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)
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 journeys show how English was taken from the villages of England, Ireland and Scotland to the settlements of the New World, how it was carried in slave ships from West Africa to the plantations of the Caribbean and the Deep South, and how it was scattered with the servants and soldiers of the British Empire to the farthest corners of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, India, and the Far East.
This book is the first that tells the whole history of English in a popular way, and makes it accessible to the general reader. Fully illustrated, it is a stimulating and comprehensive record of spoken and written English in all its variety – from Cockney, Scouse, and Scots to Geordie, Gullah, Strine, Singlish, and Franglais. It is a story that will make us all wonder and think again about the words we use, and the way we say them – fascinating reading for the English-speaking world.