Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language

by Seth Lerer

Why is there such a striking difference between English spelling and English pronunciation? How did our seemingly relatively simple grammar rules develop? What are the origins of regional dialect, literary language, and everyday speech, and what do they have to do with you?

Seth Lerer's Inventing English is a masterful, engaging history of the English language from the age of Beowulf to the rap of Eminem. Many have written about the evolution of our grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary, but only Lerer situates these developments in the larger history of English, America, and literature.

Lerer begins in the seventh century with the poet Caedmon learning to sing what would become the earliest poem in English. He then looks at the medieval scribes and poets who gave shape to Middle English. He finds the traces of the Great Vowel Shift in the spelling choices of letter writers of the fifteenth century and explores the achievements of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of 1755 and The Oxford English Dictionary of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He describes the differences between English and American usage and, through the example of Mark Twain, the link between regional dialect and race, class, and gender. Finally, he muses on the ways in which contact with foreign languages, popular culture, advertising, the Internet, and e-mail continue to shape English for future generations.

Each concise chapter illuminates a moment of invention-a time when people discovered a new form of expression or changed the way they spoke or wrote. In conclusion, Lerer wonders whether globalization and technology have turned English into a world language and reflects on what has been preserved and what has been lost. A unique blend of historical and personal narrative, Inventing English is the surprising tale of a language that is as dynamic as the people to whom it belongs.

Genres: Nonfiction, Language, History, Linguistics, Academic, Read For School, Words

320 pages, Hardcover

First published March 16, 2007

About the author

Professor Seth Lerer (1956 -) is a contemporary Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University, specialising in historical analyses of the English language, in addition to critical analyses of the works of several authors, including in particular Geoffrey Chaucer.

-wikipedia

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am no linguist, and not particularly skilled at finessing the subtleties of sounds we humans speak into meaning: monopthongs versus dipthongs, vowels held long in the front versus short in the back. But I am a person endlessly fascinated by the English language, and the way its history reflects the greater history of the people who have spoken it and shaped it over the years. As a passionate non-specialist, then, I found Seth Lerer's Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language highly satisfying: Lerer's essays on English lingual history are clear and juicy, with just enough patient explanation of technical linguistic terms to enable the casual reader to follow along easily. More than that, he analyzes the unexpected ways in which social and political movements have influenced the course of the language's evolution.

The theme that struck me most, through all of Lerer's chapters, was how fundamentally political language is, and how double-edged. From the very beginning of our history as English speakers, we've been engaged in a complicated relationship with how (or whether) our language should expand to include outside influences, and what lingual "purity" would even look like. This may sound familiar: it's still being played out in the fight to establish English as the official language of the United States, a move motivated by fear of the growing Spanish-speaking populations here. But it's nothing new. In one early section I found particularly fascinating, Lerer discusses the first known rhymed poem written in English. Some background for those who don't know: Anglo-Saxon or Old English poetry didn't generally rhyme; instead, it was organized around principles such as alliteration, kennings (novel compound words that expressed a single concept, like the coinage "whaleroad" for the ocean), and numbers of stressed syllables per line. Rhymed poetry was typical of Latinate literature, and began to filter into English after the Norman (French) invasion of 1066. But what I found so striking was that this poem, which incorporated a brand-new verse technology learned directly from the French, was in content a protest poem against those very same invaders, a lyric composed on the death of William the Conqueror, which catalogued his atrocities:

Castelas he let wyrcean,

7 earme men swi∂e swencean,

Se cyng waes swa swi∂e stearc,

7 benam of his underþeoddan manig marc

goldes 7 ma hundred punda seolfres.

Det he name be wihte

7 mid mycelan unrihte

of his landloede

for littelre neode.

He waes on gitsunge befeallan,

7 graedinaesse he lufode mid ealle.

He saette mycel deorfri∂,

7 he laegde laga þaerwi∂

þet swa hwa swa sloge heort o∂∂e hinde,

þet hine man sceolde blendian.



[He had castles built

and poor men terribly oppressed.

