Share your interactive ePaper on all platforms and on your website with our embed function. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without theprior written permission of the publishers. That represents anastonishing diversity — nearly 25 times more words than there are individual starsvisible to the naked eye in the night sky.
And even 50, seems insignificantbeside the half a million recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. But looked atfrom an historical perspective, that diversity becomes more apparent than real.
The deep prehistory ofour language has nurtured little word-seeds that over the millennia haveproliferated into widely differentiated families of vocabulary. The purpose of this book is to uncover the often surprising connections betweenelements of the English lexicon that have become obscured by centuries oflanguage change — the links in our word-web that join such unlikely partners as, forinstance, beef and cow, bacteria and imbecile, and bishop and spy.
The origins of the English languageThe life stories of individual words, often mazy and conjectural, need a fixedbackdrop if they are to make sense. So first, a little history. English is a member ofthe Indo-European family of languages. The precise origins of this are still a matterof some controversy, but the consensus view is that it came on the scene around8, years ago in the general area to the north of the Black Sea.
Since then it hassplit up into a large number of subgroups, which today provide nearly all thelanguages of Europe and have also spread over large areas of the Middle East andnorthern India. But in the history of English, there are two particular groups that are of centralimportance.
