Reddit mentions of The Stories of English

It is! If you want to read about more of this stuff I can recommend some interesting books for you. One was a collection of different studies where linguistic things were applied in various contexts (medical stuff, airlines, murder charges) and it was fascinating. I never sold that book back.

Just looked up the title: Linguistics at Work: A Reader of Applications, An Introductory English Grammar

Author is Dallin D. Oaks. I also had him for a couple classes! Funny guy.


Also, if you want to mess around with corpus linguistics (tracking usage over time, across different media [newspaper, fiction, etc]) then here's the website for you! You can use it to prove that the usage of alien to mean "being from space" got much more popular in the forties, that British people use certain phrases a whole lot less/more than us, etc etc etc. Great for satisfying curiosity, or settling arguments.

You can also use it to search for grammatical constructs (like, how many times do you see this specific adjective paired with a noun, and then a preposition?) but it's kind of fussy and I don't really know exactly how to do it without someone (preferably the guy who created and maintains the corpora, who works at my school - and I know it sounds like I'm biased towards professors of mine, but when Language Log does searches for usage over time they typically use COCA or COHA; they seem to be fairly standard and well respected) there to point out all the idiosyncracies of the syntax. I also typically just don't look at the grammar stuff as often.

If you're interested in historical linguistics, this book was my main/only real textbook for my History of English class, and it was fascinating.

I can also recommend other stuff, but I like these things the most!

I would have to strongly caution against both Bill Bryson and Bragg's The Adventure of English. I like Bryson as much as the next guy--he's super easy to read--but PumpkinCrook's on the money with this one. As for Bragg... oof, what can I say? I read it before I had ever taken a Linguistics course and even then it bothered the hell out of me. The style is unscholarly to a fault and it's also mind-numbingly anglocentric (didn't you know that English is the most versatile and resilient language?!). It's fine, I guess, but you could do so much better.

I'd recommend The Origins and Development of the English Language or The Stories of English. The former is more of a textbook; and the latter is daunting in its size, I know, but it's so lovingly done that you can't fault him--with both books, you can more or less hop around according to your fancies.

As for general background, I'd second Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. It's over 15 years old by now and assuredly outdated, but it reads so easily and you learn so much (without devolving into the sloppiness of Bryson or Blagg!) that I must recommend it almost with affection.

For a look at the mind-bogglingly diverse varieties of English throughout its history, I highly recommend the book The Stories of English by David Crystal. It will forever disabuse you of the idea that words come pre-packaged with proper spellings. Especially in England in the days before dictionaries.

Have you looked at David Crystal's work? He's one of the the most prominent historians of English in our age. Try this: https://www.amazon.com/Stories-English-David-Crystal/dp/1585677191