Booklist 17:104 D ’20
“A valuable addition to the library of manual training teachers and craftsmen wishing to be fluently versed in the universal language of mechanical drawing.”
+ School Arts Magazine 20:244 D ’20 50w
WYLD, HENRY CECIL KENNEDY. History of modern colloquial English. *$8 Dutton 420.9
(Eng ed 20–9723)
“This book may be described, in one way, as a documented history of English pronunciation from Chaucer to the present day; in another, as an attempt to show that, ‘during the last two centuries at least, the modifications which have come about in the spoken language are the result of the influence not primarily of regional, but of class dialects,’ the final result being the ‘public school English’ which is now the normal spoken idiom of the educated classes. In chapter I the author surveys in broad outline the various problems dealt with in minute detail later in the book. Chapter II, dealing with ‘Dialect types in middle English, and their survival in the modern period,’ contains an elaborate phonetic description of the three main contributory dialects. Chapter IV, on ‘From Henry VIII to James I,’ shows us the English language arriving at the self-conscious period. With chapter V, ‘Seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,’ we are on modern ground. Chapters VI to IX deal with the phonetic history of the modern language and the origin of inflections. The final chapter, on ‘Colloquial idiom,’ gives us examples of familiar speech from John Shillingford (1447) to Miss Austen; and there are some final sections on the trimmings of speech, such as greetings, epistolary formulas, expletives, compliments, etc.”—Ath
“Professor Wyld is to be congratulated on the accomplishment of a very valuable, and evidently laborious, piece of work. We would suggest that he should so far consider the intelligent layman as to publish an abridged edition, with a few characteristic examples replacing the ponderous mass of phonetic detail which concludes each chapter, and, above all, that he should add an index.” E. W.
+ − Ath p669 My 21 ’20 1350w