Name: The story of English
ISBN: 9780142002315

The story of English

"Written for general readers, The Story of English presents a stimulating and comprehensive record of spoken and written English - from its Anglo-Saxon origins some two thousand years ago to the present day, when English is the dominant language of commerce and culture with more than one billion English speakers around the world. From Cockney, Scouse, and Scots to Gulla, Singlish, Franglais, and the latest African American slang, this sweeping history of the English language is the essential introduction for anyone who wants to know more about our common tongue."--BOOK JACKET.

What Hacker News says

jll29Mar 2022

Mathematics:

Burns, Marilyn (1975) I hate Mathematics Book, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Brown-Paper-School-Books/...

Mathematics, philosophy, music, molecular biology/biochemistry, computer science, visual art, poetry, cognitive science:

Hofstadter, Douglas R. (1979) Gödel, Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid. New York, NY: Basic Books. ("GEB")

Computer Science:

Abelson, Harold and Gerald Jay Sussmann (1984) Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ("SICP")

Stoll, Clifford (1989) The Cuckoo's Egg. New York, NY: Doubleday.

Linguistics:

McCrum, Robert, Robert MacNeil, William Cran (1986). The Story of English. New York, NY: Viking. https://archive.org/details/storyofenglish000mccr

Accounting: n/a

thread

Jun8May 2010

I recommend three really good books:

[1] The Stories of English by David Crystal http://www.amazon.com/Stories-English-David-Crystal/dp/15856...

[2] The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson http://www.amazon.com/Mother-Tongue-Bill-Bryson/dp/B001W6RRF...

[3] The Story of English by McCrum, Cran, and MacNeil http://www.amazon.com/Story-English-Third-Revised/dp/0142002...

All of these make a delightful read, I especially like [2].

A number of factors combined to make English orthography as unique as it is. First, there was no central authority of the English language for about three centuries, after the Norman invasion. Then, as French usage receded and English words were becoming more frequent people adopted the spelling of one part of the country and the pronunciation of another, e.g. Western England spellings for "busy" and "bury", but London pronunciation of "bizzy" and Kentish pronunciation of "berry" [2, p, 124] On top of that, the Great Vowel Shift happened.

OK, back to the printers. The problem was that English spelling started to become fixated due to printing, around 1650s, just when the language was undergoing a huge change. William Caxton, who may be considered the first English editor, published the oldest English book in Bruges, in 1475. By 1640, it is estimated that there were more than 20,000 titles available in Britain.

The final touch came from prescriptive orthographers who fiddled with word spellings to make them "right" according to classical languages, in the seventeenth century. Thus we have the b in "debt", the s in "island", h in "anchor" etc.

English is an interesting language indeed.

thread

peter303Nov 2021

Strangest borrowing claim I heard was that Germanic strong verbs (hence English) came from Semitic language verb forms. Columbia linguist McWhorter claims this his Story of English book.

thread