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Product Description
The author presents in concise, readable form the ancestral sources of over 6,000 common English words and tells how they have grown over the centuries into the terms we use today. In delineating "families" of related words, Robert Claiborne shows, for example, how navigate, squat, demagogue, and ambassador derive from a single root, AG-, "to drive": to navigate is to "drive" a ship; to squat is to force one's body together; a demagogue "drives" the people; and an ambassador is "driven around" to represent a government. An extensive introduction describes the diverse channels by which all these words came into English: the Germanic tongues, Old English, Old Norse, Low Dutch, and High German; Latin and its Romance descendants; and Greek. This book is a must have for all word buffs and language lovers, an intelligent yet uniquely accessible examination of our vocabulary by a recognized and popular authority.
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