The History of the English Language

What it is about

A textbook history of English, based on lectures at Cornell University, in seven chapters: the Indo-European family; the common characteristics of the Teutonic languages; Old English; Middle English and the Norman Conquest; the written language and the rise of a literary standard; English in modern times; and the growth of the vocabulary. The author argues that the modern standard, the language of London, has changed in kind very little since Middle English, because no conquest or revolution has interrupted it. The last chapter treats the word-stock: the senses of the word "vocabulary", the sources of new words, and the processes that add them. The book is English, with about 440 pages of historical examples. It is a secondary source. It gives no new measurements, so it is a source of hypotheses and of the historical framing, not of data.

Ideas

• I1. world/src/dictionary.rs: take the word-stock classes of Chapter VII (native, borrowed, compounded, derived) as the origin tags of dictionary entries, so that the school dictionary can say where a word comes from.
• I2. Chapter VI's claim (no break in the standard since Middle English) is a testable hypothesis. Count the share of present-day words in a Middle English sample and in a modern sample, per period, and check whether the change is gradual, as the author says.
• I3. Use the chapters as the historical reference for the explanations of morph::archaic: each archaic form gets a pointer to the chapter that describes it, so that the output can say why.

For Mova

The chapters are 1. The period, the register and the texts Mova reads, 19. The lexicon: vocabulary, multiword expressions and register and 09. Early Modern and archaic forms. The code is world/src/dictionary.rs and en/src/morph.rs. Measure: the origin-tag coverage of the school dictionary, and the period counts on a held-out sample.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@book{emerson1894history,
  title = {{The History of the English Language}},
  author = {Emerson, Oliver Farrar},
  year = {1894},
  url = {https://archive.org/details/historyofenglish00emeruoft}
}

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/emerson-1894-history-english-language/