Stories of English

Name: Stories of English
Price: 8.82 USD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9781585677191

ISBN-10: 1585677191

ISBN-13: 9781585677191

Edition: N/A

Authors: David Crystal

List price: $18.95

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The Stories of English is a groundbreaking history of the language by David Crystal, the world-renowned writer and commentator on English. Other books have been written on the subject, but they focused on the educated, printed language called standard English. Crystal turns the history of the language on its head and 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 globe. Interwoven within this central chronological story are accounts of uses of dialect around the world as well as in literary classics from The Canterbury Tales to The Lord of the Rings. For…

Book details

List price: $18.95
Publisher: Abrams, Inc.
Publication date: 9/6/2005
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 592
Size: 5.45" wide x 8.00" long x 1.80" tall
Weight: 1.144
Language: English



List of Illustrations


List of Maps


Introduction


The standard story


The real story



The origins of Old English



The Celtic language puzzle



The Old English dialects



The rise and fall of West Saxon



Early lexical diversity



Understanding Danes



Stylistic variation in Old English



Grammatical transition



The transition to Middle English



Two Peterborough Chronicles



A trilingual nation



Lay Subsidy dialects



Lexical invasions



The first dialect story



Evolving variation



Well well



A dialect age



Where did the -s ending come from?



The emerging standard



Complaining about change



Printing and its consequences



The first English dictionary



Early Modern English preoccupations



Choosing thou or you



Linguistic daring



Avoiding transcriptional anaemia



Dialect fallout



A beggarly portrayal



Stabilizing disorder



Delusions of simplicity



Standard rules



Glottal stops



New horizons



Tracking a change: the case of y'all



Linguistic life goes on



The grammatical heart of nonstandard English



And dialect life goes on



Dialect in Middle Earth



Times a-changin'



The location of the towns and counties of England referred to in this book


Notes


References


Acknowledgements


Person Index