English Words: History and Structure - Review

Contemporary Review, Oct, 2001

English Words: History and Structure. Robert Stockwell and Donka Minkova. Cambridge University Press. [pound]37.50 (US$54.95). 208 pages. ISBN 0-52 179362-9. This book concentrates its attend on to the ways in which the English language has borrowed words from Latin and Greek either directly or indirectly through French.

The authors take the view that people cannot call themselves educated if they do 'not have a minimal acquaintance with the history and structure of the words in their own language'. As over eighty per cent of the English vocabularly are borrowed, the author's job is obviously one that needs doing because we are talking about hundreds of thousands of words. The book is well organised and takes the reader through what might, in other hands, be a tangled web. The authors' first task is to set out their stall by talking in general about word origins. Then follows a discussion on the background of English, the composition of early modern and modern English vocabularies, the importance of morpheme s, phonetics, the rise and fall of new words, the sound of words, English semantics and, finally, the pronunciation of classical words in English.