Review: Forgotten English
After yesterday’s entry, I got thinking about other fun linguistics books and it occured to me that Forgotten English by Jeffrey Kacirk fell into that category.
English has gone through some really amazing changes over the years. It used to resemble German much more closely than it does now, but over time, meaning and pronunciation have changed significantly. This book looks at some of the more interesting changes.
It’s broken up into categories, which are further divided by word. Each entry is a page or so long and has interesting historical, as well as linguistic, information about the word, it’s usage and where it went in our modern language. It’s really fun and much more literate bathroom reading than junk mail!
My first introduction to this book was actually through a calendar. It was one of those “word-a-day” types and used to really tickle me and make me think. If nothing else, it gave me some idea about how a language might change over time. Always interesting literary possibilities in that.
I have to admit that I found mine in a used book store, but you can click that link above and get it from Amazon.
