The Earliest English

by Chris McCully, Sharon Hilles

The Earliest English provides a student-friendly introduction to Old English and the earliest periods of the history of the English Language as it evolved before 1215. Using non-technical language, the book covers basic terminology, the linguistic and cultural backgrounds to the emergence and development of OE, and the OE vocabulary that students studying this phase of the English language need to know. In eight carefully structured units, the authors show how the vocabulary of Old English contains many items familiar to us today; how its characteristic poetic form is based on a beautiful and intricate simplicity; how its patterns of word building and inflectional structure are paralleled in several present day languages and how and why the English language and its literature continued to change so that by the mid-12th century the English language looks more like the 'English' that we are familiar with in the 21st century. Features of the book Written in a clear and accessible manner, The Earliest English provides a comprehensive introduction to the evolution of Old English language and literature, and will be an invaluable textbook for students of English Language and Linguistics.

324 pages, Paperback

First published November 25, 2004

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 2 out of 5]

THE EARLIEST ENGLISH by Chris McCully and Sharon Hilles is a textbook of Old English for undergraduate students. Unlike most Old English textbooks, this is not meant to teach the student OE's paradigms and enable him to read OE texts, but rather it aims to show the general shape of English as it first was and charts the changes which led to Middle English. There's also a great deal of historical detail on the political and cultural scene of Anglo-Saxon England.

Unfortunately, this book is very badly produced. Nothing is discussed in any meaningful detail, and students will come away from the course with little more than trivia. The authors cite lots of unscholarly literature--we find twice in two pages praise of Bill Bryson's disastrous book The Mother Tongue, a collection of misunderstandings and outright falsehoods by a writer with no training in linguistics. The Internet references are for sites found at such places as AOL, Tripod, and Geocities. And then the authors just make sloppy errors. In Chapter 2, we find "It seems that the Germanic language-family --- but not other languages or families within the IE grouping --- was subject in the remote past to a regularising stress shift." Most Indo-Europeanists will know that Latin at one point shifted the accent to the initial syllable, sometimes causing syncope.

For students with some prior training in linguistics, Roger Lass's OLD ENGLISH: A Historical Linguistic Companion is much more detailed, trustworthy, and readable.

[Midokako]

think nothing