The Diversions of Purley (Works in the History of Language S.) - Hardcover

John Horne Tooke, radical politician (1736-1812) and the "father of rational philology", established his reptuation with the publication of his principal work, "The Diversions of Purley". Originally planned as a three-volume work, this early attempt at a scientific language study was extremely popular and much admired by James Mill and the Utilitarians for its philological approach to language and grammar. In the opening pages Horne Tooke outlines his general theory of language and the mind. The main body of the work is dedicated to proving the validity of this theory by means of the etymological analysis of more than two thousand works. The Thoemmes Press reprint of the two-volume 1829 new edition, containing the author's final revisions with extensive notes and corrections by the editor Richard Taylor, is a useful resource for scholars of linguistics and the history of the Anglo-Saxon language.