Language Change and Nineteenth-Century Science

Catherine Watts has worked in Higher Education for over forty years and is a Senior Fellow/International Teaching Fellow (Higher Education Academy, UK), affiliated to the universities of Heidelberg (Germany), Alcalá de Henares (Spain) and Shanghai (China). Since 2013 she has written eight textbooks for language teaching/learning (all published by Routledge) which reflect Catherine’s research interests.

• Introduction / Chapter One: What’s in a word? Exploring word histories / Chapter Two: Selected background to nineteenth-century Britain / Chapter Three: What’s in a name? Exploring scientific eponyms / Chapter Four: Focus on affixation / Chapter Five: The naming of diseases, conditions and medical developments in the nineteenth century / Chapter Six: Travelling the world and the naming of zoological specimens in the 1800s / Chapter Seven: Exploring the world of nineteenth-century botany / Chapter Eight: Palaeontology and geological time / Chapter Nine: The nineteenth-century pharmacy and new chemical terminology

This book reads like a journey, navigating meanings and sources from many different social and cultural contexts. As well as the fundamental need to classify and name in order to make sense of our world, we all engage in wordplay to actively create and enrich the language. Great anecdotes, charming pictures.- Dr Jane Jones at Kings College