Volume 2, Number 7 · May 14, 1964
On Linguistics
By Paul Goodman
A Lingustic Introduction to the History of English
by Morton W. Bloomfield, by Leonard Newmark
Knopf, 375 pp., $8.95
This general text for students in linguistics, and perhaps English majors, is ingeniously designed. After a couple of chapters on the nature of language and modern English phonetics, it begins a broad chronological account of English through the centuries, stopping at convenient stations—Old English in the time of Alfred, Middle English 1350, English of the King James Bible, and so on up to recent Americanisms. The ingenious device is that, at each station along the way, the authors treat the particular subject with a different method, chosen partly for its peculiar relevance but mainly to illustrate for the student the range of philological thinking. The place of English in the Indo-European languages is, necessarily, handled by the comparative philology that climaxed in the first half of the nineteenth century. After some necessary political history, Old English is treated morphologically, reasonably enough because of its inflexions, and this gives opportunity to try out the structural linguistics of the first decades of the twentieth century. Middle English is the occasion, not unreasonably, for illustrating linguistic maps. Early Modern English is picked on, rather arbitrarily and not too happily, to expound and apply full-blown structural linguistics, the grammar of kernel sentences and transformation—rules that are associated with the work of Noam Chomsky. The eighteenth century and Victorian times are used, inevitably but boringly, for a sensible but uninspired critique of 'correct usage' and the theory of dictionaries. And the last chapter is a repository for vocabulary counts, etymologies, borrowings and coinings, slang, and other events that occur as relics in the contemporary lexicon.
Review, 4221 words
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