UNFOLDING OF LANGUAGE.
Guy Deutscher's account of how languages change, and specifically how the complex machinery of grammar could have arisen without anyone designing it. He argues that erosion, analogy and metaphor, all forces we can watch operating now, are enough to build case endings and tenses out of ordinary words over long spans of time. The examples run from Semitic roots to English, and the tone is genuinely funny. Written for readers with no linguistics background.