The Stories of EnglishAbrams, 2005年9月6日 - 592 頁 A groundbreaking history of worldwide English in all its dialects, differences, and linguistic delights: “Informative . . . distinctive . . . a spirited celebration.” —The Guardian In this “well-informed and appealing” work (Publishers Weekly), David Crystal puts aside the usual focus on “standard” English, and instead provides a startlingly original view of where the richness, creativity, and diversity of the language truly lies—in the accents and dialects of nonstandard English users all over the world. Whatever their regional, social, or ethnic background, each group has a story worth telling, whether it is in Scotland or Somerset, South Africa or Singapore. He reminds us that for several hundred wonderful years, there was no such thing as “incorrect” English—and traces the evolution of the language from a few thousand Anglo-Saxons to the 1.5 billion people who speak it today. Moving from Beowulf to Chaucer to Shakespeare to Dickens and the present day, Crystal puts regional speech and writing at center stage, giving a sense of the social realities behind the development of English. This significant shift in perspective enables us to understand for the first time the importance of everyday, previously marginalized, voices in our language—and provides an argument too for the way English should be taught in the future. “A work of impeccable scholarship [that] could easily serve as a standard textbook for students of linguistics, but Mr. Crystal, reaching out to a more general audience, recognizes that even the most avid reader might flinch at the sections on Old Norse grammatical influence. Cleverly, he has sprinkled the book with little digressions, set apart in boxes, that address historical mysteries, strange loanwords, interesting etymologies and the like.” —The New York Times “Learned and often provocative . . . demonstrates repeatedly that common conceptions about language are often historically inaccurate—split infinitives bothered no one until recently (likewise sentence-ending prepositions).” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Simply the best introductory history of the English language family that we have. The plan of the book is ingenious, the writing lively, the exposition clear, and the scholarly standard uncompromisingly high.” —J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature |
內容
Stylistic variation in Old English | |
The transition to Middle English | |
Lexical invasions | |
The first dialect story | |
Well well | |
Dialect fallout | |
Stabilizing disorder | |
Standard rules | |
New horizons | |
Tracking a change the case of yall | |
And dialect life goes | |
Dialect in Middle Earth | |
The location of the towns and counties of England referred to in this book | |
Where did the s ending come from? | |
Printing and its consequences | |
Early Modern English preoccupations | |
Linguistic daring | |
Acknowledgements | |
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常見字詞
accent Ælfric American Anglo-Saxon Anglo-Saxon Chronicle appear arrived authors become Bible Britain British English Cambridge Celtic Chapter character Chaucer Chronicle colloquial common Danelaw dialect Dictionary distinctive Early Modern English East Midlands educated emergence England English language especially example expression forms French Germanic glottal stop grammar Henry influence Interlude John kind King large number later Latin learnèd letters lexemes lexical linguistic literary literature loanwords London manuscripts Middle English Middle English period nonstandard English Norman northern noun Old English Old Norse origin Oxford panel phrases political pronounced pronunciation Received Pronunciation recorded reflect regional dialect Scandinavian Scotland Scottish scribes seen sense sentence Shakespeare sixteenth century social society sociolinguistic sound southern speak speakers speech spelling spoken Standard English standard language story style stylistic texts thou translation usage variation variety verb vocabulary vowel West Saxon writing written