English - The Origins, History and Development of the Language

Katharine Watson

Price

Format

Hardback, with full-colour laminated cover. Text in two colours. Map. 64pp, 23.5 x 17.5cm.

Description

This book by Dr Katharine Watson, previously published as 'The Story of English', has now been published in a beautiful new hardback edition. It is a slim book packed with knowledge, showing the roots of English in Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, as well as Anglo-Saxon, and tracing the development of the language through to modern times.

From Katherine Watson's Introduction:

"Children from a very early age naturally love language. You can hear them playing with sounds, trying out new words and phrases, repeating them over and over again, delighting in their sound and rhythm. If this love is nourished by the adults around them, through play and talk and reading of stories, and later on at school through learning to write their thoughts and create word pictures, poems and stories of their own, while at the same time being encouraged to explore an ever widening range of literature, it can grow into a life-long love affair. This is certainly what happened in my case. But it was not until, as a student at university, I was introduced to the history of the English language that I discovered what a fascinating and wonderful story it is. A little later I found myself giving lectures on the subject to various groups of adults, and was surprised and moved by the degree of interest and enthusiasm with which these talks were received. At around the same time the new National Curriculum for Schools began to demand that children at secondary school be taught about the history and development of English. I started to think that my own pupils might find the story of our language just as fascinating as the adults did. Most of the available textbooks at that time, however, dealt with the topic only in a very perfunctory manner. So I decided to tell my pupils the story myself. And that is how the present book was born."

"In its first edition, the book has been in use for some time within St James Schools, where I teach. The aim and intention of this new edition is to allow the book to reach a wider readership, both in its primary function as a teaching aid for schools, and also as a book of interest to the general reader."

ISBN

978-1-903843-09-3