"It is often said that what most immediately sets English apart from other languages is the richness of its vocabulary. Webster's Third New International Dictionary lists 450,000 words, and the revised Oxford English Dictionary has 615,000, but that is only part of the total." (Chapter 1)

"Although this was an immensely long time ago - some 20,000 years before the domestication of animals and the rise of farming - these Cro-Magnon people were identical to us: They had the same physique, the same brain, the same looks. And, unlike all previous hominids who roamed the earth, they could choke on food. That may seem a trifling point, but the slight evolutionary change that pushed man's larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well-articulated speech." (Chapter 2)

"All evidence suggests that minority languages shrink or thrive at their own ineluctable rate. It...