The king was very severe,

and he took from his underlings many marks

of gold and hundreds of pounds of silver.

All this he took from the people,

and with great injustice

from his subjects,

to gratify his trivial desire.

He had fallen into avarice,

and he loved greediness above everything else.

He established many deer preserves,

and he set up laws concerning them,

such that whoever killed a hart or a hind

should be blinded.:]

This poem strikes me as so poignant. The author (a monk at the outlying Peterborough monastery) must have consciously chosen to write it in rhyming form, as the vast majority of the English poetry of the period wasn't rhymed. I can't resist speculating on why, therefore, he didn't take the more obvious route of a defiantly Anglo-Saxon verse form to protest the Norman tyranny. Was it a melancholy gesture away from the poetic forms he felt were his own, looking toward a period of colonization? Or did the mixed messages of the poem reflect his own conflicted feelings, his resentment of Norman oppression battling with admiration of the new French styles in verse and culture? Lerer points out that the very first word in the poem, "castelas" or castles, was an importation from Norman French: Anglo-Saxons didn't build in stone, but in wood, and readers of Beowulf will remember their vast-timbered halls. The Normans, on the other hand, peppered English soil with stone castles as part of their program of commandeering the land for royal use. In this poem, then, we can see the simultaneous transformation of language, landscape, and ways of thinking. Fascinating stuff.

And this tension between the old and new, between expansive cosmopolitanism and protective nativism, continues through nearly every essay in Lerer's book. There are intriguing debates, in the centuries after his life, about whether Chaucer's popularization of so many French-derived words was a boon or a curse: Edmund Spenser wrote that Chaucer had tapped "the well of English undefiled," whereas early philologist Alexander Gil said that he "rendered his poetry notorious by the use of Latin and French words," going on to call the resulting English an "illegitimate progeny" and a "monster." Interestingly, in both these cases the "undefiled" English is perceived as of a higher class: to Spenser, the addition of the colonizer's French-derived words raises the language to new poetic heights, whereas by Gil's time it's possible to complain that "everyone [e.g., even the commoner:] wishes to appear as a smatterer of tongues and to vaunt his proficiency in Latin, French (or any other language)." Gil, therefore, as a mark of educated difference, advocates a return to the "purity" of Anglo-Saxon-derived words. (The irony? His anti-Latinate treatise is written in...Latin.)

But Lerer makes the point, again and again, that attempts to restrict the growth of the language are both misguided and doomed to failure. From the huge influx of foreign-derived words during the commerce and exploration boom of the sixteenth century, to the formation of Atlantic creoles as a product of the slave trade, to the jargon introduced into our speech by the soldiers of successive wars, Lerer insists that our language reflects the way we live, and that to expect anything else is foolhardy. I strongly agree with this idea: modern English is not debased, any more than Anglo-Saxon English encapsulated some mythical "purity." We should revel in the richness and diversity of our language, not fight it.

One of the most touching chapters of Inventing English deals with Samuel Johnson's personal transformation over the course of writing his Dictionary. Beginning the task with the goal of "fixing" the language in place, of ascertaining proper usage and recording it for all time, he gradually came to appreciate the untameable flow of the English tongue:

[A:]fter years of false starts, failures, and impediments - he was unable to complete the task in the three years he set himself; his wife died in the process; his amanuenses found his work almost impossible to follow; he abandoned Chesterfield's patronage - after all this he realized that it is impossible to fix a language. In the preface to the Dictionary that finally appeared in 1755, he saw a language not imperial but "sublunary," mutable and transitory. Like Caxton, who saw English living under the "domynacioun of the moon," Johnson found himself incapable of fixing usage. His purpose, now, had become "not to form, but register the language; not to teach men how they should think, but relate how they have hitherto expressed their thoughts."

I was cheering Johnson on here. His journey was not an easy one - he spent eight years basically despondent - but to me, the outcome was so worthwhile: an appreciation of the strength, richness, and changeability of his mother tongue.

