Customer Reviews

The Oxford Guide to Etymology (Oxford Linguistics)

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An excellent and comprehensive book. This book is for anyone who wants to know what etymology is all about, how it works and what problems it faces. If you ever browsed an etymological dictionary or looked at the brief etymologies in a regular dictionary and wondered, "How did they come up with this?", then you should read this book.

The writing is very accessible and readable. If only most other language scholars wrote like this.

The book really expects no prior knowledge, but it would help if the reader is familiar with the basics of grammar and knows a foreign language.

One of the best points of the book: it discredits the common misconception that etymology is about finding the "true" or "original" meaning of a word. There is no such thing, since language changes all the time, and always did so. For a reader who is not familiar with the history of the English language, it can be quite fascinating to see how dramatically it changed.

A clear, fairly formal presentation of the science of etymology, which is in many ways like archaeology or landscape history (only of words). The book's strength is its reasonably pain-free presentation of the latest research on the subject's theoretical bases. But any dryness is alleviated through plenty of attention to its methods and practice, with many detailed but fascinating (and often delightfully surprising) examples and case studies.

As just a guide to making the most of the etymological entries in the larger dictionaries it may be a little heavyweight, but it fills a need for an accessible introductory guide for someone who wants to actively work in the field. This is especially important, because of all the linguistic sciences this one is the most open to amateur contributions and independent study.