The Story of English : How an Obscure Dialect Became the World's Most-Spoken Language

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The Story of English illustrates the compelling history of how the relatively obscure dialects spoken by tribes from what are now Denmark, the Low Countries and northern Germany, became the most widely spoken language in the world, and of how that language evolved during the last two millennia. Chronologically ordered and divided into six main sections covering pre-Roman and Latin influences, the ascent of Old English, and the succession of Middle English, Early Modern and then Late Modern English to today's global language, this fascinating book also explores such factors as the history of the printing press, the works of Chaucer, the evolution of The American Dictionary of the English Language - commonly known as Webster's - and the magisterial Oxford English Dictionary, to the use of slang in today's speech and the coming of electronic messaging: language for a post-modern world.The Story of English is the perfect gift for any lover not just of English, but of the history and development of language.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction (p. 11)
• Part 1 The Celts and the Romans (40 BC to AD 450) (p. 15)
• Continental Celtic versus Insular Celtic (p. 16)
• The Ogham Alphabet (p. 19)
• The Roman Invasion (p. 21)
• Part 2 The Rise of Old English (AD 450 to 1066) (p. 25)
• Angles, Saxons and Jutes (p. 26)
• Anglo-Saxons (p. 27)
• The Runic Alphabet (p. 28)
• Old English and Christianity (p. 28)
• The Old English Alphabet (p. 31)
• The Lindisfarne Gospels (p. 32)
• Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (p. 35)
• Viking Marauders: The Influence of Old Norse (p. 35)
• Alfred the Great (p. 39)
• The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (p. 42)
• The Riddles of the Exeter Book (p. 43)
• Beowulf (p. 48)
• Part 3 Middle English: Geoffrey Chaucer and All that (1066 to 1475) (p. 53)
• A Language United? (p. 54)
• The Domesday Book (p. 56)
• Norman French: The Language of Class and Culture (p. 59)
• The Middle-English Creole Hypothesis (p. 61)
• The Ormulum (p. 63)
• Wycliffe's Bible (p. 65)
• Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales (p. 68)
• The Decline of French (p. 74)
• Chancery Standard (p. 76)
• The Great Vowel Shift (p. 78)
• Part 4 Early Modern English: A Leviathan of Language (1475 To 1670) (p. 81)
• William Caxton and the Printing Press (p. 83)
• Le Morte d'Arthur (p. 87)
• William TyndaleÆs Bible Translations (p. 91)
• Punctuation, Pronouns and Standardized Spelling (p. 97)
• Tottel's Miscellany (p. 100)
• The Inkhorn Debate (p. 103)
• The Campaign for Plain English? (p. 106)
• The Bard and the Renaissance Theatre (p. 107)
• 'False Friends' and Faux Pas (p. 114)
• Sir Francis Bacon (p. 117)
• The King James Bible (p. 120)
• Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (p. 127)
• John Milton and Paradise Lost (p. 131)
• Part 5 Late Modern English: Towards a Global Language (1670 To 1900) (p. 137)
• Alexander Pope (p. 140)
• Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (p. 144)
• The Hammer Blows of Grammar (p. 149)
• The Language of Industry (p. 154)
• American English and Webster's Dictionary (p. 156)
• The Ultimate Worde Horde: The Story of The Oxford English Dictionary (p. 160)
• The Language of Empire (p. 164)
• Part 6 Post-Modern English (p. 167)
• Slang and Euphemisms (p. 169)
• BBC English versus Estuary English (p. 173)
• Singlish and Spanglish (p. 176)
• Digital English (p. 181)
• Select Bibliography (p. 185)
• Index (p. 187)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Piercy (Slippery Tipples) offers a handy pocket guide to the way the English language conquered the world. Moving chronologically, he opens with a cursory look at how, despite four centuries of Roman rule, the native Celts resisted speaking Latin, before "Anglisc" emerges circa AD 450 with the arrival of the next invaders, the Angles and Saxons. "Olde" English took a big leap forward during the reign of Alfred the Great (871-899)-Oxford founder, literacy promoter, and defender against Viking attacks. When the Normans brought French across the Channel, the aristocracy adopted it despite the formalization of the English alphabet by an industrious monk in 1011. In the 1370s Chaucer, with his Canterbury Tales, memorialized Middle English, a hybrid of French, Anglo Saxon, and Old Norse. Between colonization and the Industrial Revolution, by Queen Victoria's reign a quarter of the planet became English speakers. Organized in bite-size chapters peppered with sidebars and quotations Piercy closes with today's robust, slang-infused English. While the topics of BBC English and colonial dialects may be lost on American readers, puzzle lovers will be pleased to discover one of the earliest extant books in English: an anthology of poems and riddles entitled the Exeter Book. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.