Overview

Words change, they emigrate and immigrate, they arrive with invading armies and embrace changing fashions; they amend their spelling as they roam across the centuries and languages. This book delves into their origins, their meanings and their changing habits. Some imagination is occasionally required to understand their peripatetic habits but bear with them and you will find many surprises and also, very often, explanations so simple that it is fun to have it explained. Remember that many of these wordy journeys took place before it was common practice to write things down so, as they moved from language to language and from dialect to dialect, the sound varied slightly and when eventually pen was put to paper, the result often bore little resemblance to the origin. Their progress from ancient parchment to modern spell checker, has therefore been varied, unplanned and often unrecorded but as they wandered casually through the languages of the world stopping off here, picking up a new spelling there, they invariably retained a little bit of their history and this book explains the origins of over 1300 English words taken from 100 other languages.

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9781873590805

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