Chapter 17: history of english fUrther reaDing

Some people prefer to work forwards through time rather than backwards as we have done in this chapter. Whichever approach you prefer, there are many accounts of the development of English from which you can choose (perhaps with guidance from your tutor). The very transparently titled Changing English (Graddol et al. 2007) provides a very good account of material addressed in this chapter. McCrum et al. (1992) provide a useful overview and the BBC films The Story of English provide useful additional information to the book. The Adventure of English (Bragg 2003) was also written in conjunction with a television series and provides a ‘biography’ of the language from 500–2000. Bryson’s Mother Tongue (1990) is an enter-taining survey of the major developments in English. Freeborn (1992) provides activities to encourage active engagement with the many samples of ancient and not so ancient texts as does Leith (1997) in A Social History of English. Hogg (2002) and Horobin and Smith (2002) offer well-exemplified introductions to Old English and Middle English respectively. Ishtla Singh’s The History of English (2005) does, as its subtitle claims, guide the student through the major changes in English over time and the final chapter addresses the future of English from a twenty-first century perspective – an issue we address in Chapter 18. Cameron (1996) is an interesting book to read on the meaning and derivations of place names.

Watts and Trudgill (2002) collect various papers which require a more thorough knowledge of the topic but which are nonetheless useful for the student (➔ R2.5). These accounts also show clearly that the historical development of Modern English is not as clear or as linear as might be imagined from this chapter.

Culpeper and Kadar (2010) edit a collection of papers which consider historical texts from the sociolinguistic concepts of politeness and impoliteness (➔ 4). O’Driscoll (2010) provides an epilogue to this collection of papers which summarizes the issues raised and shows how modern approaches to historical texts can indeed provide interesting results of a different nature from those analyses of a more traditional nature.

The blurb on the back cover of Elizabeth Knowles’ book How to Read a Word (2010) provides an accurate indication of the content of the book: it is indeed ‘an entertaining read that shows you how you might delve into the origin and evolution of words … identifying both the questions you can ask and how to answer them’. It also provides a useful list of online dictionaries, corpora and word sites, some of which we list here to help you in your future research.

Online dictionaries: Oxford Dictionaries Online at www.oxforddictionaries.com Oxford English Dictionary at www.oed.com Dictionary of American Regional English at www.dare.wisc.edu Middle English Dictionary at http://quod.lib.umich.edu./m/med Urban Dictionary at www.urbandictionary.com

Corpora British National Corpus at www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk Corpus of Contemporary American English at www.americancorpus.org

Word sites World Wide Words at www.worldwidewords.org Word Spy: the Word Lover’s Guide to New Words at www.wordspy.com

Happy exploring!