A collection of statements by literary men and others about the nature and use of the language, its resources, potentialities and development. Volume I covered the period 1490 1839. Volume II starts in 1858 and runs to the 1960s and therefore records the rise first of philology, then of modern linguistic study. Accordingly this volume contains a number of excerpts from the writings of great European and American language-scholars (Sweet, Sapir and Bloomfield among others) as well as by important writers. The volume provides a readable and often entertaining introduction to thought about...

The writers represented here are concerned with the history, the use, the reform or the changing nature of English.