These two books differ greatly in scope and style but they are both highly interesting and enjoyable. Tore Janson is concerned with the history of languages over the past 40,000 years and (in a brief coda to his argument) into the next two thousand years. Kate Burridge deals primarily with the present state of English, although, on many occasions, when she is explaining the present state of things, she examines the English of earlier periods. For example, two separate Old English verbs ended up, in a later period, being pronounced the same way, so that let meant both ‘to permit’ and ‘to prevent, stop’. Once this kind of thing happens, it is normal for English to discard one of the meanings. In this case, we discarded the sense ‘to prevent, stop’, although we have retained relics of it in the legal phrase without let or hindrance and in the tennis term let ball.