Inventing English was full of fascinating little tidbits; I was constantly reading this or that juicy anecdote out loud to David as I perused it. "Did you know," I would say, "that 'hubbub' was originally an onomatopoetic term based on what English people heard in the speech of the Irish and Welsh?" Or "Wow, did you know 'dude' originated as a term for a citified dandy? I always thought it originally described cowboys!' These little insights are fascinating and thought-provoking, but Lerer also does a good job of taking his history beyond the anecdotal, and tying these small examples into a larger context of social and political change. I ardently enjoyed it, and might even follow up a few of the chapters with some more in-depth reading.

[Cat. · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the subtitle alludes to, this is the history of English for people who haven't done much reading on the subject. That could mean deadly dull mixed with infuriating for the left-out bits, or--if done by a good writer--it could mean coherent and fun.

Luckily, in this case, it's the second choice. Lerer never rests long enough on a subject, or century, to induce boredom, staying just long enough to explain why this particular development was important, what EXACTLY the change was (how the language existed before and after), and all the while using accessible words and tone. There is no academic apple-polishing here, just good honest explication. For instance, this is the first time I've been able to understand Old English pronunciation words ending in 'e' and those pesky dual 'th' symbols.

Frankly, I was totally on his side because he uses Emily Dickinson as one of his muses in the chapter on the changes the American dialect brought to the language. Yay. And another "yay" for raising the Mark Twain flag later on and crediting him with not just attentiveness to dialect, but also his ability to invent new concept through slang and idiom. There is a sense that he almost feels that Twain was a watershed (my pun) in the development of American English. I heartily agree.

[Kvn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not going to lie, the book is a little dry. (rhyme not intended) However, any investigation into the convoluted origins of the English language is bound to include some fascinating insights, and this book is packed full of just that sort of thing.

[Jaylia3 · Rating 3 out of 5]

This took a while to finish--I read a chapter a day. Most of the chapters end like the grand finale of a book--Lerer writes in his intro that chapters don't need to be read in sequence. Lerer loves his subject and language in general, but sometimes I (maybe peevishly) think that his great enjoyment comes a little bit at his reader's expense. There is a glossary in back, but for me it could be twice as long. It doesn't include all the many polysyllabic words with Latin and Greek roots ending in "-ology", or "-graphy", or etc., that (for me) clog up the text and make reading sometimes have the cumbersome feel of translating. Lerer uses dramatic figurative language, and like early English poets he loves alliteration. (It's a lively lexical landscape!) His words bristle with so much life and almost self-aware purpose that sometimes his pages feel noisy and crowded. And then there are the sentences like, "Behind them lies a conception of vernacular character and the character of the vernacular." (P 116)

Those mild complaints aside, this is a fascinating subject and Lerer is a knowledgeable and enthusiastic guide. I really love his Teaching Company lectures on the history of the English language and it's nice to have some of that information in book form.

[Shannon Appelcline · Rating 1 out of 5]

Might be a fine book for the more scholarly inclined, but it was too academic to be much fun. I gave up a few chapters in.

[m.]

Not rating books i read for uni.

[Gary Bruff · Rating 5 out of 5]

“To come upon, discover, find.” This is what the rhetorician signifies by the word ‘invent.’ And such is the sense of invention that Lerer uses when he spins insightful narratives on the history and development of the English language. But English can also be approached, not just as some well-defined object waiting to be found, but rather as a variable and pliant instrument for discovering our own, personal language of experience. From Lerer’s introduction:

“All of us find or invent our language. We may come up with new sentences never heard before. We may use words in a unique way. But we are always finding our voice, locating old patterns or long-heard expressions, reaching into our thesaurus for the right term. And in inventing English, we are always inventing ourselves—finding our place among the welter of the words or in the swell of sounds that is the ocean of our tongue.”

While certainly true, this quotation nevertheless elides a fact which Lerer himself will return to throughout Inventing English—that English oftentimes stands between people. While English can be a unifying standard, it can also be a theatre where social and epistemological differences are played out. Seen this way, the vocalizing of any given language, or variant of a language, can be interpreted as a political act. And so there might be no meaningful recounting of the history of English without some perceptive understanding of how speech and writing, both of the powerful and of the powerless, constitute moments of political agency.

