A Companion to the History of the English Language (review)

This handsome volume will join dozens of other encyclopedias and companions being nowadays published by the most prestigious presses. The informational stream has drowned us. Whichever subject we may turn to, we discover countless publications, sometimes running to several hundred pages, that recycle a few well-known facts but boast of applying new theoretical approaches and formalisms to the paltry data. As a result, we read surveys or (even better) digests of surveys.

The present companion offers a bird's-eye view of the history of the English language, understood as broadly as possible. It contains 59 articles, explaining everything to the prospective readers whose level of sophistication is supposed to be slightly, if at all, above zero. Those readers were visualized as knowing nothing about anything in language study (perhaps a correct attitude: I cannot judge). One can say that the variation /oftƷn/ ~ /ofƷn/ 'often' is allophonic (!), p. 19, and allegedly they will believe it, or that "[t]he Indo-European language family may be pictured as a tree seen from above, with differently shaped branches . . . " (this is the cutting edge indeed), p. 125, and they will be grateful. The editors explain:

Our aim is to offer those working with literary and cultural material a fuller perspective on language, one that enhances their interests in the light of the history of the English language . . . as it has been researched and studied for more than a century. To this end, the current volume reflects contemporary concerns with colonialism and post-colonialism, race and gender, imperialism and globalization and Anglophone cultures and literatures, but approaches these contemporary issues from a historical perspective with special attention paid to the role played by language.

(p. 3)

Thus, literary scholars in need of a remedial historical language course ("a fuller perspective") may keep working on their favorite subjects (race, gender, class, ethnicity, globalization, colonialism, and imperialism) but will be exposed to palatalization, order of words, fusional languages, and other obscure concepts. How exactly this process will expand their horizon and why they need it remains unclear.

Every chapter in the companion ends with references and suggestions for further reading (some authors give over-generous references to their own work). Who will follow these suggestions? Students of imperialism and globalization probably won't. A curious detail is that in the bibliographical lists one very seldom finds titles in languages other than English. Apparently, the readership of the present work is not expected to profit by publications even in German and French. The sad thing is that many chapters have been written by the best specialists in the field, but their efforts will bear no fruit. Literary scholars will never open the book, and one can only hope that linguists will occasionally skim the references, though the companion has not been written for them.

It is unnecessary to reproduce the entire table of contents. What follows are the titles of the nine parts, with a few additions: I Introduction; II Linguistic Survey (phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, prosody; a bird's-eye view of the areas); III English Semantics and Lexicography (a lopsided, skimpy part); IV Prehistory of English (English as an Indo-European language, English as a Germanic language); V English in History: England and America (Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, Modern British English, American English, and a motley selection of Topics in History: print culture, gender, class, ethnicity, "Standard English," English in the Philippines; English, Latin, and the teaching of Rhetoric; English in Mass Communication); VI English Outside England and the United States; VII Literary Languages (from the Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition to Toni Morrison, via Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Joyce, Faulkner, and Rushdie; no explanation is given about how the post-Elizabethan authors were chosen); VIII Issues in Present-Day English (African American vernacular English, Latino varieties of English, teaching composition to native speakers, English and the postcolonial teacher, creoles and pidgins...