The English is coming! : how one language is sweeping the world

by Leslie Dunton-Downer

Hardcover, 2010

Status

Available

Genres

General Nonfiction

History

Nonfiction

Publication

New York : Touchstone, 2010.

Description

"Through the fascinating stories of thirty English words used and understood in nearly all corners of the globe, The English Is Coming! takes readers on an eye-opening journey across culture and commerce, war and peace, and time and space. These mini-histories shed new light on everyday words: the strange turns of fate by which their meanings evolved and their new roles as the building blocks of the first language ever to forge a global community. Exploring such familiar terms as shampoo (from a Hindi word for scalp and body hygiene long practiced in India); robot (coined by Czech painter Josef Capek for his brother Karel's 1921 play about man-made creatures); credit (rooted in a prehistoric phrase of sacred significance: "to put heart into"); and dozens of others, Dunton-Downer reveals with clarity and humor how these linguistic artifacts embody the resilience, appeal, adoptability, and wild inclusiveness that English, through a series of historical accidents, gained on its road to worldwide reach. These words explain not only how English has managed to link our distant and often disparate pasts but also how it is propelling humankind to a future that we can, for the first time, talk about and shape in a language that now belongs to all of us: Global English" --Cover, p. 2.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member MarthaJeanne

It would be a good idea to take at least an introductory course on linguistics before trying to write a book about it.

For example 'th' represents two different sounds in English, which is why Old English had two different letters.

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LibraryThing member dihiba

I too was disappointed in this book - the subject is one of my favourites (development of language). The author's writing style leaves a lot to be desired (she goes off onto tangents that end up having nothing to do with the original statement ), she starts a lot of sentences with "and" and some

them just go on and on and on. She also doesn't seem to know her subject very well - at the end of the book she suggests dropping the plural "s" in favour of "een" which I think she mentions occurs in Arabic - well, if she knew anything about Old English, she would known that "en" was used at times to denote the plural (e.g. children, oxen) and perhaps could be revived. She also seems to not have a grasp of the use of the present continuous which perfectly well expresses a thought or action in the here and now "(I am feeling optimistic" - her example of "I feel optimistic" obviously does not describe a feeling in the moment, as the simple present expresses habitual actions or thought) so English does not need to borrow from Spanish to express different types of "present" actions.
Jane Austen used the vague "their" to express unknown gender - e.g. "Someone left their book here", so this is not "recent" as she suggests a result of the women's movement of the 60's and 70's (I have been using it all my life, before the 1960's dawned!).
I too have an issue with the American rah rah approach - everything in the modern world has not come out of that country. Just to point out another error, Mary Quant (British) coined the term "miniskirt", not America.
If you want to read something interesting, well written and full of life, try Bill Bryson's books on language.
I picked this up to read when I was feeling unwell - it didn't help!
Not saying others wouldn't enjoy it...I was just very disappointed.

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