The English Language

by Logan Pearsall Smith

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178 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1912

About the author

Logan Pearsall Smith was an American-born essayist and critic, and a notable writer on historical semantics.

Reviews

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve been following the excellent and entertaining “History of English” podcast - https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/ - I’m up to episode 93 “The Two Arthurs” - and nothing I have heard in this series struck me as contradicting what Logan Pearsall Smith has to say about the development of the language in its historical context.

A caveat: the book was published in 1912 and the language has galloped off in many directions since then. On the other hand, I did find the author’s attitudes surprisingly modern, sceptical and liberal.

[Max Booher · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Every sentence, every collection of words we use in speech or writing, contains, if we examine its component parts, a strange medley of words, old or modern, native or foreign, and drawn from many sources. But each posses its ascertainable history, and many of them bear important traces of the event or movement of thought to which they owe their birth.” - page 127