Excavating English

This is a fabulous intro to linguistics that we are using for a 5th and 9th grader. It's at a level that is sometimes too difficult for the 5th grader, but great for the 9th grader, and the 5th grader picks up many useful bits and pieces along the way. We all love it. It's like the answers to all of history are being revealed. The things we're learning in this course keep coming up in other courses and even current events.

This is book just plain delightful, for anyone who loves the English language, of any age. It is stuffed so generously with priceless, fun, beautiful, awesome, poignant, tragic, comic, purely human and inhumanly cosmic information, that it must be taken in small doses, lest your heart and/or mind explode. But if you can keep from exploding, this is a great book.

I have another book, The Story of English, by Mario Pei, which has been one of my all-time favorites, enjoying pride of place on my shelf for years. This new book, Excavating English, is three times as much information in a third of the length, and ten times more fun. It is full of insightful graphics and anecdotes. Each chapter is followed by games and puzzles that reinforce the material from a number of different angles. The writer's fluent prose carries you along effortlessly, always pervaded with a gentle, playful sense of humor. Really a joy of a book.And when you get to the end, you will have quite a picture of how our language came to be what it is. The whole story, from the shores of the Black Sea four thousand years ago, through the diaspora throughout the western world and the extraordinary family tree of Indo-European languages, the migration to Britain, the invasions of Romans, Angles, Saxons and Normans, to the bewildering variety of dialects in 21st century international English. It gives you a keen appreciation for just how much history is packed into every word of English, every idiosyncratic spelling, every weird verb ending.The book's target audience is middle-schoolers, but it is no less fascinating or rewarding for those of us who were in middle school decades ago.A+

I was a little disappointed when I got the book but perhaps this is because the student (daughter) doesn't like English, and I don't think this will motivate her. The prose, while informative, is long and dry rather than engaging, so it doesn't encourage retaining the info out of interest. I hope she likes the activities, but just looking at one, 9.4, where you need to write no longer used Old English words to match pictures, I'm pretty sure she'd think it was a complete waste of time as it's not necessary for learning English. Which is a shame. So I would recommend for students who love the subject, and from age 12 (11 if keen). Also it's pretty thick, so maybe could pick and choose the chapters and activities that work and skip those that don't.