The Story of English: How the English Language Conquered the World

by Philip Gooden

Traces the evolution of the English language, from the Angles and Saxons of the medieval era to the role of the Internet and the United States in its perseverance today.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Language, Linguistics, Reference

223 pages, Hardcover

First published October 10, 2009

About the author

Philip Gooden lives in Bath. In addition to his Nick Revill series, Sleep of Death, he is the author of The Guinness Guide to Better English and the editor of The Mammoth Book of Literary Anecdotes. Each of his Nick Revill mysteries revolves around a Shakespearean play mirroring life - in Sleep of Death the play was Hamlet, in this offering it is Troilus and Cressida.
AKA Philippa Morgan.

Series:
* Shakespearean Murder
* Tom Ansell

Reviews

[Kris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a coffee-table book that provides general descriptions of the history of the English language. He moves chronologically, and sometimes geographically, throwing in some standard photos and a few random etymologies. It's an easy read, useful for an overview, but not amazing. I still prefer McCrum's The Story of English.

Published in the UK in 2009, it's written with a clear British slant, and some of the ending chapters about modern usage in the twenty-first century are already dated. This being pre-iphone era, Gooden marvels at the idea of a "blogosphere" and people using smiley faces in texting. He can never quite throw off that unspoken British bias: Missing or incorrect references to parts of America (you really meant to say the southwest, not the south); using British spelling or vocabulary without acknowledging it ("nick" means "prison"? you said "typewriter correction fluid" but I think you mean whiteout?); skirting around the fact that the British Empire, you know, collapsed; and the slight British superiority complex (the Brits are fond of "cryptic puzzles" while the Americans just play Scrabble), while at the same time marveling at these strange American cousins who popped up out of nowhere, with their big country, and their big economy, and their widespread influence.

He covers the basics and touches on many ideas very briefly. I wanted something a little more thorough. I wish he would have devoted more space to describing differences between kinds of English across more countries, different creole and pidgin forms of English, and the influence of immigration and technology upon English. The book ends abruptly, with no conclusion.

In this book, Gooden references The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary and The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way.

[Pallavi Kamat · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book gives a good insight into how the English language came into being and how it has now become the de-facto medium of communication through most of the world.

The author provides the origin of several words borrowed from other languages including Hindi, Afrikaans, Spanish, French, German, etc.

What I found a bit disturbing, however, is that not a single woman has been credited towards the development of the language. Only Jane Austen has been mentioned cursorily in the book. Rest merely seems to be a man's affair :(

Some bits I found interesting in the book:
- Sir William Jones said: "Pythagoras and Plato derived their sublime theories from the same fountain with the sages of India." He believed the Sanskrit language was more perfect than the Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either.
- The word juggernaut is derived from an incarnation of the Hindu deity Vishnu - Jagannath.
- The term blurb, describing the material on a book jacket, is attributed to the American humorous author Gelett Burgess in 1907.
- Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, John F. Kennedy's inauguration speech, Barack Obama's 2008 victory speech & Tony Blair's May 1997 speech are referred to as examples of using the language wonderfully.

[Lynn]

I've read this story (in various other books) off and on for about 20 years now. There's something about the English language that is overtly intriguing - maybe because it encompasses the history of the world. New to the story (since last I learned) is that we can now go back 10,000 years in our search for the universal language that started it all, thanks to super computers. This even pre-dates the Indo-European tongue from which all modern languages in the Western world have sprung.

New stuff included in the ongoing story of English:
. Words created because of texting (LMAO, LOL, CUL8R)
. Emoticons :-D as words

Overall, this book was a good update on the story of English. It prompted me to go back and listen to the lectures on the English language by Prof. Seth Lehrer.

[Helen Hagon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting book that does what it says on the cover: it tells the story of how the English language developed as various peoples landed on England's shores, adding their different languages to the melting-pot, and then goes on to explain how English subsequently started to spread around the globe. Although I was already familiar with the general history of the language, I learned all sorts of details I hadn't known before. I thought the structure of the book was excellent and divided into logical chapters, until the last couple of chapters which seemed to go off at a tangent. While still interesting, they weren't really relevant to the story the book was trying to tell and might have been better saved for another book about the use of the language, rather than its history.