It seems Chaucer knew this. He could see how his English was strewn with the sounds and concepts extracted from a host of sources. Church Latin, common Anglo-Saxon, Viking Danish, and aristocratic French all had a profound impact on the English of Chaucer’s day. From his perch in London, Chaucer espied dialects of English from all over medieval England. He made use of specific dialects to reflect the nature or origin of the characters he would go on to create. As Lerer says, “Chaucer evokes the high style of the Francophile court, the coarseness of the commoner, the Latinism of the scholar—and everything in between.”

In the history of any language, and English provides no exception, a word is sometimes borrowed from another language even though an equivalent word with the same sense is already in use. Doublets are formed in this way, an example of which is ‘will(Saxon) and testament(French)’. Scholars have known for a long time that there can be a difference in prestige favoring one half of the doublet. Consider the doublets for animals on the medieval estate. The English peasant knew all about the cow, sow, sheep, calf, and deer, yet the carnivorous francophone aristocrats who dominated the estate only knew of the animals as food: beef (French for cow), pork (French for sow), mutton (sheep), veal (calf), and venison (deer). In time, the French terms for the farm animals would become specialized as English terms for the food coming from that animal. Lerer says this example is an over-simplification, but i can think of no better way to make apparent how social stratification can be written into language itself.

English has undergone quite a few significant changes in its historical development. In Chaucer’s day, and even much earlier, there were two sets of forms for the second person pronoun: thou, thy, thine, and thee were used in the singular as informal/intimate forms, whereas the old plural forms you, your, and ye were more formal and came to be used to address a single individual, politely. This is not unlike French ‘tu’/‘vous’ or Spanish ‘tu’/‘usted.’ In his Canterbury Tales, Chaucer used the English pronominal system to map relative levels of prestige and respect. These forms were still in use in Shakespeare’s day. The ‘you’ form ultimately won out, of course, and now contrasts with the reinvented plurals “y’all” and ‘youz guys.’

Lerer culls through the archives of English literature to illustrate how these and other dramatic changes transpired in our language’s history. There was an interesting relationship between the English spoken in medieval times north of the Humber river and the Londoners’ English destined to become one of the standards of today. On account of this contact, ‘hem’ became ‘them,’ regular verb forms like ‘goeth’ and 'drinketh’ became ‘goes’ and 'drinks,’ while the irregular verb ‘be’ became even more irregular with the introduction of the ‘is’ and ‘are’ forms. It seems implausible that Northumbrian English would be so influential on the language of London and throughout the realm. But that is what seems to have happened, perhaps on account of relative prestige, but more likely through linguistic behaviors adopted as part of a fad or fashion.

Perhaps the greatest permutation of English during its long written career would be the great vowel shift. If you read today’s English while pronouncing the vowels as if they were Italian, you’d have a bit of the sense of what Chaucer’s English sounded like. I will not go into the mechanics of it, but imagine vowels being represented in an analogical space depicting tongue position. The movement of certain vowels engenders the movement of other vowels which are now pushed from their customary space, the process repeating in a sort of chain reaction. Why? As Lerer states: ‘the sounds of English may have changed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as part of a larger, social process of replacing a lost prestige language [Norman French] with a prestige dialect—a dialect not keyed to region but to social class, to education, and to wealth.’ Vowels in English are more variable than consonants. Think about an Australian or a Scottish accent; the consonants are the same, but the vowels all sound weird to speakers of another dialect of English.

To this day, accents are still being formed. Labov et al, in “One Hundred Years of Sound Change in Philadelphia”, made use of the latest in speech recognition technology (and lots of statistics and charts) to map precisely the vowel space of individual Philadelphians, even of speakers long dead whose speech had been recorded for posterity. It seems that, potentially, there are minute vowel shifts going on all around us. These small gradations of sound are not easily perceptible to the naked ear, but longitudinal study confirms the fact that sound change is omnipresent, even when it does not have the dramatic consequences of the great vowel shift. Labov and company determined that these changes have been the product of speakers bending their speech away from what Philadelphians often see as stigmatized accents, the ones bearing the sounds of New York City and of the American South. As noted by Lerer, sociolinguists like Labov enrich historiography by bringing to the fore how people with slightly different languages have understood, or misunderstood, each another over the course of time.

