English Words: History and Structure

Review
'… read this book and recommend it to your sceptical colleagues … it will certainly enhance the language awareness of already proficient English speakers … attention to the history of words can illuminate the complex relationships between meaning, spelling and pronunciation in English, and can reveal the English lexicon as much more systematic than it appears.' ATEFL Issues

Stockwell and Minkova cover a large amount of material in this work. Yet despite the abundance of sophisticated linguistic terminology, it is in fact a book which is very easy to understand. Anyone studying the history of the English language … will benefit from it.' fun-with-words.com

Book Description
English Words: History and Structure is concerned primarily with the learned vocabulary of English, the words borrowed from the classical languages and French. It is both an introduction to some of the basic principles of linguistic analysis and a helpful manual for vocabulary discernment and enrichment. Designed to deepen and strengthen the knowledge acquired in the classroom, exercises to accompany each chapter and further readings on recent loans and the legal and medical vocabulary of English are available online at http://uk.cambridge.org/linguistics/resources/englishwor ds.