jurgitasir's review
4.0
Really a fun read. I do love learning about languages and how people communicate and history of it. Some of the facts were quite fascinating and I think they helped to improve my English to understand how it works.
It lost one star due to some rather dry patches.
It lost one star due to some rather dry patches.
ederwin's review
4.0
I read lots of books on language, so I keep seeing the same tired old examples brought out to illustrate language change. This one, though, is written for a British audience, so while the ideas were not new to me, the examples often were. ("Damp Squi(b/d)" for example, must be a more common expression there than here!)
The main point of this book is to introduce to a wide audience the idea of using a digital corpus to examine how language is actually used in real life, rather than relying on examples found by experts.
A hard-core prescriptivist may not like the focus on "actual" rather than "correct" usage, but may still enjoy the introduction to using a corpus to explore usage changes.
The author talks a lot about how large the particular corpus he used was. Sure, it was big, but, they are growing all the time. Google's n-gram is the current size champ, and is available for anyone to explore. (I just used it now to see whether the spelling "alot" is on the rise or not. I like it better than the "correct" spelling. But n-gram shows that the use of that spelling is falling-off after a peak in the 1980s.)
The main point of this book is to introduce to a wide audience the idea of using a digital corpus to examine how language is actually used in real life, rather than relying on examples found by experts.
A hard-core prescriptivist may not like the focus on "actual" rather than "correct" usage, but may still enjoy the introduction to using a corpus to explore usage changes.
The author talks a lot about how large the particular corpus he used was. Sure, it was big, but, they are growing all the time. Google's n-gram is the current size champ, and is available for anyone to explore. (I just used it now to see whether the spelling "alot" is on the rise or not. I like it better than the "correct" spelling. But n-gram shows that the use of that spelling is falling-off after a peak in the 1980s.)
niv7's review
3.0
A nice synopsis of language history, and felt like a shorter, shallower version of a college class I took on the same subject.
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