May We Borrow Your Language?: How English Steals Words From All Over the World

by Philip Gooden

The English language that is spoken by one billion people around the world is a linguistic mongrel, its vocabulary a diverse mix resulting from centuries of borrowing from other tongues. From the Celtic languages of pre-Roman Britain to Norman French; from the Vikings' Old Scandinavian to Persian, Sanskrit, Algonquian, Cantonese and Hawaiian – amongst a host of others – we have enriched our modern language with such words as tulip, slogan, doolally, avocado, moccasin, ketchup and ukulele.

May We Borrow Your Language? explores the intriguing and unfamiliar stories behind scores of familiar words that the English language has filched from abroad; in so doing, it also sheds fascinating light on the wider history of the development of the English we speak today.

Full of etymological nuggets to intrigue and delight the reader, this is a gift book for word buffs to cherish – as cerebrally stimulating as it is more-ishly entertaining.

Genres: Nonfiction

384 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 3, 2016

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

[Librada O · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a linguistic dream come true. This should be on every spelling bee finalist's reading list. An excellent history of where some very good words have come from. Interesting to see how it starts in one language, then is broken down into other languages, mangled together, or chopped up, sewn back together, and into a new word. Very informative and quite fascinating for us normies. Definitely going to have to need to read this more than once; so much information to swallow all at once.