Lerer Seth. The History of the English Language Lecture

Publisher: The Teaching Company.
Date: 2008.
Duration: 36 lectures X 30 min.
Reader: Seth Lerer.
Sixteen centuries ago a wave of settlers from northern Europe came to the British Isles speaking a mix of Germanic dialects thick with consonants and complex grammatical forms. Today we call that dialect Old English, the ancestor of the language nearly one in five people in the world speaks every day.
Course Lecture Titles.
Introduction to the Study of Language.
The Historical Study of Language.
ndo-European and the Prehistory of English.
Reconstructing Meaning and Sound.
Historical Linguistics and Studying Culture.
The Beginnings of English.
The Old English Worldview.
Did the Normans Really Conquer English?
What Did the Normans Do to English?
Chaucer's English.
Dialect Representations in Middle English.
Medieval Attitudes toward Language.
The Return of English as a Standard.
The Great Vowel Shift and Modern English.
The Expanding English Vocabulary.
Early Modern English Syntax and Grammar.
Renaissance Attitudes toward Teaching English.
Shakespeareâ€Drama, Grammar, Pronunciation.
Shakespeareâ€Poetry, Sound, Sense.
The Bible in English.
Samuel Johnson and His Dictionary.
New Standards in English.
Dictionaries and Word Histories.
alues, Words, and Modernity.
The Beginnings of American English.
American Language from Webster to Mencken.
American Rhetoric 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 Science of Language.
Linguistics and Politics in Language Study.
Conclusions and Provocations.