With the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, English was eclipsed as an official language by French and Latin. We also examine the basic vocabulary of Old English that comprises a significant part of Modern English even today. ©1998 The Teaching Company Limited PartnershipĮmphasis on poetic alliteration. We consider the specific qualities of Old English that have been lost to modern English speakers: grammatical gender, synthetic structure, the presence of “strong” verbs, and the We trace Old English back to the beginning: from its position as one of the Germanic languages all the way back to its ultimate roots in the theoretical language known as Indo-European. In Part 1 we focus on the development of Old English, precursor of the modern tongue we speak today.
We will learn about the past, but also see the making of our own present. With these lectures, the student can find the history of English embedded in the words we use, the literature we read, and the everyday lives we lead. Our goal here, however, is to understand the great impact that studying the history of English can have on our appreciation of social, cultural, literary, and linguistic change.
These are all issues that could demand full courses of their own. And, at times, it will call attention to the material culture of the book (specifically, how people read and wrote and what materials they used to do so). There will be a little bit of literary criticism. Some of the approaches of this course will touch on linguistics.
In the course of these lectures, too, we will be looking at some special problems in the study of language generally-for example: how we describe and characterize language change over time how we can accurately describe differences in pronunciation and, thus, recover earlier pronunciation habits and how we can use the study of literature not only to chart the different periods of the English language, but to recognize how literary writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Twain, and others used the fluid resources of their language to grant meaning to a changing world. People have puzzled over these problems throughout time, and it will be the purpose of this course to illustrate the many ways in which speakers and writers of English, and its antecedents, confronted the place of language in society and culture. Each of these issues, charged with meaning in the present day, had historical examples. In addition to surveying the spoken and written forms of the language over time, the course also focuses on a set of larger social concerns about language use, variety, and change: the relationship between spelling and pronunciation the notion of dialect and variation across geographical and social boundaries the arguments concerning English as an official language and the status of a standard English the role of the dictionary in describing and prescribing usage and the ways in which words change meaning and, in turn, the ways in which English coins or borrows new words. This course of thirty-six lectures introduces the student to the history of the English language, from its origins as a dialect of the Germanic-speaking peoples, through the literary and cultural documents of its 1500-year span, to the state of American speech of the present day.