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The History Of the English Language

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Overview

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This course offers an overview of the English language that is literary, historical, cultural, political, and scientific in its scope and designed to give you greater insight into the written and spoken word.The lectures provide a thorough understanding of 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 1,500-year span to the state of American speech today. Professor Lerer defines concepts by illustrating them with copious examples. He often speaks in the dialect appropriate to each lecture - be it Old English, Chaucer’s Middle English, or the colloquial style of Mark Twain’s most unforgettable characters.

Syllabus

  • Introduction to the Study of Language
  • The Historical Study of Language—Methods and Approaches
  • The Prehistory of English—The Indo-European Context
  • Reconstructing Meaning and Sound
  • Words and Worlds—Historical Linguistics and the Study of Culture
  • The Beginnings of English
  • Old English—The Anglo-Saxon Worldview
  • Changing Language—Did the Normans Really Conquer English?
  • Conquering Language—What Did the Normans Do to English?
  • Chaucer's English
  • Dialect Jokes and Literary Representation in Middle English
  • A Multilingual World—Medieval Attitudes Toward Language Change and Variation
  • The Return of English as a Standard
  • How We Speak—The Great Vowel Shift and the Making of Modern English
  • What We Say—The Expanding English Vocabulary
  • The Shape of Modern English—Changes in Syntax and Grammar
  • Renaissance Attitudes Toward Teaching English
  • The Language of Shakespeare (Part 1)—Drama, Grammar, and Pronunciation
  • The Language of Shakespeare (Part 2)—Poetry, Sound, and Sense
  • The Bible in English
  • Samuel Johnson and His “Dictionary”
  • New Standards in English
  • Semantic Change—Dictionaries and the Histories of Words
  • Values and Words in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
  • The Beginnings of American English
  • Making the American Language—From Noah Webster to H.L. Mencken
  • The Rhetoric of Independence from Jefferson to Lincoln
  • The Language of the American Self
  • American Regionalism
  • American Dialects in Literature
  • The Impact of African-American English
  • An Anglophone World
  • The Language of Science—The Changing Nature of Twentieth-Century English
  • The Science of Language—The Study of Language in the Twentieth Century
  • Modern Linguistics and the Politics of Language Study
  • Conclusions and Provocations

Taught by

Seth Lerer

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