Stories of English
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Crystal (honorary, linguistics, U. of Wales-Bangor) has written widely on language in general and English in particular. He begins here by tracing the history of how Standard English came to be the privileged tongue it is. Then he recounts the stories of the other facets of the language over the past 1,500 years, which are rarely told. His topics include the Celtic language puzzle, understanding Danes, a trilingual nation, where the -s ending came from, avoiding transcriptional anemia, the case of y'all, and dialect in Middle Earth. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR Thke New York Times - William Grimes Mr. Crystal, in arguing that "eternal tolerance" should replace "eternal vigilance," chooses his examples brilliantly. Those of us who tut-tut when "nuclear" comes out "nucular" need to be reminded that polite Victorians pronounced balcony with the stress on the second syllable, like baloney. Not so long ago, correct English did not permit a sentence like "John is being promoted." The progressive passive of "is being" was despised by refined stylists. Students do need to learn the rules, just as they need to understand computer protocols, as a means to an end. Standard English, and the basic rules of grammar and syntax that govern it, have to be taught. But Mr. Crystal assigns no particular value to "are not" over "ain't." In fact, he likes to sum up his vision of the future of English, or Englishes, in one cheery, defiantly ungrammatical American sentence: "We ain't seen nothin' yet." Full speed ahead to the 14th century.
Ch. 1The origins of Old English15Ch. 2The old English dialects34Ch. 3Early lexical diversity57Ch. 4Stylistic variation in Old English86Ch. 5The transition to Middle English105Ch. 6A trilingual nation121Ch. 7Lexical invasions144Ch. 8Evolving variation169Ch. 9A dialect age194Ch. 10The emerging standard222Ch. 11Printing and its consequences254Ch. 12Early modern English preoccupations285Ch. 13Linguistic daring311Ch. 14Dialect fallout338Ch. 15Stabilizing disorder365Ch. 16Standard rules392Ch. 17New horizons419Ch. 18Linguistic life goes on453Ch. 19And dialect life goes on484Ch. 20Times a-changin'514AppThe location of the towns and counties of England referred to in this book535