Some of the most supple thinking to take place in English manifested itself in the writings of the renaissance, a time which we now know to have been one of sociolinguistic upheaval. While the great vowel shift “made the language of the age of Chaucer largely opaque by the time of Shakespeare,” it was Shakespeare himself who generated a great deal of opacity for the modern reader. Lerer attributes to Shakespeare the coining of 6,000 new words. I can’t see how this could be true. Shakespeare might have been the first to use these words in a written text, or the first we know of to do so. But thespians being thespians, I am sure Shakespeare was immersed in a universe of creative talkers. Saying that one person single handedly invented a hefty chunk of the English language seems a bit fantastic. Be that as it may, the renaissance in England was probably the best of times for those who thrived on linguistic anarchy.

Out of this anarchy, there stormed a desire to standardize and so to control English. Caxton operated his printing and publishing business from Westminster, where the Chancery charged him with printing and publishing the laws and precedents of the court in an English that all could understand. And so not only spelling, but also grammar and vocabulary, became centrally regulated by the English government administration. Shortly afterwords, a movement called Orthoepy emerged. Orthoepists postulated a necessary connection between correct pronunciation/grammar and moral worth/character. They were reformers who sought to correct society’s ills by forcing all to speak properly, following a strict standard. While the orthoepists were among the first to analyze systematically how speech sounds are produced, they were seriously flawed in their linguistics otherwise. For example, they maintained that the meaning of a word is a product of the meanings of that word’s individual sounds. But the different meanings of ‘cat’ and ‘rat’ is not a function of what ‘c’ means versus what ‘r’ means. Pronunciation of sounds serves to distinguish words from each other, but meaning does not reside in the individual sounds themselves.

Linguists during the Enlightenment were often lexicographers. By writing dictionaries, Samuel Johnson in England and Noah Webster in the United States made their mark on how English was to be conceptualized by the everyday users of the language. For their long historical understanding of English, they were rewarded with profound insights into the nature of language change. Interestingly, both Johnson and Webster appear to have come to the same conclusion: language is continuously changing and cannot do otherwise. Johnson saw language as being under the domination of the moon, in other words, as both mutable and transitory. The American Webster believed likewise that holding back the progress of language is like holding back the Mississippi river, “the motion of which, at times, is scarcely perceptible; yet even then it possess a momentum quite irresistible. Words and expressions will be forced into use in spite of all the exertions of all the writers of the world.”

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. That seems to have been the motto for nineteenth century American writers of dialect like Mark Twain. As Lerer puts it, “the study of American dialects became, in part, a celebration of American identity and the fuel for a distinctively American philology.” While many writers experimented with ‘dialect,’ none were as successful as Twain. Instead of offering apologies for the deviant nature of their talk, American authors like Twain turned the tables on their critics by making use of the wealth of folksy forms found out in the real world.

African American English presents another facet of America’s dialect wealth. Some black Americans, like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, made use of the high style of traditionally white rhetoric in order to share their astute acumen and moving experiences with a largely white audience and readership. Other writers of color have found greater rhetorical power in their own range of dialects. Lerer makes it clear that there is no single, unified standard of black English vocabulary, syntax, or pronunciation. But that has not stopped black folks from having a solid impact on English. By way of slavery, words from west African Wolof found their way into the informal vocabulary of English speakers practically everywhere. ‘Hip’ comes from a Wolof word for “to open one’s eyes, to become aware of what is going on.” ‘Cat’ comes from a Wolof person marker. ‘Dig’ comes from a root in Wolof meaning “to understand, to appreciate.” Significantly, these borrowings from Wolof are not symptoms of cognitive decay or social insouciance. Rather, they are indices of how a language like English can become invented or revived by way of contact with the most unlikely of sources. Linguistic innovations, including slang, form part of the ongoing history and development of the English language. Through cloud-tethering technology and the language space of social media, innumerable speakers (or those posting texts) have also had a far-reaching impact on their language.

