The English Language

230 Pages Indexed. The title of this book is The English Language. It could just as well be called A History of The English Language. There are eleven illustrations. The Frontispiece is street entertainers reciting songs and poems, from Cries of London, 1760. This book is in near new condition as some would say it is gift quality. No defects noted. The endpapers are the same burgundy color. The boards are composed of green letters over a light tan background with a burgundy quarter/spine with gold lettering. All of this in an attractive burgundy slip case with no lettering. Interior text pages are bright, tight, and white. There never was a more sparkling refutation of Dr Johnson's famous definition of the lexicographer - a harmless drudge - than the life and work of Robert Burchfield. As Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, he made the English language news. Or perhaps more accurately, he recognised that what was happening to the mother tongue in the late twentieth century was unprecedented, and he used his position at Oxford to publicise the fact. Before Burchfield, the state of the language was an unreported story; after him, it was always a source of debate, and often a headline. Burchfield's foray into linguistic controversy occurred first in the late 1970s, a world now almost as unimaginably remote as the Regency. His thrilling and controversial thesis, which caught the imagination of young arts graduates like me, as well as the attention of the world's press, was simple enough, and linked to Britain's post-imperial twilight. According to Burchfield, English was like Latin. Just as, with the decline of the Roman Empire, Latin broke up into mutually unintelligible languages like French, Spanish and Italian, so in the course of many centuries, said Burchfield, global English would similarly disintegrate into separate tongues. To the delight of cultural commentators from Sydney to Saskatchewan, Burchfield pointed out that, historically speaking, languages have always had a tendency to break up, or to evolve. There were, he argued, some powerful models of the severance of a language into two or more constituent parts, especially the emergence of the great Germanic languages of Western Europe - English, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish and so on - from the mutually intelligible dialects of the fifth century AD. The obvious objection to this model, which his critics were swift to deploy, was the contemporary vigour and interconnectedness of global English. In the age of mass media, the future of world English, said Burchfield's opponents, would never follow the Latin model.…