The ​Story of English 0 csillagozás

Robert McCrum – William Cran – Robert MacNeil: The Story of English Robert McCrum – William Cran – Robert MacNeil: The Story of English Robert McCrum – William Cran – Robert MacNeil: The Story of English

The ​Story of English is the extraordinary tale of a language that came from nowhere to conquer the world. Two thousand years ago, Egnlish was confined to a handful of savage and now forgotten tribes on the shores of northwest Europe. Today, in some form or another, it is spoken by perhaps a billion people around the world, of whom 350 million – nearly one-tenth the world's population – use it as their mother tongue. More widely scattered, more widely written and spoken than any other language in history, English has become a global phenomenon of our times.

Why do people of Newfoundland speak English with an Irish brogue? What do Australians have in common with Cockneys? How was rhyming slang borrowed by the hippie movement? When did NASA send the English language into outer space? This book explores these and dozens of other questions in a series of nine absorbing journeys across a vast span of time and space, from Chaucer's England to Reagan's America. These… (tovább)

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Viking, New York, 1986
384 oldal · ISBN: 9780670804672

Népszerű idézetek

hunny>!

The story of all languages is full of surprises. The year the Anglo-Saxons first crossed the sea to the former Roman province of Britannia, in AD 450, the odds against English becoming a world language were about a million to one. It was then an obscure sub-branch of the Germanic family of languages and not even native to the British Isles. In the course of this book we shall see how a language that was born of invasion itself became an invader on a global scale, and how it was thus possible, at the end of 1983, for a nomadic, drought-plagued African tribe, the Tuareg, to delay their annual migration to fresh pastures by ten days, in order to catch the last episode of Dallas.

48. oldal


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