Linguistic Change in Present-Day English [antikvár]

1 Preface iHis book originated in a series of lectures given in Poland a few years ago to teachers and students of English. Since then, the material has grown constantly, and parts of it have been given as lectures to similar audiences in India, in Pakistan, and also in the United Kingdom, where it has been heard by teachers of English from the U.S.S.R. and by various groups of mixed nationalities. After such lectures, I have frequently been pestered by members of the audience to supply them with the basic material of the lectures in duplicated form; and it is this keen demand that has encouraged me to turn the lectures into a book, despite the obvious shortcomings of the result (it is impossible for a single author to cover such an enormous field without fallingintosuperficiality at many points). In developing the material into a book, I have tried to adapt it for a rather wider audience, by explaining the technical terms used, and by giving a certain amount of elementary historical background. I hope that this will make it useful for English sixth-formers (or even first-year university students) who are just beginning the historical study of the mother-tongue; and I hope too that this will make it accessible to the layman who is interested in language but who has no specialised knowledge of it. These additions will of course be rather elementary for the overseas teacher, but I hope he will bear with them for the sake of the actual material that the book contains, which illustrates the changes going on in the language to-day. The aim of the book is to give an account of the changes which have taken place in the English language in England in the past few decades. The idea behind this is that the living language is the right place to begin all language study, and that this applies to historical linguistics as much as to descriptive linguistics. Too often in the past, the student learning the history of the English language has begun with Old English