26.2526, Review: Historical Linguistics: van Gelderen (2014)

Mon May 18 20:11:15 UTC 2015

LINGUIST List: Vol-26-2526. Mon May 18 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.2526, Review: Historical Linguistics: van Gelderen (2014)

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Date: Mon, 18 May 2015 16:10:57
From: Jessie Sams [samsj at sfasu.edu]
Subject: A History of the English Language

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-2098.html

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.

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