Lerer closes his literary history of the English language by inspecting how biblical translation provides clues to our understanding of linguistic conservatism. The King James bible translation, for example, drew on words for rhetorical effect which in the seventeenth century already sounded archaic. Hence, obsolete forms like ‘brethren’ or ‘confound’ were used in place of the more popular and newer words ‘brothers’ and ‘confuse.’ Such words as ‘brethren’ become borrowings from the past and so formed doublets. The King James translators also made a point to import much of the syntax of biblical Hebrew. Such choices made the translation less transparent, but they also gave the English words a ring of old-time authority or an aura of mysterious power.

Overall, I found Lerer’s Inventing English to be a wonderful endeavor. Not only does it place contemporary debates about the decay of English in their proper historical perspective, it also serves as a wonderful work of social and political theory. I have skipped over some of Lerer’s prime movers in the history of English, most notably Milton, Orwell, Priestley, Wulfstan, and the Oxford English Dictionary. But I hope to have conveyed Lerer’s main point, that English has a dynamic history, one which emerges, resurrected from the dead page, as a living legacy, bridging the gap between our rich cultural heritage and whatever worlds we might come upon in the future.

To offer a criticism of sorts, I feel that Lerer’s history of English is discernibly one-sided at times. Although we learn a bit about how scientific discoveries together with colonial misadventures have been compounding the legacy of English with new words for new ideas, we hear very little from Lerer of how English can be “invasive” instead of inventive. All over the world, languages are perishing, never to be recovered, and English is often at the forefront of these language shifts and language deaths. We should not denigrate historians of English like Lerer who guide the reader through all the triumphs and traumas experienced by speakers of English. But it is of no use to disregard the social and cognitive trauma caused to speakers who feel compelled to turn their backs on their own linguistic heritage in order to reinvent themselves as participants in the power of English. But to anyone even mildly curious about how English has evolved and grown through the ages, you can’t go wrong with the discoveries to be found in Seth Lerer’s Inventing English.

[Bob]

Lerer is a professor of humanities at Stanford and concerns himself with socio-linguistic issues: language as a signifier of social class, gender, political power, and national identity. The first chapters proceed chronologically: Old English and the problems of grafting Christianity into a Germanic language; the beginnings of literary English; adapting the language to a French government; Chaucer and courtly speech; dialects; the Great Vowel Shift; chancery English (and orthography); Shakespeare; the exploration of the new world; and then branches to topical treatments, American English, American Dialects, the OED; warfare and military language; Black English; and slang.
Lever has a very personal voice, and the book is not as its subtitle suggests "a portable history of the language" but a series of topical essays with a great deal of food for thought and excellent individual bibliographies.
"Enabling immediate communication by distant interlocutors, the telephone not only revolutionized the passage of information, it changed irrevocably social relationships in late-nineteenth centgury America...But the problem for the early telephone was how to address someone you could not see. Forms of address are invariably linked to social class and gender...The conundrum for the telephone was what to say first to a speaker whose class or gender you could not know. And so a neutral word was needed. Phone greetings, culturally are arbitrary, German bitte, Italian pronto, Spanish bueno..." and he continues very entertainingly to Morse's use of "Ahoy" and Edison introduction of "hello."

[kkurtz · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is a 'must read' for anyone with a passion for reading, writing,...or speaking. From Beowulf to 21st century slang,& everything in between, Lerer covers all the bases.
This book is a thoroughly enjoyable & readable history of the english language. The chapter on Mark Twain is worth the price of admission alone, with an extensive history of the word 'dude'.

[DaughterDaDa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up because I thoroughly enjoyed the audiotapes of his lectures on the History of the English Language. For hard-core philologists.

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this because I enjoyed the DVDs from The Teaching Company. I am pleasantly surprised that it doesn't seem at all to be just a re-hash of the course!

