Rating: 
Summary: Many rivers lead to the sea...
Review: Ralph Waldo Emerson once remarked of English that it is 'the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.' The English language is certainly a sea of words and constructs which has been fed into by almost every major language and ethnic tradition in the world. English began as a hodge-podge of languages, never pretending to the 'purity' of more continental or extra-European languages (which, by the by, were never quite as pure as they like to assume). The book 'The Story of English', as a companion piece to accompany the PBS-produced series of the same name, hosted by Robert MacNeil, late of the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, is an articulate, engaging, wide-ranging and fair exposition of an ordinarily difficult and dry subject. The study of English is difficult on several levels. 'Until the invention of the gramophone and the tape-recorder there was no reliable way of examining everyday speech.' What did English sound like 200 years ago, or 400 years ago? 'English is--and has always been--in a state of ungovernable change, and the limits of scholarship are demonstrated by phrases like the famous 'Great Vowel Shift', hardly more informative than the 'unknown land' of early cartography.' Of course, written language has until modern times been the limited and limiting commodity of a very small minority of people. The balance between the written and spoken language has a variable history, which can still be seen today (compare the writing of the New York Times against the speech patterns and vocabulary choices of any dozen persons you will find on the street in New York City, and this divergence will be readily apparent). English has many varieties, and this book explores many of them, explaining that the writings and speech-patterns we see and hear as being foreign are actually English variants with a pedigree as strong as any Oxford University Press book would carry. From the Scots language which migrated to the Appalachian mountains to the Aussie languages adapted to Pacific Islands, to the ever-changing barrow speech of inner London, English speakers have a wide variety of possibilities that no one is truly master of all the language. 'If our approach seems more journalistic than scholastic, we felt this was appropriate for a subject that, unlike many academic studies, is both popular and newsworthy. Hardly a week goes by without a news story, often on the front page, devoted to some aspect of English: the 'decline' of standards; the perils and hilarities of Franglais or Japlish; the adoption of English as a 'national' language by another Third World county.' English is, for international trade and commerce, for travel, for science and most areas of major scholarship, and many other groupings, the language not only of preference, but of required discourse. In trying to find the length and breadth of English infusion into the world, past and present, MacNeil and primary authors Robert McCrum and William Cran have produced an engaging history, literary survey, sociology, and etymological joyride. By no means, however, are the major streams of English overlooked in favour of the minor tributaries--Shakespeare warrants most of his own chapter, as is perhaps fitting for the most linguistically-influential of all English speakers in history. Of course, about this same time, the Authorised Version of the Holy Bible (better known as the King James Version) was also produced, with its own particular genius of language. 'It's an interesting reflection on the state of the language that the poetry of the Authorised Version came not from a single writer but a committee.' There is a substantial difference in aspect of these two works -- whereas Shakespeare had a huge vocabulary, with no fear of coining new words and terms to suit his need, the King James Bible uses a mere 8000 words, making it generally acceptable to the everyman of the day. 'From that day to this, the Shakespearian cornucopia and the biblical iron rations represent, as it were, the North and South Poles of the language, reference points for writers and speakers throughout the world, from the Shakespearian splendour of a Joyce or Dickens to the biblical rigour of a Bunyan, or a Hemingway.' From Scots to Anglesey, from the Bayou to the Barrier Reef, English is destined to be a, if not the, dominant linguistic force in the world for some time to come, particularly as the internet, the vast global communication network, is top-heavy with English, albeit an ever changing variety. Revel in the glories of the English language, and seek out this fun book. Everyone will find something new.
Rating: 
Summary: Lightweights lacking linguistic literacy, levity,
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Great stuff!
Review: This book is a must read for anyone interested in the English language and it's orgins. As an English teacher I have found the book to be a usefull reference and teaching tool. The book is also written clearly and in lay language so anyone can understand it.
Rating:
Summary: Great read - - nice pictures
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Great read - - nice pictures
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: fantastic overview
Review: This is a wonderfully readable overview of the history of the English language, but very indepth as well. I highly recommend it. Perhaps the only problem with it is its size, but this allows for great maps and photos which help you follow along with the text. The greatest thing about it is that it isn't just a story of English, but of "Englishes."
Rating:
Summary: fantastic overview
Review: This is a wonderfully readable overview of the history of the English language, but very indepth as well. I highly recommend it. Perhaps the only problem with it is its size, but this allows for great maps and photos which help you follow along with the text. The greatest thing about it is that it isn't just a story of English, but of "Englishes."
Rating:
Summary: A marvelous work
Review: This wonderful all encompassing work traces the roots of English to the final spread of English as the language of the world, the language of air traffic and of international dialouge. This tour de force looks into the roots of English as it came from Germany, explaining how England survived the Latin onlaught of the Romans and how english developed, replacing the Welsh dialects and coming to dominate the British isles.
Then the book turns to the creation of the British empire and the export of English to South Africa(where it was a unifying language) to India(where likewise it unified) and Australia, New Zealand, Africa, and the Americas.
This fascinating book includes may maps, even explaining such dialects as 'cockney' and tries to describe the various accentsthat developed among AMerican blacks and Australians. Many subjects are tackled in a fast paced easily understood, but fact packed manner. Almost everys egment of the English language,from borrowed words to exported words is covered,including attempts to refine English, the growth and preeminance of American English and the attempts of other languages like French to rid themselves of English words.
A must read for anyone who has some spare time and wants a good read.
Seth J. Frantzman
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