Customer Reviews

Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language

5 star:		(6)
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3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This isn't intended to be a review.
Just that I found the book to be extremely readable, very exacting, very interesting from its historic and modern social perspective (and insights), and incredibly human.

From its interesting contrasting of Anglian from Saxon dialects, to its description of 21st century ethnic speech, it keeps the reader informed and fascinated. Each chapter could be read independently of the others.

I have long been interested in the subject of English language history, and found this to be concise, eloquent and inspiring.

I ordered INVENTING ENGLISH the minute I read the reviews and was not disappointed. In fact, it exceeded my expectations. Lerer, a Stanford professor who has produced audio lectures on the English language as well as a considerable backlog of scholarship, has created a highly readable book that goes back to the very origins of the language--its sounds, rhythms, organization, meanings and looks--in post-Roman Britain and then follows its very organic, human trail forward from Old English to Middle English to the modern language that leaped an ocean, spread across the New World and is still evolving.

Lerer has great passion for his topic and a gift for delivering information. While there is considerable technical content, it is incorporated effortlessly and backed up with a glossary and appendices. Citations from Old and Middle English literature are followed immediately by translations. With less than 300 pages, Lerer has to leap from lily pad to lily pad in time to show how the language grew with expanding human experience and was influenced by historical acts, but he seems to hit all the key moments: Caedmon in the 7th century wrapping his consonant-dense bluntish language around Christian concepts; chroniclers documenting daily lives and events; King Alfred organizing a nation state; the Norman Conquest introducing French and a language of court apart from a language of the countryside; Chaucer seizing on the internationalism of King Richard's reign; the Great Vowel Shift; Shakespeare inventing our modern language; orthographers attempting to corral it; American colonists consciously shaping it their way; and those who have continued to use it to interpret experience and communicate life, influenced by technology, warfare, politics and globalization.

There is something beautiful in a language where at the very beginning on a cold, rough shore, users were calling the ocean the "swan-road" and the "whale-road" and the word for poet was the word that became today's "shaper." It is amazing to see that even in times when human endeavor has been at its most self-destructive, the language has been able to flower and step forward.

If reading a history of the English language seems a daunting task, do not despair. Lerer presents his concise history as a conversation with his reader and not as an encyclopedic form. Lerer's style of writing is familiar and close, like you are having light discourse with friends over a glass of wine. He writes in short, self-contained chapters, which smoothly take the reader from seventh century English to the present. It is a book that can be read in a few nights, or if one wishes, at a more leisurely pace which does not make one feel detached from the subject. During the course of this book, Lerer connects with his readers on many levels. He offers his own feelings of inadequacy about studying the language and provides his readers with a sense of immediacy about language change. Although some prior knowledge of linguistics may be helpful, Lerer's text is complete with an appendix and glossary of terms. So, while studying the English language may not seem like easy reading, be assured that Lerer's book provides readers with the experience of reading at ease.

I have long been looking forward to reading this book (it has been on my TBR pile for months). It finally worked its way to the top of the stack, and I am happy to say it did not disappoint.

"Inventing English" traces the evolution of English from the earliest known written document in Old English to the modern day. As the author describes it in his introduction, it is an episodic epic, with each chapter covering a specific topic.

In his book, Lerer does a good job of striking the middle ground; that is, his work is a bit more conversational than a college textbook, but it is definitely not dumbed-down. Someone like me whose degree is in something other than English or Linguistics may struggle a bit with some of the more technical terms he uses in the earlier chapters. However, if you're interested enough in the history of our language to even pick up this book in the first place, then you're probably motivated enough to stick with it, anyway. Not knowing the exact meaning of the technical terms doesn't prevent a good understanding of the gist of what the author is trying to convey.

The first half of the book is the most difficult. In discussing Old and Middle Englishes, Lerer necessarily focuses on the technical aspects of the language: the syntax, grammar, word formation, and pronunciation. This is slow reading, if you really want to absorb what he's saying, that is. However, once he moves into Modern English the reading is faster and less technical.

This book is an excellent survey for the non-Linguistics major. It covers a vast amount of territory at just the right amount of depth to give a nice, beginning overall knowledge of English. For someone who has studied Linguistics in depth, this book would definitely be too shallow. But for anyone else this is a great starting place to understand the birth and evolution of our fascinating and ever-changing language.

