We are now halfway through this book and enjoying it very much, not least the malicious wit with which the author challenges received opinions in Linguistics.

On looking up the author’s background, it is clear that he has come to the study of language after a successful academic career in Mathematics, which is notoriously exigent in demanding evidence for any statement. He finds Linguistics lacking in academic rigour in this respect.

For example, it has been axiomatic in Linguistic studies that “all languages are equally complex”. When I learned this, I realised that the reason for this statement was to counter the popular opinion that technologically primitive people are cognitively and linguistically primitive.

However, it has been left to Deutscher to challenge this statement as a matter of fact. He shows in this book that, not only is there no evidence from real languages for this statement, but there is no measure of complexity in language. Some languages are more complex than others at the morphological level – German, with its case and gender endings is more complex that English in this respect, for example. Which language is more complex at the level of the clause? No-one has done this research or attempted to produce a measure of complexity.

It seems that isolated languages spoken by few people are less complex phonologically than more widely used languages, clearly because people who know one another well cut down on the sounds for communication (by the force of linguistic destruction described in Deutscher’s previous book i.e. laziness). Otherwise the field is wide open for research.