The First Word by Christine Kenneally
The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language is not quite a book for the amateur linguist, but the unschooled can still get a lot out of it. There were places where the author lost me with too many vocabulary words, but the history of the study of language evolution was very interesting and I learned a lot about the players in the field and the current level of understanding.
Of course the book doesn’t tell you what the first spoken word was. There’s no way to know, since verbal communication doesn’t leave fossils, unfortunately. But you get an idea of how language may have started with gestures and certain canned sounds that grew to more individualized sounds over many generations. You also get an appreciation for how complicated our language is and how much we take it for granted. When you think about it, it’s a miracle (not to mean that I attribute it to a supreme being of some sort).
Perhaps most interesting is how much I learned about evolution in general. I’ve heard all the arguments about evolution being a theory, not proven, and I’ve heard the counter-arguments that evolution is thoroughly accepted by all scientists as a principle, only there are some specifics to work out. Although I doubt the author intended this, the weight of the evidence bolstering the theory of language evolution, which is not generally accepted, showed how ponderous the evidence in favor of evolution in general is. Language evolution necessarily starts from evolution as a foundation.
As a bonus, I now know who Noam Chomsky is and will be able to appreciate the endless references to him.