I think this book will disappoint many buyers. It is too detailed on some arcane topics, especially concerning the sounds of old English, for beginners. And, there are too many personal flights of the author's fancy, especially in its later stages, for scholars. Most readers in the middle will find some points of real interest, but too many stretches of well-covered ground (such as the chapters on Dr. Johnson and the OED.)

I do not doubt that Professor Lerer knows much about our common tongue. However, in my opinion, his book is a collection of chapters --- a number seemingly aimed at different types of readers --- rather than a seamless discussion of the topic at hand. For me, this was not a first class reading experience.

This book is not (and not meant to be) mere entertainment, so I will review this book by introducing who I am and what I wanted.

I am American, speak several languages and teach English in a foreign country. However I did not study linguistics or Eng. Hist. at school, so while I have a reasonable grasp of language and language quirks and workings, not an actual expert on those subjects.

Then one day I got interested in English, the history of the language, and linguistics, really bit by a bug, and went out and got all sorts of books on the subjects. This was one of those books. And it is the one I least recommend. I had to force myself to read all the way to the 3rd-to-last chapter, at which point I could take no more. It is not too technical, no. Just not well done. The author himself may be a really interesting guy, that's the shame of it. This book is just not well organized.

As it says in its description, it is not an overview of the whole history, but a focusing in on a few points in the history. Each chapter goes into detail on one period, or event, and the chapters do not link together as a story, they are stand-alone essays. This in itself is not a bad thing. However in this book very few of the chapters were very good. There was one or two near the beginning of the book about the relations between French and English that were very interesting and well done, and I almost thought of giving it 2 stars for that reason, but have decided to stick with a strict standard.

Of the 10 or more books I have read on this subject in the last few months, and the ones that would be similar in topic to Inventing English, I recommend The Story of English, from the US tv series, and the Stories of English by the UK linguist David Crystal. Similar titles but different books. Well, a lot of the same ground is covered by them, but some differences and with different aims. "Story" gives the history with a self-congratulatory isn't-English-great? backdrop, and focuses a lot on pronunciation and dialect differences. It is a little more US-centered, a little shallower and just a little easier to read. Crystal's Stories while addressing accents and dialects in depth also talks about structure a little more and literature as well and has a bit more on the relations between Eng and various other languages. He certainly explains what Old English was in a more in-depth and understandable way than the Story of English did, including charts and excerpts etc. He also takes a theme explaining the grammar proscriptivism of the last 300 yrs (the assertion of one grammar being right and other dialect grammars being wrong) and debunks it, something which Story only did in passing. Overall I would say go with Crystal's Stories, but it was not a waste reading both. As for Inventing English, I don't want to say it is a waste, just that the information is better presented, more in depth and clearer in other books. At the very least wait for a paperback, if they make it.

Why is there such a difference between English spelling and pronunciation, and how did grammar rules develop? INVENTING ENGLISH is an engaging survey considering all the oddities of English: it not only covers these oddities but places them in rare American historical perspective, adding background to a survey where others would focus on linguistics alone. High school, college and public library holdings alike will find it a lively historical survey of how people discovered and developed new forms of expression bundled into the English language we know and use today.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

I found this book one of the best of its type. It gives a logical and understandable survey of the development of the English language from its earliest days -- the most interesting and illustrative part of the book -- to contemporary times. The first few chapters are particularly enjoyable though merit a second reading, not because of the presentation, but because of the complexity of the subject.

Others have covered the content and scope of this book sufficiently, so I wish only to echo those who found Lerer's writing dense and remarkably wooden. Readers may find it useful as a reference work, as something they can dip into here and there. But it is certainly no page-turner. For an educator who has much experience explicating arcane subjects for the lay person, Lerer is surprisingly dull, dull, dull!

Seth Lerer missed an opportunity to invent an interesting read with his portable history of the English language. The dry manner in which Lerer writes will certainly disenchant logophiles and entertain only a small number of those of us fascinated by the richness of English. It is difficult to determine what audience Lerer had envisioned when this project was compiled- certainly too simple for true word historians and language scholars, yet too technical for the amateur linguist or wordsmith to properly enjoy. That said, the book does have a handful of interesting revelations pickled through its many sections, but this book will neither fascinate nor captivate the majority of those interested in the invention of English. Two stars, Mr. Lerer.