Whether you are an entry-level or seasoned designer or programmer, learn all about data structures in this easy-to-understand, self-teaching guide that can be directly applied to any programming language.

This handbook shows how to write faster and more robust stored procedures and functions, learn effective, real-world solutions to problems faced by database developers, designers, and administrators, and master topics such as optimizing and debugging.

Few languages are riddled with as many spelling inconsistencies and irregularities as English. Why is there such dissonance between the sounds of English and the spelling used to represent them? The answer lies in the history of the language itself. The History of English Spelling reveals the rich and complex history of Modern English spelling, tracing its origins and development from Old English up to the present day. The book provides a highly detailed, letter-by-letter analysis of the Old English basis of Modern English spelling, followed by in-depth coverage of the contributions from French, Latin, Greek, and the many other languages that have contributed to current orthography. Upward and Davidson also explore events in the socio-political history of England as an explanatory setting for developments in spelling, along with the works of a number of lexicographers (especially Johnson and Webster), and various proposals for spelling reform. The History of English Spelling reveals the richness of the complex and often frustrating alphabetic spelling system used in the English language.

The history of a language can be understood as the combination of its internal history and external history. The internal history of a language includes all events of a linguistic nature, such as phonological, grammatical, and lexical changes. Among the questions it addresses are these:What changes have occurred in the language’s inventory of sounds over time?What grammatical structures have been lost, and what other structures have arisen to replace them?What have been the most important sources of new words? To what extent have other words become obsolete? External history is the history of the people or peopleswho speak the language, though naturally a language history focuses principally on the events that have had linguistic repercussions. Thus, external history addresses questions such as the following:What peoples spoke the language originally?What other peoples adopted the languag and under what circumstances?What invasions, migrations, and other events have contributed to the current geographic and demographic distribution of the language? What cultural developments have affected the evolution of the language? Ideally, we would like to find one-to-one correspondences between these two perspectives—the internal and the external—but in practice this is rarely possible. Even if it is unquestionable that cultural events such as the Renaissance and the technological revolution of the twentieth century have fostered the acceptance of largen umbers of neologisms—in the first case primarily from Italian and in the second from English—in general it is difficult to find concrete correspondences, for example, between the pace of phonological change and periods of peace or war, or between specific grammatical changes and migrations of populations.