Language Made Plain

by Anthony Burgess

"An enthralling study of how languages are related to one another, how they have grown apart, how and why they change" Daily Mirror

Genres: Linguistics, Language, Nonfiction, Reference

208 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1984

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Seriocomic novels of noted British writer and critic Anthony Burgess, pen name of John Burgess Wilson, include the futuristic classic A Clockwork Orange (1962).

He composed also a librettos, poems, plays, screens, and essays and traveled, broadcast, translated, linguist and educationalist. He lived for long periods in southeastern Asia, the United States of America, and Europe along Mediterranean Sea as well as England. His fiction embraces the Malayan trilogy ( The Long Day Wanes ) on the dying days of empire in the east. The Enderby quartet concerns a poet and his muse. Nothing like the Sun re-creates love life of William Shakespeare. He explores the nature of evil with Earthly Powers , a panoramic saga of the 20th century. He published studies of James Joyce, Ernest Miller Hemingway, Shakespeare, and David Herbert Lawrence. He produced the treatises Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air . His journalism proliferated in several languages. He translated and adapted Cyrano de Bergerac , Oedipus the King , and Carmen for the stage. He scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen. He invented the prehistoric language, spoken in Quest for Fire . He composed the Sinfoni Melayu , the Symphony (No. 3) in C , and the opera Blooms of Dublin .

Reviews

[Dan]

The mechanics of pronunciation, the history of the alphabet, the changes of language over time, are a few of the topics Burgess discusses in this overview of the functioning of the spoken and written word.

Much of the book is written as an encouragement to the reader to learn one or more foreign languages: at one point, Burgess suggests that you have not really read Dante or Goethe if you have not read them in the language in which they wrote their respective works. The chapters making up the latter half of the book are methods and tips the reader can employ in the learning of various languages, from German through French or Italian or Spanish, and even Russian.

Acquired sometime between 1995 and 1999
Cheap Thrills, Montreal, Quebec

[Kev Nickells]

Burgess is a polyglot, and a very erudite and charming one with it. This book is a series of essays telling a kind of story of linguistics. Necessarily limited (it's only 200 pages) but thoroughly impressive. Burgess talks the reader calmly but clearly through the 'building blocks' of what language is - taking in IPA, ideas arising from proto-Indo-European.

This is a fairly dated book in some senses - certainly there's a tinge of anglocentrism about it - but it's also a charming and clear book, espousing from the science of linguistics some sound political points - later codified in ideas such as functional grammar. There's a bunch of charming linguistic anecdotes - Malay's relationship with rice, great vowel shifts etc.

I can't help but draw comparisons with Peter Ladefoged 'a course in phonetics', which is a great deal more comprehensive in explaining specifically IPA. But this is about as charming a book as you're likely to find on the subject of linguistics - definitely recommend for the wordy uncle or geeky niece.

[Tony Lawrence]

Despite the assurances from AB that this is an introductory 'primer' on linguistics, there are some heavy details here! I was mostly fascinated by the way that the vocal organs create sounds and how these have mutated over time as languages have moved geographically, and morphed, split and merged in relatively recent human history. We mostly know Burgess as a fiction author (The Clockwork Orange), but he was also an educator, lecturer in phonetics, and 'colonial' before writing full time in his mid-forties, hence Malay crops up here alongside more familiar indo-European languages. He is obviously fantastically gifted and knowledgeable in learning and analysing language and writes from a forgotten era of classics and the power of the written word. I don't think this book would exist or have a ready audience today in the internet age with the wider spread of English as the world's lingua franca.

[Natalie]

Burgess very thoroughly explains class implications of linguistics, how it’s a science but also completely lawless, and tries to simplify in the best way what exactly language is and why it’s important. I think Burgess was a very intelligent polyglot and I found myself validated a lot on this book, for example: shitting on academic snobbery when it comes to language learning. The only downside was sometimes Burgess got carried away with his own knowledge, and for the rest of us, we cannot easily go from talking about German to Spanish to Sanskrit within the same sentence and be able to follow along. But I enjoyed Burgess’s insights and would recommend a skim for anyone interested in linguistics.

[Liedzeit Liedzeit]

Fast am interessantesten der Teil, der mich am wenigsten interessiert - über Phonetik. Schade, dass ich die Unterschiede nicht höre.

[Jadzia]

Love it! It's a great book for beginners and explains the IPA very clearly. It also shows you how other alphabets and languages work, which is greatly appreciated.

[Karen]

Pretty good for what it was, but this is the first book I didn't finish in about a decade. It's very dry, narrator sounds like Dr.Dolittle from My Fair Lady to me.

[Steve Clark]

Edition: Revised edition