[Nicole · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't get along with the tone of this book at all. For me it was not professional enough and it couldn't tell me anything I did not already know. For those who want an academic yet easy-to-read book about the subject I would highly recommend Dan McIntyre's History of English. Although it was written for undergraduates it is general enough to not exclude the interested beginner with its language or tone.

This book on the other hand was unable to decide if it was a general knowledge book or a book for people in the field. I just saw it as a reconstruction of academic workwithout the references with a tone which did not suit author nor subject. An entirely pointless exercise for the author in my opinion. Having read a range of texts which the author would have done well to reference, all I can conclude is that he has muddied the water of an otherwise fascinating field.

[Mallee Stanley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This version was definitely more thorough than the previous Story of English I read but still didn't meet the standard of the one I read years ago that was written and printed in England. While this version acknowledged the many borrowed words English has incorporated from other languages, there was still no mention of Arabic.
When we use the word algebra — a part of mathematics we learned because of the Arab world — it is clear it's an Arabic word, like others (e.g. mascara). The number system we use — the Hindu Arabic system — a system that had zero that the Romans had no concept of — how can we omit these important influences on the English language? Yet this book's omission sends a sad message to the Arab world.

[James Boling · Rating 5 out of 5]

An oddly abrupt ending but a very fun & informative read!

[LPR · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was a great and interesting overview which did as well as could be expected considering the huge undertaking it had ... undertook (?), while also wanting to remain general-interest level. It of course ran into some of the issues I usually have with accessible, general-audience non-fiction, which is that it usually just leaves me wanting more, in a 'why didn't i spend my time reading a more detailed, academic book on this subject instead' type of way, not in a good 'wanting more' type of way. (An exception to this is whatever exact mode Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History was working in, because that was undeniably my sweet spot.) But as a historical look at linguistics and English it was very good. The earlier chapters on history were far more interesting than the later chapters about the current state of the language (though they could have used more maps). But that is undeniably mostly because there are lots of more interesting, better put-together, more intensive, more up-to-date works about the current state of the language out there so this one didn't quite measure up (having the prescriptivist vs descriptivist camps of thought explained to me again was a total waste of time). For a better look: Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, which is mind-blowingly good and completely fascinating. I also think that as a whole the book did a good job of thinking about the language internationally, almost too good of a job at points, since I can't for the life of me figure out if this book was British or American, and honestly I think a solid point of view would be more valuable than a weird attempt at bothsides-neutrality.

All-in-all, it was fine. A little out of date, a little lacking in parts, but not as questionably colonialist/ethnocentrist as I was expecting from the title, so there was a bullet dodged there at least.

Lastly, the huge, glaring problem of this book completely lacking a conclusion. This single fact brought my rating down a whole star. The subsection ended, I turned the page, and there was the glossary! And it's not like the final chapter topically wasn't a good overview, it was, but that does NOT a conclusion make. It was horribly jarring and a huge, huge oversight that significantly weakened the book as a whole. Like, I get the project was big and it would be hard to write a conclusion that did justice to a whole language, but like, gosh, please at least try.

Mostly: a wealth of fun facts that I will want to remember but promptly totally forget, but not particularly deep-diving or mind-expanding as a whole work.

[Stephanie Ricker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three and a half stars rounded up to four. A fun coffee-table type of book with some outright fascinating etymologies (see some examples below), but a rather ho-hum execution of the overall history of English. As other reviewers have noted, the book feels surprisingly dated for 2009 once we get to the chapters on 21st century; I would have guessed it was written in 1999 or 2000. Some of the linguistic examples are so British as to be unreognizable to the American reader; the section on rhyming slang was completely foreign to me. Guess that's not too surprising considering where the language originated!

