Stan CareyNothing in #language is permanent except the conviction that standards are somehow always falling.
TRiG@stancarey Just finished reading Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language. He's quite amusing on this point.
@TRiG Good book, that
@stancarey I read his second book first (Through the Language Glass) and loved it. The Unfolding of Language took a little longer to grab me, but got there in the end.
I quite enjoy the way Deutscher in both cases writes as much about the history of ideas as he does about linguistics.
@TRiG Yes. I remember being struck by TtLG's account of Lazarus Geiger and how his idea about the sequence of colour terms was pretty much ignored for a century, till Berlin and Kay