The Stories of English - Hardcover

CRYSTAL, David

4.04

1,386 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0713997524 ISBN 13: 9780713997521

Publisher: Lane, 2004

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Stories of Englilsh, 2004, by David Crystal. Introduction to the history of the English language family. Hardcover with dust jacket, 584 pages, published by Allen Lane (Penguin).

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About the Author:

David Crystal is Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor. He has published over 90 books including: The English Language (Penguin), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English language. He was awarded the OBE for services to the English language in 1995.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* For at least 200 years, the story of English has been the story of Standard English triumphant. But now, in a work of unprecedented scope and range, a distinguished linguist challenges that deceptive hegemony, showing with piquant detail and lively anecdote that no standards of correctness have ever really contained the surging energy of English, in all it multiform varieties. From the syntactical inventiveness of tenth-century Norse invaders to the lexical ecumenism of twenty-first-century Tex-Mex ranch hands, Crystal traces the diverse and unpredictable influences that have shaped English into an unruly family of dialects, creoles, and patois. To be sure, Crystal acknowledges the emergence during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of a prestigious standard version of English. Yet he shows in instance after instance that the tempests of linguistic change have often overwhelmed the custodians of the King's English, compelling them to accommodate forces they could not control. And though he never loses his focus on language, Crystal allows some of its more colorful users--including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, and Thomas Jefferson--to bring their personalities and voices into the chronicle. Accessible to the nonspecialist, Crystal's rich chronicle still presses deeply enough into key episodes (the Great Vowel Shift and the Elizabethan effervescence, for instance) to entice even casual readers into the more scholarly sources listed at the end of the book. Why, after all, should professional philologists hog all the fun? Bryce Christensen
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