one,
then get really good deal. But you can go use the paperback for super cheap
And I highly recommend it. The only thing
I'm gonna warn against is the audible, or any audio version of the book because there's just so many
charts and graphs and stuff in here, a lot of pictures, a lot of scripts from other languages.
In fact there's a whole
chapter that's just about written scripts and orthography, so you're not going to get the full experience
if you get the audible book or any audiobook version.
But other than that disclaimer,
I cannot recommend this book enough, especially if you think you might ever have an interest in conlanging or
constructed languages in any capacity. When I started reading this book for the first time I had absolutely no interest in the conlanging
community. I just wanted to learn about the linguistic theory that was inside the book.
But after making it all the way through it kind of opened my eyes to the really
vibrant community, and all kinds of different conlangs that exist out there.
And it's really interesting. It got me a kinda hooked on the idea and even if you have no interest in conlanging,
but you're just interested in real world languages
There's still a wealth of information in this book because he tries to make his conlangs as close to real world
languages as possible, and it will open up your minds to the depth and width of the bizarre things that real world languages do.
Even your own native language, which there's probably a ton of things that you never noticed about your language
but when you stop and think about it or read about it, you start to realize that this is a
really weird way of saying the stuff that I have just always felt is totally normal because I grew up speaking this language.
So that's where I'm gonna end the video
I hope you guys liked it, and I hope you guys go out and buy the book, and I'll see you all next week!