Abstract
The Emergence and Development of English is one of many introductions to the History of the English Language (HEL). It is intended as an undergraduate textbook aimed at diverse groups of students, who do not necessarily need any prior knowledge of English linguistics. What makes Kretzschmar’s book stand out among other textbooks for teaching HEL is that it frames language change as a continuous process of emergence, a concept used to explain complex systems mainly in the natural and social sciences. The book is composed of acknowledgments, an introduction, twelve main chapters, three appendices, a glossary of terms (sorted according to chapter), a reference section, and an index, as well as supplementary online materials. Like all volumes in this series, each chapter includes an introductory overview (headed “In this chapter”), a summary including a list of key terms, exercises, and suggestions for further reading.
The Acknowledgements (vi) reveal that the book is based on Kretzschmar’s own teaching experience of HEL, a fact that also shows through in many hands-on tips (e.g., how to type special characters on the computer [69]), straightforward explanations of terminology (e.g., external/internal history [95]), as well as a large number of exercises that are both thought-provoking and fun. The Introduction (1-3), perhaps aimed at instructors rather than students of HEL, draws attention to emergence as a key concept of the book (see below). However, as Kretzschmar points out, “the incorporation of the science of complex systems into the mainstream coverage of HEL” is also the “key challenge for students and instructors” (1). Chapter 1, entitled “Popular English: What we think we know,” highlights the relevance of studying HEL by pointing to the historical origins of different varieties of English and introduces the notions of prescriptive and descriptive linguistics. It meets undergraduate students at their own level by interrogating their beliefs about language and language variation. The topic of prescriptivism is taken up again later in the book in chapter 11 on “Standard English,” where it is also neatly deconstructed as a social construct (177-179).
Chapter 2 introduces the concept of emergence on which the book centers. It describes language as a complex system, which is shaped by the interactions of language users. Kretzschmar uses ant colonies as a non-linguistic example to illustrate the workings of complex systems, in which there is no central control, but clear-cut patterns of behavior emerge via random interaction and a continuous exchange of information. In human language, emergence results in the distribution of linguistic features in frequency profiles that take the shape of A-curves (short for asymptotic hyperbolic curves). A-curves represent distributions in which a small number of features account for a large number of tokens, while a large number of features occur in low frequencies. 1 The distribution pattern is exemplified with different expressions for ‘heavy rain’ from the American Linguistic Atlas Project, of which Kretzschmar was editor-in-chief at the time of writing. Based on such distribution patterns, language change is identified as “a change in the frequency profile” (35). For the concept of emergence, Kretzschmar draws on his own earlier work in this field, most notably Language and complex systems (2015) and its central chapter on complex systems and HEL (105-130).
Chapters 3-12 present HEL from “Indo-European” to “The future of English” in chronological order. Only chapter 11 diverges from the overall scheme by focusing on “Standard English.” In each of those chapters, Kretzschmar provides an account of the historical and sociolinguistic context and discusses how this shaped the continuing emergence of English. Text extracts (accompanied by translations or glosses) illustrate the language of each period and serve as a starting point for a discussion of linguistic features. Given the scope of the book, the treatment of HEL is necessarily selective, and it largely eschews paradigm tables or sound change charts. While this certainly enhances the readability of the book, it also results in a scant treatment of traditional staples of HEL. Kretzschmar makes up for this by additional online material including a Reference grammar and Historical outlines. These resources are accessible via the Cambridge University Press website, 2 and consist of scans of chapters from Moore, Knott, and Hulbert’s The elements of Old English (1972) and Moore and Marckwardt’s Historical outlines of English sounds and inflections (1965). There are also audio recordings from Bessinger and Bornstein’s A history of the English language (1973) plus a file containing transcripts of the readings. All three are still useful resources; however, materials reflecting the current state of research (or at least references to them) would have been highly desirable.
How well do these chapters integrate the concept of emergence? It is perhaps most successfully employed in chapters 9-12 on “Modern English,” “Contemporary English,” “Standard English,” and “The future of English,” respectively. In these chapters, Kretzschmar points to changing settlement patterns, social networks, and communities of practice as factors influencing regional as well as social language variation. For example, he succinctly describes the emergence of American English dialects as a result of the patterns of settlement (134-135) and highlights that the development of any geographical or social variety is always in a state of flux (138). In these chapters, Kretzschmar effectively uses frequency patterns to show how varieties of English differ from each other, to explain language change in the recent past, and to speculate about the potential future of English. On the other hand, the chapters on the earlier stages of English illustrate the key challenge that Kretzschmar himself highlights in the Introduction. For the recent stages of the language, students can draw on their own knowledge of the language and there is also a wealth of data available. For earlier periods, the balancing act is to teach, on the one hand, the very basics of the language and, on the other hand, to keep language variation in focus. So, while Kretzschmar describes the Germanic dialect continuum as a complex system on a theoretical level, his brief account of gemination and i-mutation (as, for example, in Germanic *satjan > Old English settan) falls short of the theoretical claim as it projects a static (and outdated) view of the development of the Germanic dialects (59-61). To exemplify the emergence of Old English from the West Germanic dialect continuum would require a more detailed treatment of the overlapping changes affecting the North Sea Germanic varieties as well as features relating to both North and West Germanic (see, for example, Ringe & Taylor 2014). The same is true for Old and Middle English dialects. Admittedly, such a treatment may well be beyond the scope of an introductory textbook.
The book is complemented by three appendices, which provide brief introductions to different areas of linguistics. Appendix 1 focuses on semiotics, phonetics, and phonology; appendix 2 introduces morphology and syntax, as well as discourse analysis and pragmatics; appendix 3 centers on lexicology and semantics, and presents linguistic corpora as important tools for studying topics like collocation. The appendices make the book accessible for students without previous knowledge of linguistics; they are also suitable as stand-alone readings.
Overall, the book is a highly readable and appealing account of HEL. It makes use of many vivid metaphors and highlights modern parallels to engage students, for example, when Old English characters are compared with recent graphemic innovations, like the use of the symbol @ as an abbreviation for at in email addresses and such. Some of Kretzschmar’s choices may appear rather idiosyncratic—at least from a Continental European perspective: in chapter 3, for example, Carl Darling Buck is mentioned several times in reference to cognates in Indo-European languages (and also included among the key terms of the chapter; 47, 49, 52) while Jacob Grimm is not cited. There are also a number of infelicities: for example, the runic script is attributed to Greek without reference to any other theories (66); Hengest and Horsa are introduced as if they were actual historical figures (58, 59). Additionally, I have spotted some mistakes in the discussion of an extract from the Lindisfarne Gospels (67-68): the legend of Figure 5.3 refers to the “Incipit for the Gospel of Mark” though the image is from the Gospel of Matthew (identified correctly in the text); the beginning of the Latin passage is transcribed as “Mattheu in iudaea” though the text runs Mattheus (with a ligature of u and long s at the end of the line); and the transcription of the first word of the Old English gloss is given as “on gynneþ” when the manuscript reads on ginnes. However, such points are minor issues, that in no way detract from this engaging textbook, which I recommend to anyone who is looking for “the ‘short’ book on HEL” (vi).
