A History of the English Language

Biblio-Blog

Proto-Indo-European
Fortson IV, Benjamin W. Indo-European Language and Culture: an introduction. Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
I was really impressed with this textbook. The second chapter was especially interesting. It showed a lot of proposed maps of the developments of the Indo-European people. It also showed several of the basic words that can be found across several of the descendants of the Proto-Indo-European language. Finally, I thought it was really interesting how it made an attempt to describe the cultural distinctions among the people.

Duursma, K.J. “The Tower of Babel Account Affirmed by Linguistics” found at http://www.creationontheweb.com/images/pdfs/tj/j16_3/j16_3_27-31.pdf
This was an interesting article that looked to reconcile the several different language families. It brought up the point that if man evolved from apes there would be a point were they developed language and the several different language families would not have been an advantage for communication and thus points to the Tower of Babel.

Old English
http://home.comcast.net/~modean52/oeme_dictionaries.htm
This is just a really fun Old English to Present-Day English Dictionary. It’s divided up between the two languages and easily referenced by the first letter. I really thought it was interesting to see all the different Present-Day English word translations for the Old English word. Through this I could in my mind see what possible changes occurred in the language and semantics of a word.

Carkeet, David. “Aspects of Old English Style.” Language and Style, 1977 Vol. 10 Issue 3 pp. 173-189.
This article’s purpose was to isolate one of the grammatical tendencies found within the Old English language to help with understanding those texts. It focused on the tendency of Old English to avoid internal relative clauses. Basically this means that Old English works to complete one thought before moving on to another or providing further details about it.

Graddol, David; Leith, Dick; Swan, Joan. English: History, Diversity, and Change. Routledge 1996.
This was another cool textbook that briefly followed English from its beginnings to Present-Day English. I liked the parts of this book that I read just because it really focused on the human aspect of the language and didn’t separate it out as a mathematical problem. However, even with the more human aspect it was able to teach about the structure of the language much like our textbook did.

Middle English
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/
Like the Old English online dictionary this was another useful dictionary to Middle English. It is very extensive and has a really cool feature where you can find a Middle English Quotation for a word that you are looking for to ensure it was used in the way you want to use it. This was especially helpful for the Middle English Project.

http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/chaucer.htm
This is a really cool website that features Chaucer’s writings but what I found most interesting was that there were quote a few essays written by others about Chaucer’s works. It was really enlightening to find out what insights others have had on his writings. Just reading a few of the essays really gave me a new found appreciation of Chaucer and his works.

Early Modern English
http://leme.library.utoronto.ca/
Like the Old English and Middle English online dictionaries this is one for Early Modern English. This has a word search feature and a lexicon so you can see where the words were used. I thought that this was especially useful in trying to understand Shakespeare’s sonnets.

http://poetry.eserver.org/sonnets/
This is a very accessible list of all 154 Sonnets that Shakespeare wrote. They each so beautiful and after reading several of them I thought that they are terrific examples of Early Modern English.

Devries, William Levering. “The English Bible.” The Old and New Testament Student, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Sep. 1889), pp. 152-161.
This article is a fascinating history of bible in the English language and culture. It catalogued each of the major versions of the Bible as well as the political and cultural implications. After reading about everything that the reformers were able to do and how the several different versions of the Bible came about it was really eye opening and spiritually powerful for me.

Present-Day English
Simonini, R.C. Jr. “Word-Making in Present-Day English” The English Journal, Vol. 55, No. 6 (Sep. 1966) pp. 752-757.
This article studies how Present-Day English is still changing and evolving namely through the creation of new words. It goes through all of the morphological changes like clipping and back formation. It was a pretty good article that I think had the original intention of supporting English as a second language teachers, so that they can help their students understand and be able to predict the meaning of these new words.

http://corpus.byu.edu/time/
I found this corpus through Mark Davies and the ELang 273 course I took from him. This is a really great way to analyze on a large scale how the language is being used today. This specific corpus uses every single issue of Time Magazine to give a glimpse of recent trends in the language.

http://www.americancorpus.org/
The BYU Corpus of American English is similar to the Time Magazine corpus but it is much larger and a lot more powerful. There are 350 million words that can be studied individually or by part of speech. You can also check differences in the language across several different registers and see exactly what is happening rather than what we may just suppose.

World English
http://www.world-english.org/listening.htm
This is a fun website were you can hear audio files and radio stations of several different dialects of English from across the world. I thought this was such a fun website because you not only get to hear the phonological differences between all the varieties of English but also the lexical and structural differences. This is a really fun website.

Bhatt, Rakesh M. “World Englishes.” Annual Review of Anthropology. Vol. 30 (2001). Pp. 527-550.
This is a very interesting article that studied several of the World Englishes and from a linguistic perspective but also from a power perspective. It ultimately reaches the conclusion that pluricentric point of view is the best. It was great to see how global and how powerful of a language English is, not to mention complex in terms of all its varieties.