Most popular Historical & comparative linguistics books

Snowflake, elite, expert . . . What are today's 'bad words' and what do they say about us, both as individuals and as a society?

Women as slang creators and users is perhaps the last, and very important, piece of the slang jigsaw. Women in slang is a pretty sorry story, but women and slang is an undiscovered territory, which this book explores, from fishwives and flappers to Mumsnet.

The almost incomprehensible wit and wonder of Irish slang words. Can you tell your bowsies from your gougers from your gurriers? No? Well, it's time to stop acting the maggot and find out, courtesy of this invaluable reference book that's been donkey's years in the making (only coddin').

This introduction to the history of English includes chapters on language change, the Indo-European background of English, and on Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English and Late Modern English. It offers information about the socio-historical background, the core areas of linguistic structure, discourse, speech acts and genres.

The newest volume in David Crystal's pentalogy of the English language, focusing on the subtleties of pronunciation

This book provides a brief account of the origins, history, and sense-development of more than 38,000 words.

Considering literature comparatively can help readers realize how much can be learned by looking beyond the horizon of their own cultures, discovering not only more about other literatures, but also about their own. Ben Hutchinson offers a history of comparative literature, placing it at the heart of literary criticism.

This book explores the fascinating origins of the words and phrases that we use every day. Simon Horobin takes the reader through a typical day's activities - waking up, eating meals, going to work - and looks at the etymology of the words we use to describe them, as well as how their meanings have changed over time.

Forget the boring stuff you learned in school. Here's the REAL skinny on Irish history.

This informative, accessible exploration of Geordie examines the origins of the dialect and its European roots. It includes a glossary of words along with features on Geordie songs, Brown Ale, Border Reivers, Geordie surnames, keelmen and local food. In addition the book examines the two main theories that explain the term Geordie.

Provides a brief account of the origins, history, and sense-development of a large part of the vocabulary of modern English, including both basic words and a wide selection of derivative forms.

Trilling is concerned with the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one's self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in the moral life-and the further shift which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity.

Covers the major aspects of linguistics. This guide begins at the 'arts' end of the subject and finishes at the 'science' end, with the discoveries regarding language in the brain. It looks at the prehistory of languages and their common origins, language and evolution, language in time and space, grammar and dictionaries and phonetics.

Few words are as ideologically charged as "ghetto," a term that has described legally segregated Jewish quarters, dense immigrant enclaves, Nazi holding pens, and black neighborhoods in the United States. Daniel B. Schwartz reveals how the history of ghettos is tied up with struggle and argument over the slippery meaning of a word.

This superbly well-informed - and also wonderfully entertaining - history of the English language answers all these questions, showing how the many strands of English (Standard English, dialect and slang among them) developed to create the richly-varied language of today.

Does language reflect the culture of a society? Is our mother-tongue a lens through which we perceive the world? Can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts? This title states that contrary to the fashionable academic consensus of today, the answer to all these questions is - yes.

How many languages are there? What differentiates one language from another? Are new languages still being discovered? Why are so many languages disappearing? These are some of the questions considered in this Very Short Introduction. By examining the science of languages, we find that the answers are not as simple as we might expect.

An introduction to the study of language. With abundant examples and exercises, it helps students learn for themselves how to do historical linguistics. It also includes examples taken from a wide range of languages, including non-Indo-European languages, that illustrate concepts and methods.

During the Roman empire Greek speakers learned Latin using textbooks that still offer special advantages: authentic and enjoyable vignettes about the ancient world, easy Latin composed by Romans, insight into ancient learning practices. This book makes the ancient Latin-learning materials available to modern students for the first time.

This innovative introduction outlines the structure and distribution of the world s languages, charting their evolution over the past 200,000 years.

This is the fully revised and expanded second edition of English - One Tongue, Many Voices, a book by three internationally distinguished English language scholars who tell the fascinating, improbable saga of English in time and space.

An updated edition of the first ever comprehensive Scots language course, including 25 graded lessons, an English to Scots vocabulary list and more.

This unique and thoroughly revised collection contains over 1,100 of the most widely used proverbs in English, drawing on the resources of the Oxford Languages team for the most up-to-date research. Lively and compelling, it is filled with favourites - old and new - with a strong emphasis on meanings of proverbs catalogued.

The Story of English is the extraordinary tale of the origins and development of the English language. Two thousand years ago English was confined to a handful of savage tribes on the shores of north-west Europe; More widely scattered, written and spoken than any other language in history, English has become a global phenomenon.

English Accents and Dialects provides a unique introductory guide to the regional and social varieties of English spoken in the UK and Ireland.

Essential study guides for the future linguist.

Encompassing eponyms from medicine, botany, invention, science, fashion, food and literature, this book uncovers the intriguing tales of discovery, mythology, innovation and infamy behind the eponyms we use every day. The perfect addition to any wordsmith's bookshelf.

A step-by-step introduction to the history of the English language that teaches both students and instructors about complex systems, the scientific model behind human speech. This easy-to-follow text includes chapter openers, key terms, chapter summaries and end-of-chapter exercises, as well as online resources and audio samples.

Hittite is the earliest attested Indo-European language and was the language of a state which flourished in Asia Minor in the second millennium BC. This introductory course comprehensively introduces Hittite grammar in ten lessons and provides ample exercises both in transliteration and in cuneiform.

'Language is mankind's greatest invention - except of course, that it was never invented.' So begins Guy Deutscher's fascinating investigation into the evolution of language.

Roughly half the world's population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did they manage to spread it around the globe? This title reveals how their domestication of horses and use of the wheel spread language.

Hobson-Jobson is a unique lexicon of British India. Part dictionary, part encyclopedia it shows how words of Indian origin entered the English language and offers insight into Victorian views of Asia and the way cultures transform one another. Quirky and entertaining, this selected edition includes a fascinating introduction and notes.

This authoritative dictionary provides coverage across the field of linguistics, both the theoretical and the practical. In over 3,250 entries it clearly defines terms relating to phonetics, grammar, semantics, languages (spoken and written), dialects, and sociolinguistics.

This workbook guides students through 12 problems on the establishment of genetic relationship among languages, 24 problems on sound change, 35 problems on phonological reconstruction, 10 problems on internal reconstruction, and 20 problems on subgrouping.

This concise textbook provides advanced undergraduate and graduate students with an engaging and thorough overview of the history of Spanish and its development from Latin. Featuring numerous exercises, and presupposing no prior knowledge of Latin or linguistics, the book is suitable for courses on the history of Spanish and Spanish linguistics.

This volume provides a comprehensive reference grammar of Gothic, the earliest attested language of the Germanic family (apart from runic inscriptions). It is the first in English to draw on the recently discovered Bologna fragment and Crimean graffiti, in addition to the traditional Bible translation explored in most works to date.

Victoria Bricker's painstaking work is based on almost one thousand provenienced notarial documents and letters written by native speakers of Yucatec Maya from the colonial times to the modern day. Because the documents are dated and also specify the town where they were written, Bricker was able to determine when and where grammatical changes first appeared in the language.

This volume publishes in full for the first time all known cuneiform manuscripts of an Akkadian calendar treatise composed in Babylon in the Late Babylonian period. Hand-drawn copies of the clay tablets in the British Museum, a composite edition, and a manuscript score, are accompanied by a contextualizing introduction and detailed commentary.