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Origins of the English Language
From Simon & Schuster, Origins of the English Language is Joseph M. Williams' exploration of social and linguistic history.
In this book, author Joseph Williams presents a unique social and linguistic history as he explains the ways in which culture, education, class, and race affect language use and what changes in grammar reveal about the changes in our social lives.
In this book, author Joseph Williams presents a unique social and linguistic history as he explains the ways in which culture, education, class, and race affect language use and what changes in grammar reveal about the changes in our social lives.
436 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
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January 9, 2012
Not great shakes of an overview/history.The scholar author gets lost and confused in the wealth of detail and data he's accumumlated and hits the reader w/ a confusing blizzard of unimportant incident and phonetic-diction-morphological (omg) bits and pieces, obscuring patterns, trends, highlights. Hard to follow, given all the bunny trails and rabbit holes that distract him. This was used as a foundational text for college level linguistics for many yrs. With years (now)of study behind me, I don't see why profs couldn't find a better text, cuz this textbook musta turned off many a student fm further inquiry into linguistics.
PS most fun and interesting shreds of the book to me were the outrageous monikers of some of the late Old English and Early Middle English (speaking of the language here, these terms are used differently in linguistics than in popular culture) "kings" who (thud, thwack, crunch) left their mark or impression on the English language:
Robert the Devil (a son of William the Conqueror)
Ivar the Boneless (said to have been born with gristle insteadof bone)
Ethelred the Redless ("unready" or "ill-advised")
and Egberth, Ethelbert, etc. and how these paragons of English pre-history got rid of people they didn't like: threw 'em in snake pits, burned 'em in bird dung (?) etc. You wouldn't think that type could do anything more than grunt and yowl speechwise. Interesting, anyway.
PS most fun and interesting shreds of the book to me were the outrageous monikers of some of the late Old English and Early Middle English (speaking of the language here, these terms are used differently in linguistics than in popular culture) "kings" who (thud, thwack, crunch) left their mark or impression on the English language:
Robert the Devil (a son of William the Conqueror)
Ivar the Boneless (said to have been born with gristle insteadof bone)
Ethelred the Redless ("unready" or "ill-advised")
and Egberth, Ethelbert, etc. and how these paragons of English pre-history got rid of people they didn't like: threw 'em in snake pits, burned 'em in bird dung (?) etc. You wouldn't think that type could do anything more than grunt and yowl speechwise. Interesting, anyway.
Displaying 1 of 1 review