Daniel W. Mosser has a good website on "The Evolution of Present-Day English" that has pages on each phase of the history of English, starting with Indo-European. I'm too familiar with the material to be sure of this, but it seems pitched at a level accessible to everyone, whatever their prior acquaintance with the subject. (Thanks to aldiboronti at Wordorigins for the link.)
If you're wondering, the title is from Chaucer, specifically a remarkable passage in Book 2 of Troilus and Criseyde that could serve as an epigraph for any book on historical linguistics:
Ye knowe eek, that in forme of speche is chaungePosted by languagehat at July 12, 2005 12:25 PM
With-inne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho
That hadden prys, now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thinketh hem; and yet they spake hem so,
And spedde as wel in love as men now do;
Eek for to winne love in sondry ages,
In sondry londes, sondry been usages.
I agree that it would make a great title.
It was in fact used for a collection of readings illustrating the history of English, which is entered in my personal catalogue as:
Fisher, John H., and Diane Bornstein, editors. In Forme of Speeche is Chaunge: Readings in the History of the English Language. Prentice–Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1974. Five plates (facsimiles). Bibliography. Appendices. VIII + 375 pages. Trade paperback.
(My copy is in a box in a storage unit, so I'm relying on this information, instead of describing it from memory.)
It has been out of print for years; Amazon doesn't have a listing for it, although copies show up on ABEBooks from time to time.
I can't see any real obstacle to using it again, especially if it is spelled differently. Except, of course, for another collection of texts illustrating the development of English....
Posted by: Ian Myles Slater at July 12, 2005 02:08 PMTitles aren't copyrighted, IIRC. There are twelve different books called "Peace Like A River", the most recent of which was written by a family friend.
Posted by: John Emerson at July 12, 2005 04:04 PMThat is true. But I wasn't thinking of copyright issues so much as practical bibliographic ones, as a "real obstacle."
I keep having to ask Amazon to unlink, please, entirely different books with the same title. They don't always agree that a four-hundred page collection of folktales is NOT the same book as a twenty-page retelling of the title story for children, for example.
Posted by: Ian Myles Slater at July 12, 2005 04:16 PMThat's a good passage, though I would use "Nice and Strange" as a title myself, unable to resist the snapshot in the history of 'nice'. It's moved to 'unusual, unfamiliar' just before heading into 'delicate, dainty'.
I suppose (being at work and not having books about me) that 'wonder' is a zero plural there. If so, what a gem of grammatical change it all is: postposed adjectives, then a dative subject and 'hem' from before the Norse borrowing.
Now wonder nyce and straunge us thinketh hem!
Posted by: aput at July 14, 2005 07:29 AMNo, I think wonder is an adverb here ('wondrously'). The plural in -s was well established by Chaucer's day:
c1205 LAY. 21738 Tha.. gunnen to fleonnen.. into than watere, ther wunderes beoth inoghe.
1297 R. GLOUC. (Rolls) 151 Mirabilia Anglie. Thre wondres beth in engelond,..
But you're right, it's a great sentence from that point of view!
hi i'm looking for book to have a speech for my english class ok
Posted by: kostya at November 18, 2005 04:02 PM