Reread Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone Today

Published by Nimble Books, Michigan.
ISBN 978-1934840573

The Buckingham Journal of Language and Linguistics.

Issue 1, October 2008.

The Unauthorized Harry Potter Quiz Book, published June 2008 by Nimble Books, Michigan.
ISBN-10: 1934840440
ISBN-13: 978-1934840443

This is a Harry Potter quiz book like no other. It won't be asking you questions like "what school did Harry Potter go to?" (If you are a Harry Potter fan, then of course you know the answer!) Rather it asks questions which will develop your literary appreciation of the Harry Potter books and your general knowledge of the Harry Potter phenomenon. Some of these questions are easy, quite a few are fiendishly difficult, and several of them really don't have simple answers, but thinking about possible answers is what it is all about. Work through this quiz book (with an eye on the answers) and come out the other end with a much better understanding of the phenomenon that is Harry Potter.

Review of Connectives in the History of English on The Linguist List.

Dictionary of West Country English
Published July 2008 by Abson Books.
ISBN 9780902920811

"A language so local, so phonetically condensed, permissive of slur that it is inseparable ... from its peculiar landscapes; its combes and bartons, leats and linhays." (John Fowles)

Genealogy and the Internet

eBook republishing on the cover disk of Your Family Tree magazine October 2007 edition.

New eBook Uploading Your Family Tree to the Internet republished on the cover disk of Your Family Tree magazine January 2008 edition.

Vikings in America
Forthcoming April 2009, published by Birlinn, Edinburgh.

For four centuries or more, from their first visits around ad 1000 to the eve of the Columbus voyages, the Vikings explored and settled thousands of miles of the coasts and rivers of North America. From New York’s Long Island to the Canadian High Arctic the New World was a playground for Viking adventurers. And the name the Vikings gave to this New World – America.

Lingua et Linguistica 1.1 2007
ISBN 978-1-84753-625-9
Lingua et Linguistica 1.2 2007
ISBN 978-1-84799-129-4
In association with Shakespeare Centre Press and the JLL Project.

Home Counties English

Mini dictionary published September 2007 by Abson Books, London.

Early English Settlement of Orkney and Shetland
To be published 29th November 2007 by John Donald, an imprint of Birlinn.
Classical and Mediaeval historians state that there was English settlement in both Orkney and Shetland from at least the fourth century AD – about a century before the English migrated from the Continent to England. Scholars have dismissed these references as mistaken, though with no better reason than that they do not fit the traditional view. This book examines the case for early English settlement, bringing to light new evidence from the Norn language which was spoken on the islands until the eighteenth century, as well as re-examining historical and archaeological sources. The linguistic evidence serves as a proof for the accuracy of the assertions of early historians. It shows that the English were a small group within the complex cultural mix of Orkney and Shetland, ultimately subsumed into the Norwegian Viking population which later migrated to the islands. The English did not survive as a discrete population. But they had a four-hundred year presence in the islands, which constitutes the earliest English settlement within the British Isles.

Reviewed by The Orcadian.
http://www.orkneyjar.com/archaeology/anglosaxons.htm

Guest Lecturer, Florida International University, March 2007.

Presentation 13th March "The Mythical History of English", Linguistics Program, College of Arts and Sciences.

Entrant for the Lulu Blooker Prize 2007 is A Brit in Iceland

Dictionary of Surrey English
by Graeme Davis
A Revised Edition of Granville Leveson Gower's 1893 A Glossary of Surrey Words

Book published 2007 by Peter Lang within the series Historical Linguistics.

Genealogy and the Internet

Dr Graeme Davis

New on-line book published September 2006 by SelfHelpGuides, Auckland, New Zealand.

This guide is for anyone who wants to research a family. Using the resources here you can advance your family tree without travelling to national and regional record offices. The emphasis for this guide is on the British Isles and those English-speaking countries where ancestry goes back to Britain or Europe, usually by the mid nineteenth century.

Contemporary Studies in Descriptive Linguistics

This Peter Lang monograph series provides an outlet for academic monographs which offer a recent and original contribution to linguistics and which are within the descriptive tradition.
While the monographs demonstrate their debt to contemporary linguistic thought, the series does not impose limitations in terms of methodology or genre, and does not support a particular linguistic school. Rather the series welcomes new and innovative research that contributes to furthering the understanding of the description of language.
The topics of the monographs are scholarly and represent the cutting edge for their particular fields, but are also accessible to researchers outside the specific disciplines.

