Spellbound: The Surprising Origins and Astonishing Secrets of English Spelling Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Spellbound: The Surprising Origins and Astonishing Secrets of English Spelling? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Spellbound: The Surprising Origins and Astonishing Secrets of English Spelling. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Spellbound: The Surprising Origins and Astonishing Secrets of English Spelling ReviewIn my opinion, this book cannot compete with more careful and serious works on the same subject. If you are interested in this topic, my recommendation would be to read Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World or Speak: A Short History of Languages. You can (and in fact should) then safely skip this one.
My overall impression is that Essinger (not a scholar and not an expert on the subject) hastily read a few popular books on the subject and then added his own effort. A first piece of evidence is the bibliography, which is amazingly short and contains very few serious works. More to the point, throughout the book Essinger has the annoying habit of using his prejudices and his extremely vivid imagination to fill gaps in our historical knowledge. The results are usually absurd.
Some examples: The Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain are "smelly." (That seems to change later with Alfred the Great, when the Anglo-Saxons become the good guys and their body odor no longer merits Essinger's attention.)
The Norman conquerors, on the other hand, get a more sympathetic treatment right away: they were not oppressors (Essinger writes). This point is forcefully driven home a few paragraphs later by pointing out that they disowned and/or killed the local aristocracy.
While serious scholars are puzzled by the fact that the Germanic conquerors kept their language in Britain but nowhere else in the Roman empire, Essinger knows the answer: continental Celts and Romans had nowhere to hide, so they decided to teach the Germans Latin, while their British counterparts ran away (or were killed, Essinger isn't very clear here and generally cares little about consistency).Spellbound: The Surprising Origins and Astonishing Secrets of English Spelling Overview

Want to learn more information about Spellbound: The Surprising Origins and Astonishing Secrets of English Spelling?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now