What books will help me understand the development of the English language?
1. Canterbury Tales
2. King James Bible
3. Book of Common Prayer
4. The Faerie Queene
5. Shakespeare
...? What else? Some non-fiction perhaps?
sir gawain and the green knight
Beowulf
The Seafarer and Caedmon's hymn
>>7739739
What you have is good so far, though it's missing some contemporary to show you where the language is now. Throw some john green in there (if recommend his seminal class The Fault in Our Stars) and you're all set , bud.
>>7739739
The "Oxen of the Sun" episode of Ulysses.
all books recommended so far (except don't expect to finish Faerie Queene or KJB) plus, to continue forward in time:
some John Donne poems
Milton: L'Allegro and Il Penseroso
anything by Daniel Defoe
The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope
excerpts from Boswell's Life of Johnson
excerpts from Gibbon's Decline and Fall
some Walter Scott
some essays by William Hazlitt
and end the timeline with a modernist work, the "Oxen of the Sun" chapter in Ulysses where Joyce (to complement the development of a fetus in the womb) writes a chapter where the language continually shifts to cover every period in the English language's development from anglo-saxon era to 1904.
>>7739739
Selected Tweets by Tao Lin and Mira Gonzalez
>>7739823
also The Story of English by David Crystal
I think Twain might have been the first author to make Southern vernacular artistic.
>The Faerie Queene
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Faerie_Queene#Reception
The Faerie Queene is horribly dull, read Paradise Lost instead
>>7739739
Sir Doyle? I forgot his first name. Sherlock nigga
>>7742093
all of these books/authors are horribly dull. that isn't the question of the thread
