My name is Richard Manning. I spent my working life in Britain’s now abolished Department of International Development and its predecessors from 1965-2003, and was then involved as Chair, Board Member or consultant in various other institutions involved in International Development, full-time to 2008, and then on a gradually-reducing scale. One of the many benefits I have received from this has been the opportunity of learning about diverse cultures, histories and languages from across this astonishing and rapidly-changing world.
I was given an interest in words, first by my mother and then more specifically on word-origins by my teacher of Greek at school. That encouraged me to specialise in linguistics in my final year of a Classics degree in Cambridge, back in the 1960s. While that taught me some of the basics of how Indo-European languages relate, it seemed that most of the issues had already been extensively researched, and I decided not to continue in academia.
Many decades later, I reviewed a couple of books on a totally different subject for the Oxford University Press, and was paid in the form of books from their publications. I decided to select books on Indo-European and on the history of English (the latter almost totally absent from the course at Cambridge). It was a pleasure to re-connect to this field, and the COVID lockdown enabled me to use this updated knowledge to sketch out a book designed to make use of the many borrowings English speakers have made from related languages to show how an understanding of sound changes sheds so much light on these word-links.
I was fortunate to get reactions to my initial draft from the current Professor of Linguistics in the Classics Department at Cambridge University, James Clackson, who not only corrected many errors but advised me that my draft needed to reshaped if it was to have wider appeal.
This resonated with me, as I feel that there is a story to be told, and a wide potential audience among the 1.5 billion or so who understand English in the world today. Publishers were however unimpressed, and this encouraged me to shift from writing a book to setting up a website to engage with others with an interest in word-origins, and see where that leads.
I accept full responsibility for any errors in the blogs that you will be able to access, and I look forward to learning from any comments that you may wish to make – just press the ‘Comments’ button below.