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fond readers of this blog, at least those who pay attention to my book reviews, will likely note that I am fond of reading about linguistics for fun [1].  At time I even converse with people about this subject when they share an interest in it, although that is not often.  This book deals, technically, mostly with a related subject to linguistics, namely philology.  Nevertheless, like books on linguistics this book discusses the great vowel shift, especially as it is shown in the justly famous Paxton family letters, and so it belongs in the general family of books about the linguistics of English.  This sort of book has a rather specific target audience:  if you like reading books about the change of English over time from Old English to today, with a focus on written language, the fecundity of English when it comes to both creating and appropriating words, and the complexity of English grammar and spelling and its political context, you will likely find something here to enjoy despite it being a somewhat challenging book to read.  The fact that the author references Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the Uncle Remus stories that formed the basis of Song of the South gives the story some additional cachet for certain audiences.

The slightly more than 250 pages of material in this book are made up of 19 mostly short chapters that take a broad look at the changes in the written (and spoken) English language over the course of its history so far, from the origins of English poetry during the times of Caedmon, to the language of Beowulf, to the dramatic effects of the Norman conquest that formed the end of Old English.  After this the author discusses the influence of French in Middle English, Chaucer's bold and inventive encouragement to Middle English as a written language, and the variety of Middle English dialects that existed, if sometimes poorly attested, for centuries.  A discussion of the great vowel shift and the making of English prose through the efforts of Caxton and others precedes a chapter on Shakespeare's English as well as the flowering of new words in 17th century English and the inevitable reaction by Orthoepists who sought to create a standard English dialect.  Samuel Johnson's efforts at creating his idiosyncratic dictionary follow before the book takes a turn towards American English in chapters on lexicography, dialect, Mark Twain, and African American English.  The last three chapters of the book look at the influence of the Oxford English Dictionary, the role of war on language, and the widespread nature of contemporary English before some appendices, glossaries, references, acknowledgments, and an index.

Ultimately, this book promotes the sort of descriptivist English that is very common among those who seek to describe the varieties of English rather than promote a standard sort of language.  Nevertheless, the book does acknowledge the contrary pulls that exist in English between a love of creativity and a desire for standardization, between the influence of conservative forms of English throughout the centuries and that of French, Latin, and other languages with which English has had fateful interactions.  The author celebrates diversity while still understanding the need for different dialects of English to be able to understand each other.  Likewise, this book offers considerable insight into the way that English became a language known for vagueness and misdirection during the period of Norman domination, yet another loss suffered by the people of England after the wicked conquest of William of Normandy.  At any rate, although this book talks a lot about the past, it is clear that the author has a certain expectation about the future and that there will continue to be a great deal of interest in the changes of English that are yet to come, something that does not appear to trouble the author in the least.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...

[Jeremiah · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're bothering to read this, you'd probably love this. You're the sort who'd love to learn about the variations in pronunciation and grammar across early England and how Chaucer mastered and united them all in Canterbury Tales. You'd like nothing better than to learn about Twain's role solidifying American slang. Further, reading about what consonants slid in and out of use throughout European history, how precisely the Great Vowel shift worked, and what paratexis is, sounds like your idea of a fun time. And it certainly is for me. While it keeps a healthy distance from textbook formality, it goes in depth with the niche subject. It even touches on literary criticism by way of examining how Milton and company use specific words. It gets challenging but it's so fun. If you're enough of a reader to reach the end of a random paragraph online, this book is for you.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this to prepare for a "History of the English Language" class I'm teaching, and I really enjoyed it. Lerer is very much on the linguistics side of "linguistic history," spending a lot of time on the sounds of the vowel shift (and also how it's maybe more of a make-up phenom to conceal a group of changes) as much as he is interested in why it happened. He goes deep into texts here and unpacks what is happening in them, which is occasionally great and occasionally a little bit much.

Dense, learned, and thoughtful. There might be a couple more chapters than there need to be, especially toward the end, though I appreciate the desire to make a case for what is happening in the more recent years. I'm just not sure it's as easy to see, or that Lerer makes it as visible, as he does in his chapters on Shakespeare and the trilingual period that become Middle English, et al.

