English Words: History and Structure

English Words: History and Structure is concerned primarily with the learned vocabulary of English, the words borrowed from the classical languages. It surveys the historical events that define the layers of vocabulary in English, introduces some of the basic principles of linguistic analysis, and is a helpful manual for vocabulary discernment and enrichment. Exercises accompanying each chapter and further readings on recent loans and the legal and medical vocabulary of English will be available online in the near future. • Introduces students to some basic linguistic terms needed for the discussion of phonological and morphological changes accompanying word formation • Designed to lead students to a finer appreciation of their language and greater ability to recognize relationships between words and discriminate between meanings • An informative appendix discusses the history and usefulness of the best known British and American dictionaries • Online readings and exercises to deepen and strengthen knowledge acquired in the classroom

• Both an introduction to some of the basic principles of linguistic analysis and a helpful manual for vocabulary discernment and enrichment • On-line readings and exercises designed to deepen and strengthen the knowledge acquired in the classroom • Designed to lead students to a finer appreciation of their language and greater ability to recognize relationships between words and discriminate between meanings

An introduction to the textbook; 1. Word origins; 2. The background of English; 3. Composition of the early modern and modern English vocabulary; 4. Smaller than words: morphemes and types of morphemes; 5. Allomorphy, phonetics, and affixation; 6. Replacement rules; 7. Deletion rules and other kinds of allomorphy; 8. Fossilized allomorphy: false cognates, and other etymological pitfalls; 9. Semantic change and semantic guesswork; 10. The pronunciation of classical words in English; Appendix I. An introduction to dictionaries; Appendix II. Master root list.

‘… read this book and recommend it to your sceptical colleagues … it will certainly enhance the language awareness of already proficient English speakers … attention to the history of words can illuminate the complex relationships between meaning, spelling and pronunciation in English, and can reveal the English lexicon as much more systematic than it appears.’ ATEFL Issues

Stockwell and Minkova cover a large amount of material in this work. Yet despite the abundance of sophisticated linguistic terminology, it is in fact a book which is very easy to understand. Anyone studying the history of the English language … will benefit from it.’ fun-with-words.com