Vol. 1 Mark Garner: Language: An Ecological View. 260 pages, 2004.
ISBN 3-03910-054-8 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6295-0
Vol. 2 T. Nyan: Meanings at the Text Level: A Co-Evolutionary Approach. 194 pages, 2004.
ISBN 3-03910-250-8 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7179-8
Vol. 3: Forthcoming.
Vol. 4: Dimitra Koutsantoni: Developing Academic Literacies - Understanding Disciplinary Communities' Culture and Rhetoric. 302 pages, 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-575-5
Vol. 5: Emmanuelle Labeau: Beyond the Aspect Hypothesis: Tense-Aspect Development in Advanced L2 French. 259 pages, 2005. ISBN 3-03910-281-8 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7208-5
Vol. 6: Maria Stambolieva: Building up Aspect: a Study of Aspect and Related Categories in Bulgarian, with Parallels in English and French. 243 pages, 2008. ISBN 978-3-03910-558-8
Vol. 7: Stavroula Varella: Language Contact and the Lexicon in the History of Cypriot Greek.
283 pages. 2006. ISBN 3-03910-526-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7531-9
Vol. 8: Alan J. E. Wolf: Subjectivity in a Second Language: Conveying the Expression of Self. 246 pages. 2006. ISBN 3-03910-518-3 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7524-6
Vol. 9: Bettina Braun: Production and Perception of Thematic Contrast in German. 277 pages. 2006. ISBN 3-03910-566-3 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7593-9
Vol. 10: Jean-Paul Kouega: A Dictionary of Cameroon English Usage. 202 pages. 2007. ISBN 3-03911-027-8 / US-ISBN 0-8204-9316-9
Vol. 11: Sebastian M Rasinger: Bengali English in East London. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-036-0
Vols. 12, 13, 14, 15: Forthcoming.
Vol. 16: Jinan Fedhil Al-Hajaj and Graeme Davis (eds): University of Basrah Studies in English. 304 pages. 2008. ISBN 978-3-03911-325-5
Vol. 17: Paolo Coluzzi: Minority Language Planning and Micronationalism in Italy. 348 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-041-4
Vol. 18: Iwan Wmffre: Breton Orthographies and Dialects, volume 1. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-365-1
Vol. 19: Iwan Wmffre: Breton Orthographies and Dialects, volume 2. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-365-1
Vol. 20: Fanny Forsberg: Le Langague Préfabriqué: Formes, fonctions et fréquences en français parlé L2 et L1. 2008. ISBN 978-3-03911-369-9
Vol. 21: Kathy Pitt: Sourcing the Self: Debating the Relations between Language and Consciousness. 2008. ISBN 978-3-03911-398-9

University of Basrah Studies in English

An academic project to produce an edited book in collaboration with staff in English language, linguistics and literature at the University of Basrah, Iraq. Published October 2008.

Comparative Syntax of Old English and Old Icelandic

Study of the syntax of Old English and Old Icelandic has for long been dominated by the impressions of early philologists. Their assertions that these languages were "free" in their word-order were for many years unchallenged. Only within the last two decades has it been demonstrated that the word-order of each shows regular patterns which approach the status of rules, and which may be precisely described. This book takes the subject one step further by offering a comparison of the syntax of Old English and Old Icelandic, the two best-preserved Old Germanic Languages. Overwhelmingly the two languages show the same word-order patterns - as do the other Old Germanic languages, at least as far as can be determined from the fragments which have survived. It has long been recognised that Old English and Old Icelandic have a high proportion of common lexis and very similar morphology, yet the convention has been to emphasise the differences between the two as representatives respectively of the West and North sub-families of Germanic. The argument of this book is that the similar word-order of the two should instead lead us to stress the similarities between the two languages. Old English and Old Iceland were sufficiently close to be mutually comprehensible. This thesis receives copious support from historical and literary texts. Our understanding of the Old Germanic world should be modified by the concept of a common "Northern Speech" which provided a common Germanic ethnic identity and a platform for the free flow of cultural ideas.