Inventing English

Why is there such a striking difference between English spelling and English pronunciation? How did our relatively simple grammar rules develop? What are the origins of regional dialect, literary language, and everyday speech, and what do they have to do with you? Based on the enormous success of his video and lecture series and the widespread popularity of his public speaking events, Seth Lerer's "Inventing English" is a masterful, engaging history of a language constantly in flux. Many scholars and journalists have written about the changing nature of our grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary, but only Lerer situates these developments in the larger history of English, reconstructing an epic tale of creation, celebration, and reinvention. Lerer begins in the seventh century with the poet Caedmon teaching himself to sing our earliest poem in English. Then, we meet the scribes of Peterborough Abbey, who recorded changing grammar. The Great Vowel Shift can be traced to the spelling choices of personal letter writers in the fifteenth-century, and in 1755, Samuel Johnson produced his Dictionary. Lerer describes the differences between English and American usage and the link between regional dialect and race, class, and gender. He tells his own story of growing up in an immigrant community in Brooklyn, torn between a desire to"better"himself through proper English and his love for the melodic, Italian-Yiddish mash-ups of his childhood. Contact with foreign languages, popular culture, advertising, the Internet, and e-mail continue to shape English for future generations. In conclusion, Lerer wonders whether globalization and technology have turned English into a world language and reflects on what has been preserved and what has been lost.