Say What?: The Weird and Mysterious Journey of the English Language
Grade 7 Up—The opening chapters cover the influence of ancient Greece and Rome on the English alphabet and language. Later, German dialects of invading Angle and Saxon tribes mixed with Celtic and Latin, and Old English emerged. William of Normandy's rise to power in 1066 brought an influx of French words. Warfare between the Arabs and Europeans in the 1100s and 1200s led to further exchange of language and ideas. Simultaneously, Old English evolved into Middle English. In the 1500s, the Protestant movement, coupled with printing-press technology, led to the dissemination of English-language Bibles. English in the New World was influenced by when and where settlers came from, as the language evolved yet again. Source notes and a selected bibliography provide plenty of more-detailed sources to explore. The black-and-white illustrations include maps, portraits, and pencil drawings cued to the text. Exercises throughout the book could easily be adapted for classroom activities, e.g., matching definitions to words borrowed from Italian. The author achieves a blithe, conversational tone but sneaks in the occasional warning about how carelessness and sloppy mistakes can damage the language. This volume has more student appeal than Bill Bryson'sThe Mother Tongue(HarperCollins, 1991) and will make a nice supplement to SAT prep and vocabulary programs.—Amy Pickett, Ridley High School, Folsom, PACopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.