THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

To write a good small book on the English language is an extremely difficult job…. Professor Wrenn’s study is far better than of its predecessors…. It would be an impertinence for an indolent reviewer to comment on the scholarship of the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford , but one may perhaps venture to admire the vivacity and seriousness of his interest in modern English, and his conviction that the language should be studied historically in order that we may use it more intelligently to-day.” - The Cambridge Review The Author writes for the intelligent layman as well as the linguist. He first seeks the true nature of language and its true function and structure in modern society, and traces the paths along which language has developed and changed in its known history, both in the forms of its words and in their meanings, examining for this purpose many languages of civilised and primitive peoples. These paths he then pursues backwards with the aid of data from human physiology, the language of children and observations of animal behaviour, and shows how all these paths converge to one beginning, and deduces how language originated–both the forms of its first words and their meanings. He finally shows relics of these earliest words and meanings in languages which still survive. The arguments are cumulative and many-sided, and the case made is convincing.

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