A History of the German Language Through Texts examines the evolution of German, from the Early Medieval period to the present day. Written in a lively and accessible style, the book looks at the history of German through a wide range of texts, from medical, legal and scientific writing to literature, everyday newspapers and adverts. All texts are translated and accompanied by commentaries. The book also offers a glossary of technical terms and abbreviations, a summary of the main changes in each historical period, a guide to reference material, and suggestions for further reading. A History of the German Language Through Texts is essential reading for students of German, Linguistics or Philology.

Written in a lively and accessible style, the book looks at the history of German through a wide range of texts, from medical, legal and scientific writing to literature, everyday newspapers and adverts.

'A New History of German Literature' offers some 200 essays on events in German literary history.

This new history of the French language allows the reader to see how the language has evolved for themselves. It combines texts and extracts with a readable and detailed commentary allowing the language to be viewed both synchronically and diachronically. Core texts range from the ninth century to the present day highlight central features of the language, whilst a range of shorter texts illustrate particular points. The inclusion of non-literary, as well as literary texts serves to illustrate some of the many varieties of French whether in legal, scientific, epistolatory, administrative or liturgical or in more popular domains, including attempts to represent spoken usage. This is essential reading for the undergraduate student of French.

The book examines the word order of two Old Germanic languages, Old English and Old High German, using a corpus containing samples of three text types: poetry, original prose and translated prose. Thanks to this methodology, it is possible to compare word order patterns in Old English and Old High German, eliminating differences which may be due to stylistic or technical reasons (rhythm, rhyme, Latin influences), as well as to see to what extent text type determines word order and to check whether this phenomenon is universal (triggering similar behaviour in both analysed languages). The book also disproves the hypothesis of the West Germanic syntax, presenting data which show that the word order of the two languages started to diversify already during the Old English/High German period, i. e. before the 11th century AD.

In The Golden Mean of Languages, Alisa van de Haar sheds new light on the debates regarding the form and status of the vernacular in the early modern Low Countries, where both Dutch and French were local tongues. The fascination with the history, grammar, spelling, and vocabulary of Dutch and French has been studied mainly from monolingual perspectives tracing the development towards modern Dutch or French. Van de Haar shows that the discussions on these languages were rooted in multilingual environments, in particular in French schools, Calvinist churches, printing houses, and chambers of rhetoric. The proposals that were formulated there to forge Dutch and French into useful forms were not directed solely at uniformization but were much more diverse.

Same as Instructor's Edition but softcover and different cover image.