It also feels like Lerer missed a trick by not going with the multivalent title "The Invention of English," which sounds more formal but also sweeps in other resonances this more casual title doesn't.

[Jer Wilcoxen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fairly stuffy history of the English language through poetry and the occasional personal correspondence. Somewhat boring, though supremely well researched, it takes a tack that's less linguistically focused for a closer look at how written art both reflected and effected the language. Not strong on the everyday usage of common folk from any given era, which the author admits throughout the book; but worth a read for the very interested reader. The casually interested may not find it their cup of tea. Definitely dense and not for light reading, in my opinion.

[Bryan Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

I studied linguistics, and work with languages, and I bow to the almighty algorithm, so I am recommended and, subsequently read, many books of this ilk, "philology for dabblers", academic-adjacent texts that are meant for the layman-adjacent audience. This book didn't tell me a whole lot I hadn't already read elsewhere, and if it did, it didn't really stick. I prefer the wit of John McWhorter or the readability of Steven Pinker, but I suppose that if you're interested in doing a real deep-dive into the history of English, this book belongs on your reading list as much as a host of others...

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellently written for anyone who is academic-minded and interested in the subject. It's going to be too simple for some and too complicated for others. For me, it was the right balance. The chapters are a good length and move on before getting to bogged down and repetitive. It was the only book on the subject in my library that wasn't focused almost entirely on simply entertaining the reader. This book is used in college classes and the author gives lectures on the subject. This book has it all.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very well written trip through the development of the English language from Olde English to the tongue we speak today, with chapters on the influence of Old Norse, the Norman Conquest and ALL those French words ending in -tion and -sion, Middle English (Chaucer), Shakespeare, John Milton, Britain's colonies (Hindi and, from America, Algonquian, Iroquioan and Muskogean words), Black English and even Yiddish. I enjoyed the book a LOT!

[Taylor Swift Scholar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I suspected this would be boring, but it was so fun. I particularly loved the early sections on Early English and Middle English. I had not thought too much about these earlier forms prior to this book and it was absolutely fascinating. My poor husband had to learn so many fun facts about dialects. My interest petered off towards the later sections, but only slightly. I would highly recommend this to anyone who wants to learn more about English, poetry, or language in general.

[MrsMJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Worth reading, but be ready... Great information, but boring/hard to trudge through at times... That says a lot since this is a subject I’m highly interested in (I study linguistics and read textbooks for fun 🤓). Worth reading because of the info, but just be ready to push through the boring parts.

[Corinne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the way the author told the history of the English language, making it manageable in 4 main parts: Old, Middle, Early Modern and the way it is evolving today. The antidotes and stories made it appear to be an interesting history, rather than a textbook for a class.

[Caitlin ~WordsAreMyForte~ · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite academic required readings throughout my college career! I'm a word nerd and was continually fascinated by this deep dive into the origin of so many features of English we take for granted. My favorite was the explanation for 'Ye Olde Shoppe.'

[Karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

A rather academic tour through various episodes in English history. It seems the author's very breadth of knowledge prevented him from sharing it in an intelligible way. I found most of the chapters to be quite bogged down in metaphor, valuing elegance of expression over elegance of thought.

[Kees · Rating 4 out of 5]

very interesting to learn about the Great Vowel Shift and why it is a Cow that we eat as Beef.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read half. Got bored. Stopped.

[Manar Tomeh · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is really hard to rate a textbook for a class. But as much as this subject is interesting, it is hard to digest.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Occasionally a bit overwritten but a solid overview of English from Old, through Middle to the current incarnation including military slang and some dialects.

If you like etymology and philology this is a good book

[Roberta Suárez]

no lo terminé pero algún día. dejo acá el registro. muy interesante !!!!

[Kaitlyn Caughfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of Inventing English is fascinating, but Lerer has some bizarre analogies that don't work at all.

[Angel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this with my History of English class, and really enjoyed learning about linguistics through this!