Book rec: The Long Journey of English
Hello!
As always, I had a great time at 4th Street Fantasy, where I saw friends from my Viable Paradise class (and other VP alums/instructors) and from Codex as well as people I met there in years past. It's such a smart convention, and I love going there and hearing people say smart things about books I've never heard of and ones I've read a dozen times but never thought about quite in that way. I was on a panel about military fiction, where I was the person without any sort of experience in that vein, just a lot of opinions on Gundam shows. It went pretty well, I think.
Amplitudes is out and debuted on the USA Today bestseller list, which is pretty exciting.
The Long Journey of English
In an earlier newsletter, I talked about Peter Trudgill's Millennia of Language Change, which I enjoyed but thought was probably too academic for a general audience. It's pretty much a collection of articles and essays that was edited together to create a cohesive unit. But his latest book (or latest that I know of) is much more targeted to a general audience, and I want to talk about it and recommend it to you.
Peter Trudgill is an English linguist who authored many of the foundational papers in sociolinguistics in the UK and went on to have a long career. He wrote some of the earliest papers about dialect contact. He's in his 80s now, and he seems to be doing a sort of retrospective of his research.
In Long Journey, which is subtitled A geographic history of the language, he traces English back to its roots in the Indo-European homeland (which the current general consensus puts near the Black Sea in the steppes, though there are two other strong contenders) and follows the people who would become the English as they traversed what is currently eastern Europe to reach the Germanic homeland (southern Sweden) and then fill the power vacuum left when the Romans left Britain. The other Germanic languages are left largely untouched-on, because this is a story of English, not of Swedish or German, except as they interact with English, as in the Danelaw in Anglo-Saxon England.
The story of English is a story of colonization, and he emphasizes this in every chapter. The earliest chapters are by necessity somewhat speculative, as they go into prehistory, but once he gets to the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes, we have a lot of records. He focuses on the Celtic languages of Britain, especially Irish, but as speakers of English spread themselves throughout the world, they encounter, for example, Native American languages, and Trudgill discusses the effects that this encounter (usually at the end of a literal or metaphorical spear) has on the Native American or African or Australian aboriginal language and its speakers.
I first read about this book in a review in a journal, and the reviewer said that linguistics books aren't usually this political, and I thought to myself, “What sociolinguistics books are you reading that you completely miss the politics?” Granted, most journal articles and academic texts are perhaps subtle in their politics, requiring you to read between the lines a bit, and Trudgill is decidedly, unambiguously, direct about political matters in this book.
I appreciated the summary of historical linguistics in the first few chapters, which were a nice review of grad school, and, as one of my interests was (is) Norse-English contact on Britain in the Anglo-Saxon period, I also enjoyed the section on that. The sections on Ireland, the Americas, and Australia & New Zealand were interesting and infuriating.
Starting in chapter 4 or 5, there's a discussion of those left (or who stayed) behind and/or the dispossessed or the colonized, which I presume is what the journal reviewer read as “political.” But any good sociological study has to be political, or it is worthless.
I would recommend this book to anyone who's interested in sociology, linguistics, or the history of English and the people who speak it. If you subscribe to my newsletter, I presume you're interested in at least one of these things. It was published by Cambridge University Press, but it's priced for the general public, not for academic libraries, so it's fairly affordable.
That's all for now!
Until next time!
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