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    May We Borrow Your Language?: How English Steals Words From All Over the World
    Unavailable
    May We Borrow Your Language?: How English Steals Words From All Over the World
    Unavailable
    May We Borrow Your Language?: How English Steals Words From All Over the World
    Ebook322 pages6 hours

    May We Borrow Your Language?: How English Steals Words From All Over the World

    By Philip Gooden

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    About this ebook

    The English language that is spoken by one billion people around the world is a linguistic mongrel, its vocabulary a diverse mix resulting from centuries of borrowing from other tongues. From the Celtic languages of pre-Roman Britain to Norman French; from the Vikings' Old Scandinavian to Persian, Sanskrit, Algonquian, Cantonese and Hawaiian – amongst a host of others – we have enriched our modern language with such words as tulip, slogan, doolally, avocado, moccasin, ketchup and ukulele.

    May We Borrow Your Language? explores the intriguing and unfamiliar stories behind scores of familiar words that the English language has filched from abroad; in so doing, it also sheds fascinating light on the wider history of the development of the English we speak today.

    Full of etymological nuggets to intrigue and delight the reader, this is a gift book for word buffs to cherish – as cerebrally stimulating as it is more-ishly entertaining.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHead of Zeus
    Release dateNov 3, 2016
    ISBN9781784977979
    Author

    Philip Gooden

    Philip Gooden writes books about language as well as historical crime novels. The former include Who's Whose? A No-Nonsense Guide to Easily-Confused Words, The Story of English, and (as co-author) Idiomantics and The Word at War.

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