LINGUIST List 26.2526
Mon May 18 2015
Review: Historical Linguistics: van Gelderen (2014)
Editor for this issue: Sara Couture <saralinguistlist.org>
Date: 07-Jan-2015
From: Jessie Sams <samsj
sfasu.edu>
Subject: A History of the English Language
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AUTHOR: Elly van Gelderen
TITLE: A History of the English Language
SUBTITLE: Revised edition
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2014
REVIEWER: Jessie Sams, Stephen F. Austin State University
Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry
SUMMARY
As with many books written on the history of the English language, this book was borne out of van Gelderen’s frustration with finding a suitable text for her History of the English Language course; she wrote the text to reflect the most important goals of her course, focusing on the overall theme of English’s change from a synthetic to an analytic language. Van Gelderen writes, “The goals of the class and book are to come to recognize English from various time periods, to be able to read each stage with a glossary, to get an understanding of typical language change, internal and external, and to understand something about language typology through the emphasis on the synthetic to analytic cycle” (xii-xiii). The book is intended for an undergraduate audience, which is evidenced in both in its style and scope. Ample illustrations, figures, and tables provide support for the content.
The book is broken down into ten chapters with the middle seven chapters covering stages of the English language (e.g., Before Old English, Old English, and Middle English); each chapter is organized with a short introduction and conclusion for the content and is followed by a short section of keywords for the chapter and exercises and/or review questions to accompany the content. Five of the chapters have appendices that provide sample texts from that stage of the English language, and the final chapter provides lists of ideas for practical projects and paper topics. Three appendices for the book follow the ten chapters: Appendix I provides suggested answers to the exercises/questions at the end of each chapter, Appendix II provides information on how to use the Oxford English Dictionary, and Appendix III provides a timeline of historical events from 500,000 BC through 2013 AD.
The first two chapters serve as an introduction to the English language and its basic history, as well as an overview on language change (describing the differences between internal and external change). The first chapter introduces major historical milestones in the development of English, such as the Germanic tribes’ migration to Britain and the Norman Conquest; the second chapter focuses on linguistic features of the English language, introducing readers to necessary terminology for studying spelling, sound changes, and grammatical changes. Chapter 3 turns its focus to the origins of language and then, more specifically, the origins of English; topics such as language families, Grimm’s Law, and language reconstruction are introduced in this chapter.
With the exception of the fifth chapter, Chapters 4-9 share roughly the same organization, with sections on areas like sources, spelling and sounds, grammar, morphology, lexicon, and dialects. These chapters focus on different stages of the English language: Old English (defined as the language from roughly 450-1150), Middle English (1150-1500), Early Modern English (1500-1700), Modern English (1700-the present), and English around the world, including information on major dialects, pidgins, and creoles. Chapter 5 focuses on the transition from Old to Middle English and is not organized like the chapters that surround it; instead, it is organized by other languages’ influence on the development of the English language, including Celtic, Latin, Scandinavian, and French.
Finally, Chapter 10 serves as a conclusion for the book, summarizing the major changing points of the English language and introducing basic themes in theories about language change and language in general.
EVALUATION
This book covers the material necessary to reach each goal van Gelderen lists in the preface (printed above in the summary), so in that respect the book reaches its goals and could be a useful text for an undergraduate course on the history of the English language. In terms of chapters, the book is organized nicely and covers much of the same information as Algeo (2010) and Baugh and Cable (2013), though van Gelderen writes in a much simpler style, which could be beneficial for students.
Within chapters, though, organization is lacking because, at times, there are so many topics covered that too much information is presented in a single chapter. For example, Chapter 2 covers both sound changes and grammatical changes, introducing students to the Great Vowel Shift and to grammatical terminology in a few short pages. As another example, Chapter 7 focuses on Early Modern English but opens with a short section on book-making, even including figures to show what a quire and a quarto look like; that information is not fully integrated with the rest of the chapter and feels like an interesting side note rather than an important concept for the chapter. Because many chapters cover so much information in a limited space, many chapters read as surface analyses of a lot of disparate pieces of information and can be quite overwhelming. Covering fewer topics within each chapter and organizing the information so that it is fully integrated would allow for more in-depth analyses of features of language change, such as those offered in Mugglestone (2012).
One highlight of the book is that, like Freeborn (2006), it incorporates many examples of original texts (and, in some cases, facsimiles to show the original writing). Van Gelderen chooses a few important texts to highlight for each chapter, providing excerpts and any necessary translations within the text of the chapter, but she also provides larger excerpts of texts (and in some cases full texts) from that time period in appendices for the chapter. She provides these appendices so that the texts are arranged in chronological order and represent different genres of writing. Not all these texts are incorporated into the chapter or the exercises, but they could be useful for examples in a classroom situation.
The best feature of the book is perhaps its exercises at the ends of chapters and the interactive questions throughout the chapters; van Gelderen provides many suggestions for getting readers involved in the material. For example, when discussing Scandinavian influence on place names, van Gelderen provides a list of place names in English and asks readers to “[e]xplore what they mean and … look on the map of England to see where [the] places are located” (102). Then, in Appendix I, she provides information about each place name, showing the connection between Scandinavian place names and areas that are associated with Scandinavian settlers. Because all exercises have suggested answers at the back of the book, students can gauge for themselves how well they understand the material.
In the preface, van Gelderen writes that this book “remains the most succinct and accessible yet comprehensive of linguistic histories” (xii). I agree that this text is comprehensive and its writing style is accessible, but the organization of information and inclusion of so many topics keep it from being the most succinct and accessible for scholars or readers working through the text on their own. However, this book could be a useful resource in a classroom context where a professor can guide students through the information in order to help students find the connections within the material.
REFERENCES
Algeo, John. 2010. The Origins and Development of the English Language (6th ed.). Boston: Wadsworth.
Baugh, Albert C. and Thomas Cable. 2013. A History of the English Language (6th ed.). Boston: Pearson.
Freeborn, Dennis. 2006. From Old English to Standard English: A Course Book in Variation across Time (3rd ed.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mugglestone, Lynda (Ed.). 2012. The Oxford History of English (Updated Edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
van Gelderen, Elly. 2014. A History of the English Language (Revised Edition). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Jessie Sams is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, TX. Her primary research interests include the intersection of syntax and semantics, English quotatives, English grammar, and history of the English language.
Page Updated: 18-May-2015