Rate this book

The English Is Coming!: How One Language Is Sweeping The World (2010)

by Leslie Dunton-Downer(Favorite Author)

3 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1439176655 (ISBN13: 9781439176658)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Touchstone

review 1: 3 stars for the tremendous amount of research that went into this book, but not for how much I enjoyed reading it. Very dry at points, and there is only so much language-lover humor that I can handle in one sitting. At many points, this book became redundant. It just repeated itself over and over again, quite redundantly ;-)Plus, I found the author's guesses about possible future changes to the language quite silly. However, her ideas on ways that English could be simplified (without adding foreign words) seemed plausible and likely. As an ESL teacher in Korea, I've wished many times that certain irregularities were done away with. Adding S to third-person singular verbs for example. Perhaps, English will simplify to loose this grammar regularity. I can also imagine loosin... moreg the 's to make nouns possessive and a loss of the indefinite article 'a'. Also, I could imagine an international simplified spelling of English. (although reading examples of what this may look like always gives me headaches)
review 2: This book was okay; I found it quite uneven as far as holding my interest. Some sections were very interesting, and I will happily acknowledge this; others seriously dragged, at least for me, and I had a hard time finishing the final section of "predictions" (really more like wild guesses) about how English may change in the future (though I did finish it eventually). I am always on the lookout for fun books about the English language, but I have read more enjoyable ones than this. less

Download links for: The English is Coming!: How One Language is Sweeping the World

Advertising