Here were some of my favorite gems:
You would think that "ransack" (rob, plunder) would come from the same roote as "sack" (destroy, plunder), but no: "ransack" comes from Old Norse rann+saekja (house+seek), and "sack" comes from French sac (sack into which you might put your looted goods). Stuff like this is why spurious etymology is so common; false cognates about.

"Chivalry," as most probably already know, comes from the French word cheval (horse). But this in turn came from Latin caballus, which does mean horse, but specifically a slang term for a Roman cavalryman's horse, the equivalent of nag, while the Latin word for a regular horse was equus. So chivalry is named not after the noble equus, but after the soldier's old nag.

Meanwhile the word "cabal" is related to none of the above, but is derived from Hebrew qubbalah or kabbala (describing the mystical teachings of some Jewish rabbis) because of its sense of mystery.

[Patti (baconater) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting. A good book to dip in and out of whilst travelling.

[Jc · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting expose on the developments of the English language.

[♥Xeni♥ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a 3 to a 3.5 star read. The first half is pretty good, interesting, in depth enough for an overview-style book (which this is), but the latter half ends up far too much in modern ground.

[Amanda Witt]

A good brief account of the language developing over the centuries -from the early English invaders through to Chaucer and Shakespeare and their influences.

[Darrin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was not the book I was looking for when I bought it at Strand Bookstore in Manhattan several weeks ago. I purchased it because I did not have access to my Goodreads app at the time and, so, could not determine which of the two books with similar titles this one was...and my memory was faulty.

In the end, this was not it.

I really wanted a book about the linguistic nuts and bolts of the english language that was more detailed and more rigorous. This book is really meant for a college 101 survey course or a high school english class. It started off interesting but I found myself muddling through history I was already aware of and it took on the feel of a word maven's column in the local newspaper.

[Lucy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good history of the English language and how and why it evolved as it has. Occasionally, the author's English-English bias is obvious at the expense of American English. Still it's a good book with interesting historical perspective and small side-bars on specific words that represent various periods. I do like the fact that he doesn't ignore or forget other places where English is or was important, like Australia and India, and doesn't cover just England and the U.S. He also points out that there are more people speaking English as a second language than speak English as a first language. This, of course, points up his subtitle: How the English language conquered the world.

[Beorn · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book that went from intriguing to interesting to tedious in remarkably quick succession.
As an amateur etymology novice I picked this up thinking I'd be more interested than I was. Far from being about the meaning of words, origins of phrases and things, it's a far more bland though accessible explanation of the place of English in the development of modern society.

I'd recommend picking up something like the 'Etymologicon' over this book unless you're a linguistics student in which case knock yourself out.

[Severance Biro · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love linguistics. Learning new words, discovering relationships between languages & cultures, is my favorite way to observe history, in part because seeing how languages develop is a very real way to see how history has affected me personally in everyday life.
I have a number of books on linguistic development (particularly English, as this is my native tongue), but this is one of my favorites; this book draws a clear chronology in easily-understood terms with a very accessible format. I think the entire English-speaking population stands to gain from reading books such as this.

[Gary · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pretty standard history of English. The one striking, and useful, feature is the number of images and 'side boxes' which augment the information of the narrative (the more knowledgeable reader may safely ignore the majority of these, however).

Liked it a lot.

[katie]

Summer 09-10 booklist.

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

How the English language developed and keeps evolving. Nice easy read, interesting and short enough to keep all entertained.

[Chrissy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting read about how english has evolved. And plenty of pictures to keep it from being too dry. Fun book.

[Nick Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

A standard short history of the English language for the general reader. Solid enough, but no surprises for anyone familiar with the subject.

[Pam Knox · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting subject matter but a rather boring rendition. The Mother Tongue has just as much information and is a much better read.

[Vikas Datta · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderfully crafted tale of the great language...

[Miroslav Kohut · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit too conscise and shallow but nonetheless very entertaining and captivating tour through the history and richness of the English language.

[Gerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

very interesting but a slower read than I had expected

[Richard K · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bit scattergun