The English Language. Its Origin and History by Rudolph C. Bambas (review)

Book Reviews Rudolph C. Bambas. The English Language. Its Origin and History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980. XIV + 229p. If you are looking for a straight-forward, traditional, accessible text for the language history course required ofEnglish majors, this offeringmight well do quite nicely. It contains nothing which would startle anyone who has taken such a course in the last thirty years, but what it does contain is presented in reasonably clear, readable form. Thechapters cover the required ground in the accepted pattern, with preliminary background material on historical linguistics and the basics oflanguage description followed by presentations of Old, Middle, Early Modern, and Modern English. The concluding chapter covers American, the variety of English, by the way, which forms the focus of the book's entire presentation. Helpful aids include a bibliography, a list of technical terms, and an index. There are no footnotes and, generally, no scholarly references. The strongest chapters are those on Early Modern and Modern (17th-18th century) English, where the author warms to the discussion of the Enlightenment movement and its effects on languagephilosophers and grammarians. He appears to know the subject well and presents it in an anecdotal, lively manner. The presentation has the considerable advantage over other treatments of avoiding the temptation to include long lists of ink-horn terms, borrowings, and the like, lists which are invariably a failure in the classroom. On the other hand, the earlier chapters, where tradition demands a greater emphasis on phonetics and inflectional morphology, do not come off quite so well. Typically, these matters are compressed into dense, "underexplained" paragraphs which an uninitiated student could not possibly follow on his own. The linguistically defining characteristics of Germanic, for example, take up only three pages (wasting part of that, curiously, on the rather inconsequential weak adjective endings), with far too few explanations and examples. Although it may not be of great consequence in the type of course this book is intended for, it is unfortunate that the presentation so completely ignores recent work in the history of English. For instance, there are no references — with the exception of history of English texts — after 1966. There is a great deal of activity underway presently, especially in the area ofsyntax, but one will hear nothing about it here. In fact, the view we receive of how Germanic is to be divided into dialects reflects a view rejected universally over 50 years ago (although admittedly still popular in textbooks). The author has an unfortunate tendency toward cuteness at times, which I am certain would not be well received: Gaelic has its defenders because "lost causes often find forlorn-hope defenders who enjoy holding up their heroism for the world to wonder at" (p. 28); American soldiers of World War II vintage become "numberless copies of G.I. Joe" (p. 209); and so on. A similar oddity is the repeated reference to "good" and "bad" developments, as when the author states that the loss of redundant comparatives and superlatives (most best, etc.) "can perhaps be regreted" (p. 156). Some items are simply out of place, as the discussion of Mulcaster and spelling reform, which appears in the chapter on articulatory phonetics (pp. 53-54), and the discussion of how reason affected linguistics judgments (pp. 153, 156), which occurs before the general presentation of the Enlightenment. It is also most unfortunate that the author errs — or gives the wrong impression — in a number of rather important matters: them appears to be Old English (xiii), the Lord's Prayer in Gothic is incorrect [unsar] (p. 29), Old English be is called a definite article (p. 32), Grimm is Book Reviews103 given credit for Grimm's Law (p. 33), the phonetic alphabet presented is called IPA (p. 44), it is claimed that there are seven ablaut classes (p. 72), the date of Verner's famous article is given as 1875 (p. 73), the [g] in egg and in give are put in the same basket (p. 89), the Old English plural ending is given as -en (p. 117), shall and will are characterized as becoming auxiliaries only in Middle English (p. 178), German and Dutch are characterized as deriving from a single...