[.ca] Story Of English (ISBN 0142002313)

This is a companion to the PBS television series.:
After watching the series it is fun to see the information in print. Just about everything you ever wanted to know about the English Language is in this book. There are newer and older references but none so complete and at the same time readable. This book covers history, usage, almost usage and possible futures of the language. One of my favorite antidotes was the one about how the Advisory Committee on Spoken English (ACSE) discussed the word "canine": "Shaw brought up the word 'canine', and he wanted the recommendation to be 'cay-nine'... And somebody said 'Mr. Shaw, Mr. Chairman, I don't know why you bring this up, of course it's 'ca-nine'. Shaw said, 'I always pronounce things the way they are pronounced by people who use the word professionally every day.' And he said, 'My dentist always says (cay-nine)'. And somebody said, 'Well, in that case, Mr. Chairman, you must have an American dentist.' And he said, 'Of course, why do you think at 76 I have all my teeth!'" After reading about how English came about, the next book to read would be "Divided by a Common Language" by Christopher Davies, Jason Murphy

Refreshing lack of triumphalism:
I read this book back in my 'English Conversation Teacher' days in Japan. Having been embrassed one to many times by students having to lecture me, their teacher, on the history of English, I figured I should do some 'catch-up reading.' I asked around for suggestions and was recommended 'The Story of English'. It is free of the linguistic jargon most general readers would find pedantic, and although it is aimed at the general reader it is never condescending. The first half of the book explains the historical development of English while the second half focues on modern English. Most refreshing though, is that it is free of the triumphalism found in many books of this kind. Reflecting the demographic reality of English today, it gives even-handed attention to the many contemporary varieties of English spoken around the world in places such as North America, Singapore, India, the Anglophone West Indies, and so on. 'The Story of English' is best suited to those who are curious about the origins as well as the future of English, and who want an easy-to-understand introduction to the subject.

Lightweights lacking linguistic literacy, levity,:
The book takes one of the most interesting, far-reaching, important and fascinating stories in linguistics and makes of it a cardboard, flavorless bit of school days humdrum. The book follows from a TV show commissioned by the BBC and it shows. The snide schoolmarm tone, the determination to wring every last bit of vitality out of the material, the "educational", plodding, boring voice, all very effectively render this a bit of dreck. The book is best in its historical sections, where the journalists' eyes unearth clever detail, before sinking into treacly bromides in the second half. The almost laughable biases - in the bilingualism debates, Republicans are "prescriptive, authoritarian" while liberals are "tolerant", (never mind that is overwhelmingly Democratic Hispanic parents who most oppose the policy); JFK's visit to his Irish ancestral home is triumphant while Reagan's is merely political and perfunctory, etc. etc. - begin to make one wonder what other evidence the authors have twiddled with to fit their prejudices. In addition, worrisome false facts crop up in this book. The canard of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address being composed in two minutes on the back of an envelope appears here. As do the folk etymologies for "pass the buck" and "buck"; neither of which have proper citations in the literature. Though this is perhaps to be expected from journalists treading far afield, it distressed the reader to wonder what else is made up, incorrectly cited, or passed as along as truth. The book does trundle over all of English history in some comprehensiveness, and there were new discoveries for me: - London brewers felt it necessary to adopt a resolution in 1422, that changed their written language of commerce from Latin or French to English (French had been the official language of England from 1066 to the early 1400s). - Shakespeare's Midlands regionalisms precludes the East Anglian Bacon's purported authorship of many Shakespeare works. - Captain John Smith's stark pronouncement at Jamestown: "He that will not work neither shall he eat." Which is one of the fine reasons we are not a Marxist country. The book frequently surfaces the "purify Englsh" crowd with incidences cited from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, and suitably mocks them, given the historical record of every language's changes, though the book does fail to appreciate legal, political, and socio-economic arguments behind standardized dialects. The book provides very nice insight into the only work of art ever created by committee: the King James Bible, and shows how the master editor synthesized six working drafts into that timeless statement of human and divine condition. Anyone who has ever had to edit in the presence of outsized egos, thick ignoramuses, or prickly neurotics, that is, fellow humans, will marvel at the accomplishment. The authors also provide entertaining anecdotal details on that other great ancient work in English, Johnson's Dictionary, produced in 9 years for the sum of 1,575 English pounds. The BBC provenance of the book is clear throughout, mostly for the worse. Pronunciations that vary from Standard British English are illuminated phonetically, while those that don't, aren't. So the American audience, reading that the Australian and British pronunciations vary here or correlate there, is left mystified. And at its worst, there is this outright chauvinism: "The English speak quickly the Americans tend to be more deliberate. The English tend to use a greater variety of tone; Americans tend to a certain monotony." The book gets much weaker in its modern day sections, which flounce about the globe discovering Englishes in their natural habitat. With the air of a patronizing NPR Brahmin descending upon the colorful locals with quaint habits (you can almost hear them cueing up those creepy NPR "audio samples" of cowbells clanging in the background, or the clippity-clop of horshoes on cobblestones) to explain to the audience at home. It is in these sections where the demands of TV journalism most undermine the authors' efforts. We are quite clearly reading a script written twenty years ago, and it grates. While I'd previously understood the global offshoots to be descended from, and evolving away from, British English, it hadn't occurred to me that the *date* of offshoot was important. So that America, settled first in the 1600s, is accented and pronounced more like 1600s Elizabethan English, while Australian or New Zealand dialects, which are 19th century creations, sound more like the English of that era. Interestingly, this is exactly the case with French and Spanish, which are outgrowths of the Roman street slang versions of Latin at the separate time those provinces were conquered. The linguistic map of English, rather than marching in steady gradients, pools and puddles and pockets. Overall, this book should be read by serious students of the English language if for nothing else than its sheer wealth of facts, however incorrectly positioned in a framework they may be. If you are not comprehensively surveying the field, you don't need this book. Similar material is covered much more ably in McWhorter's The Power of Babel and Hughes' A History of English Words.

The Complete History is very Full:
I've always been interested in this subject, but could never find enough information on the evolution of the English language. Thank god for this book, it is full, and has writing samples from different time periods and places, as well as back stories that tell when the language changed.

Great read - - nice pictures:
This book is a very readable and well researched introduction to the history of the English language. It contains a great deal of material about the many varieties of English, including separate chapters on Irish English, Scots English, American English, Caribbean English, and Australian and South African English. The photographs and maps that are featured throughout the book are excellent. The maps provide invaluable insights to the historical processes of change, and the pictures make the history come alive. In some places, it is clear that the book was written as a companion to the TV series, when the narrative takes us to an interview with a dialect speaker and then falls flat. If you have access to the video, the motivation for these interviews is much more clear when you can hear the person talk. This book would be excellent for the general reader; it would also make a good textbook for an introductory course on the development of English.