The Making of the English Landscape, by W G Hoskins, taught me to see the landscape through new eyes. The idea that underpins the book is captured well by the cover illustration of the 1970 Penguin edition, pictured. I owned a copy of this edition at one time, but now it's been replaced by the Kindle version.
In this book Hoskins shows us how the landscape has been worked and reworked over the last 2000 or so years, and how what we see today can be understood in terms of its history, once we begin to understand what we are looking at and can peel back the layers.
In a similar way studying the origins of the English we use today helps us understand the history of the language and the influences that shaped it. That's why I find etymology an object of absorbing interest, including the etymology of place-names.
Here's a short extract I particularly like from Hoskins, describing a village some miles from where I live and which I've visited a couple of times because it preserves many features of the original settlement. It is a kind of fossil village.
"It stands in the midst of the 1,620 acres of its territory, just off the Icknield Way which forms the entire southern frontier of the parish. The site of the manor house and the church, which stand on the highest ground in the parish, is enclosed by a moat, and the minute village lies along the street to the west. There is not a single outlying farm in the parish, which looks exactly the same on the map of 1950 as it did on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map in 1834. It is first recorded in a Saxon charter of 973 – ‘the place by the ditch’ – and it retains all the essential characteristics of a small community founded 1,000 years ago. Even the Saxon open fields of Bygrave disappeared within living memory."
Notice the Old English name - Bygrave means "next to the ditch". The -grave element is from an old Germanic root meaning "to dig" and which is also the origin of groove (via Dutch). In fact several of the canals in Amsterdam have names ending in gracht, from the same root, and which means something like "ditch" in modern Dutch.
The Making of the English Landscape
The Making of the English Landscape, by W G Hoskins, taught me to see the landscape through new eyes. The idea that underpins the book is captured well by the cover illustration of the 1970 Penguin edition, pictured. I owned a copy of this edition at one time, but now it's been replaced by the Kindle version.
In this book Hoskins shows us how the landscape has been worked and reworked over the last 2000 or so years, and how what we see today can be understood in terms of its history, once we begin to understand what we are looking at and can peel back the layers.
In a similar way studying the origins of the English we use today helps us understand the history of the language and the influences that shaped it. That's why I find etymology an object of absorbing interest, including the etymology of place-names.
Here's a short extract I particularly like from Hoskins, describing a village some miles from where I live and which I've visited a couple of times because it preserves many features of the original settlement. It is a kind of fossil village.
"It stands in the midst of the 1,620 acres of its territory, just off the Icknield Way which forms the entire southern frontier of the parish. The site of the manor house and the church, which stand on the highest ground in the parish, is enclosed by a moat, and the minute village lies along the street to the west. There is not a single outlying farm in the parish, which looks exactly the same on the map of 1950 as it did on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map in 1834. It is first recorded in a Saxon charter of 973 – ‘the place by the ditch’ – and it retains all the essential characteristics of a small community founded 1,000 years ago. Even the Saxon open fields of Bygrave disappeared within living memory."
Notice the Old English name - Bygrave means "next to the ditch". The -grave element is from an old Germanic root meaning "to dig" and which is also the origin of groove (via Dutch). In fact several of the canals in Amsterdam have names ending in gracht, from the same root, and which means something like "ditch" in modern Dutch.