Jonathan Culpeper
History of English.

London: Routledge, 1997 [Language Workbooks]. ix, 103 pp. ISBN 0-415-14591-0

The target group of Jonathan Culpeper's History of English (Language Workbook) seems to be young undergraduate students with limited general linguistic knowledge. For them the book is most appropriate, also because of its excellent pedagogical structure. One may say that some of the best principles used when teaching children - such as to make them curious and answer questions - reappear here in a book for young adults.

If it were possible to build an obligatory, introductory first-year course on the history of the English language into the curriculum of English studies at our department, we would not hesitate to recommend Culpeper's book. However, studies that included a historical angle were largely abolished at our department many years ago, and today we primarily teach modern English disciplines. Nevertheless, we are occasionally - indeed increasingly often -asked to give a survey course on the history of the English language, but only for specially interested postgraduate students. This means that however difficult the theme may be, we cannot start from scratch but have to make our students work with complicated original texts and advanced background material from the very first day. For them Culpeper's book would be no challenge, nor was it written for students at their level.

On the whole we welcome the fact that a publishing house has considered it worthwhile to print a new, good and different primer of the history of the English language. This may encourage a reawakening of interest in the development of the English tongue and likewise in the history of Britain itself, which is so closely connected with the history of its language.

Inge Kabell and Hanne Lauridsen, Copenhagen