For Russell and anyone else into languages, I strongly recommend checking out the Power of Babel. John H. McWhorter is a linguist who wrote this book for the layman, all about how language evolves.

Fascinating stuff, he tears down a lot of the bogus beliefs that we have about language, for instance, that there languages have a "pure" version and then dialects. What we call a language is a actually a collection of dialects, and the "pure" language is arbitrarily chosen, sometimes based on the dialect in use by the dominant political group (France), sometimes randomly chosen (England), or artificially created (Sweden). Even the dividing lines between languages is artificial, much like the lines we draw between ethnic groups and in geography.

McWhorter backs up these concepts with many examples from languages and their evolution. He mentions a Roman scholar in the early centuries AD decrying the corruption of Latin in parts of the area, those corruptions later evolving directly into the French language. Lots of interesting tidbits come out, such as the fact that the rule against double-negatives, which is somewhat unusual to English (most languages, including Turkish, actually require the double-negative), was a peculiarity of an obscure dialect of English that got entombed into the language by an early grammar book.

Linguists examine grammatical constructs across many languages and come up with some interesting conclusions. Most languages acquire unnecessary baggage of one kind or another, features which other languages do just fine without. An example that Russ has mentioned about Spanish is the gender of nouns; when learning Spanish vocabulary, you must memorize whether each noun is masculine or feminine. It serves no practical purpose, plenty of languages do just fine without it, but if you don't learn it you won't be speaking Spanish.

English has these features, including articles, "a" and "the". Sure, they are useful to distinguish whether you are talking about a specific thing, but many languages don't have them, and people are able to communicate just fine. Turkish has an equivalent to "a", namely "bir", but no "the". What it does have is an entire verb tense to indicate something happened that you didn't directly witness, "-mis", sometimes called the "journalistic tense". It can be useful, but we don't have it in English, and we get along just fine.

Another thing McWhorter talks about is how languages change over time. Parts of the language fall off, for instance we no longer say "thou" for the second person singular, having allowed the plural "you" to grow to cover singular as well. Of course where I come from, "ya'll" has been added to replace the plural "you". This phenomenon explains why spelling in some languages, including both English and French, is such a pain in the ass for foreigners to learn. The spoken language evolves, but the written doesn't, so words aren't pronounced the way they are written. Languages such as Turkish which have had their written component totally overhauled recently (less than 100 years ago the Arabic alphabet was tossed out in favor of a new Latin-based one), spelling and pronounciation are the same, which is a relief for learners. I'm not sure why Spanish is consistent, it's as old as French, isn't it?

This is just a smattering of what I remember from reading the book 3 months ago. If you're into languages, have a read, it's cool stuff.