A history of language (New edition.)

It is tempting to take the tremendous rate of contemporary linguistic change for granted.

What is required, in fact, is a radical reinterpretation of what language is.

Steven Roger Fischer charts the history of language from the times of Homo erectus, Neanderthal humans and Homo sapiens through to the nineteenth century, when the science of linguistics was developed, as he analyses the emergence of language as a science and its development as a written form.