In Praise of the Garrulous

This book deals with the origins of language to argue its centrality to humanity and the naturalness of bilingualism and multilingualism, but also examines how writing and printing built on that centrality to develop the "social mind" - the sum of knowledge within any given society. All the arguments are couched in a skeptical approach, and the author principally wants to initiate a debate rather than give a defining analysis of a complex subject. "This self-described "rant" has some persuasi…