The English language: Its origin and history By Rudolph C. Bambas (review)

Abstract

484 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 2 (1982) sequences with pronominal copy were topicalized constructions and represented innovating word-order patterns—while Greenberg has long noted that, in verb-final languages, dependent verbs precede the main verb. A's keen stylistic sense distinguishes such traditional correlative uses of hopös after demonstrative touto 'that' as pragmatically variant (explicative), and hopos ... touto as neutral. The neutral order parallels verb-final patterns in Hittite, lending further support to the hypothesis that such patterns are old, and that attested IE subordinate patterns attest the progress ofchange in syntactic type from OV to VO, via stylistically marked variants. While A does not relate her findings to recent issues, her data are the sort which confirm or refute syntactic hypotheses. Her study constitutes an indispensable supplement to standard Greek grammars, lending greater precision to the ???ßfGß????? of subordination, the use of mood and the future tense, and the particle án. The indices and explicit table of contents make it accessible as a reference work to the Greek scholar. [Carol Justus, Berkeley.] The English language: Its origin and history. By Rudolph C. Bambas. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980. Pp. xiv, 241. $12.95. This book is for the beginning student or general reader who wants the history of English in painless doses; but that reader is likely to be puzzled by the book's first chapter, 'English as a world language', which contains statements like the following: 'Syntax, idiom, and spelling are maddeningly irrational' (p. 8); 'The spelling of English is a thing of horror to the student with an orderly mind' (10). The chapter ends with an admonition to study as many foreign languages as possible in order to 'avoid the linguistic complacency that seemed natural to the Greeks and Romans' (13). The effect of all this is to put the reader off by making the study of the history of English seem like an uninviting, perhaps hopeless, endeavor. What is more, only the most determined of readers is likely to get through the book, for even though it is ostensibly pitched to an uninformed audience, technical notions and terminology are introduced without elaboration and in compressed fashion (e.g. in Bambas' treatment of breaking and palatalization , 81). The book covers the sounds of English, the IE family oflanguages, and the different periods of English. There is a good deal of conventional information about these matters, but it is laced with errors and defects. Thus the discussion of Grimm's Law in Chap. 2 uses notions not presented until Chap. 3. The chart summarizing this law does not show that the IE aspirated voiced stops shifted to the Germanic voiced fricatives , and then to unaspirated voiced stops in initial position; it incorrectly suggests that IE /k/ became Gmc. /h/ in all instances (33). The discussion includes the astonishing comment that 'Grimm's Law illustrates the instability of language, and is by no means a unique illustration ' (34). A number of confused and confusing features infect other chapters. B's discussion of r-less dialects is especially troublesome, in part because /3/ is used to represent the unretroflexed vowel in bird as pronounced in standard British and many varieties ofSouthern American (45-6, 50); presumably /3/ was intended. In the chapter on Old English, it is at least paradoxical to find nu^hological change characterized as 'generally in the direction of simplification', but then find it termed 'haphazard' (74). The notion of linguistic capriciousness carries into B's treatment of the Great Vowel Shift, where he says, of the movement of the high tense vowels to diphthongs: 'as with linguistic change in general , it is difficult to assign a rationale for this change' (149). According to B, the rules for shall and will laid out in the 17th and 18th centuries are a 'dialect matter, regional and social' (180); this undercuts much of his own discussion which shows these prescriptive rules to be based on important modal distinctions which, presumably, every language must somehow reflect . The book ends with a cursory review of American English, though there is nothing about social dialects or even one sentence about Black English. The 'Notes and bibliography' at the end...