Early Modern English

by Charles Laurence Barber

Now available in a completely revised edition, this book describes the English language between the years 1500 and 1700 - the different varieties of the language, the attitudes of its speakers towards it, its pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. It will be useful to serious students of the history of English and takes full account of those readers who are mainly interested in the literature of the period by providing plenty of references to literary works and authors.

Genres: Language

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

Reviews

[Benjamin]

The information and selections in this book are good but the narrative style and organization of it don't really do much to help improve that. It's a dry book but good at presenting the information it has to.

[George]

If you're fascinated--as I am--by sociolinguistics, phonology, and grammar, especially as demonstrated in English, you'll find this fascinating. Barber lost me a bit when he started presenting the statistics from his vocabulary samples out of the OED*, but I soldiered on and can't regret the comparatively little time I spent with that on the way to the end.

For the serious student, rather than the odd duck like me who reads this stuff largely for pleasure, I'm betting that the text being two decades old matters, at least somewhat. But my master's in the area is two decades older than that, so it doesn't worry me.
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* The Oxford English Dictionary, now available online. If that doesn't interest you, this book probably isn't for you, either.