The Secret History of Language Language Change Unraveled

1. Language history: past offenses or glorious achievements?; 2. What's in a word?; 3. You get my drift? Meaning change; 4. Language mooching: loanwords and borrowing; 5. Sound change costs and benefits; 6. How do languages clean up their act? The might of analogy; 7. Can languages change their grammatical spots? Can old grammars learn new grammatical tricks?; 8. All in the family: language classification; 9. Writing and the magic of writing systems; 10. Thereby hangs a tale: Linguistic prehistory; 11. Is linguistic Armageddon nigh? What's ahead for the world's languages?; Appendix: language families of the world (including language isolates).