Franklin Folsom is a well-known American popularizer-philologist. Not being a linguist himself, he nevertheless has a good idea of ​ ​ the range of problems associated with such a complex organism as the human language. He vividly, fascinatingly and very intelligibly talks about the emergence of speech from inarticulate sounds, about the origin of writing, about the huge number of languages ​ ​ inhabiting the earth, about how they are different, but at the same time they are somewhat similar, about how much interesting is behind almost every word of the language.