nd The History of the English Language, 2 Edition Parts I–III Professor Seth Lerer THE TEACHING COMPANY ® PUBLISHED BY: THE TEACHING COMPANY 4151 Lafayette Center Drive, Suite 100 Chantilly, Virginia 20151-1232 1-800-TEACH-12 Fax—703-378-3819 www.teach12.com Copyright © The Teaching Company, 2008 Printed in the United States of America This book is in copyright. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of The Teaching Company. Seth Lerer, Ph.D. Avalon Foundation Professor in Humanities and Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Stanford University Seth Lerer is the Avalon Foundation Professor in Humanities and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He holds degrees from Wesleyan University (B.A., 1976), Oxford University (B.A., 1978), and the University of Chicago (Ph.D., 1981), and he taught at Princeton University from 1981 to 1990, when he moved to Stanford. Dr. Lerer has published 10 books, including Chaucer and His Readers (Princeton University Press, 1993) and Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language (Columbia University Press, 2007), and he is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and reviews. Professor Lerer has received many awards for his scholarship and teaching, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation, the Beatrice White Prize of the English Association of Great Britain, the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, and the Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching at Stanford. ©2008 The Teaching Company. i Table of Contents The History of the English Language, 2nd Edition Professor Biography.....................................................................................................................................................i Course Scope................................................................................................................................................................1 Lecture One Introduction to the Study of Language ...............................................................................2 Lecture Two The Historical Study of Language......................................................................................6 Lecture Three Indo-European and the Prehistory of English.....................................................................9 Lecture Four Reconstructing Meaning and Sound.................................................................................12 Lecture Five Historical Linguistics and Studying Culture.....................................................................15 Lecture Six The Beginnings of English ...............................................................................................18 Lecture Seven The Old English Worldview.............................................................................................21 Lecture Eight Did the Normans Really Conquer English?......................................................................25 Lecture Nine What Did the Normans Do to English? ............................................................................28 Lecture Ten Chaucer’s English.............................................................................................................31 Lecture Eleven Dialect Representations in Middle English ......................................................................34 Lecture Twelve Medieval Attitudes toward Language...............................................................................37 Lecture Thirteen The Return of English as a Standard ................................................................................40 Lecture Fourteen The Great Vowel Shift and Modern English ....................................................................43 Lecture Fifteen The Expanding English Vocabulary.................................................................................46 Lecture Sixteen Early Modern English Syntax and Grammar....................................................................49 Lecture Seventeen Renaissance Attitudes toward Teaching English..............................................................52 Lecture Eighteen Shakespeare—Drama, Grammar, Pronunciation..............................................................55 Lecture Nineteen Shakespeare—Poetry, Sound, Sense ................................................................................58 Lecture Twenty The Bible in English .........................................................................................................61 Lecture Twenty-One Samuel Johnson and His Dictionary.................................................................................64 Lecture Twenty-Two New Standards in English.................................................................................................67 Lecture Twenty-Three Dictionaries and Word Histories ......................................................................................70 Lecture Twenty-Four Values, Words, and Modernity.........................................................................................73 Lecture Twenty-Five The Beginnings of American English...............................................................................76 Lecture Twenty-Six American Language from Webster to Mencken...............................................................79 Lecture Twenty-Seven American Rhetoric from Jefferson to Lincoln..................................................................82 Lecture Twenty-Eight The Language of the American Self.................................................................................86 Lecture Twenty-Nine American Regionalism .....................................................................................................89 Lecture Thirty American Dialects in Literature........................................................................................92 Lecture Thirty-One The Impact of African-American English ........................................................................95 Lecture Thirty-Two An Anglophone World .....................................................................................................98 Lecture Thirty-Three The Language of Science ...............................................................................................102 Lecture Thirty-Four The Science of Language ...............................................................................................106 Lecture Thirty-Five Linguistics and Politics in Language Study....................................................................110 Lecture Thirty-Six Conclusions and Provocations........................................................................................113 ii ©2008 The Teaching Company. Table of Contents The History of the English Language, 2nd Edition Timeline....................................................................................................................................................................117 Glossary....................................................................................................................................................................120 Biographical Notes...................................................................................................................................................124 Bibliography.............................................................................................................................................................126 ©2008 The Teaching Company. iii iv ©2008 The Teaching Company. The History of the English Language, 2nd Edition Scope: This course of 36 lectures surveys the history of the English language, from its origins as a dialect of Germanic- speaking peoples, through the literary and cultural documents of its 1,500-year span, to the state of American speech of the present day. In addition to surveying the spoken and written forms of the language over time, the course also focuses on larger social concerns about language use, variety, and change; the relationship between spelling and pronunciation; the notion of dialect and variation across geographical and class boundaries; the arguments concerning English as an official language and the status of standard English; the role of the dictionary in describing and prescribing usage; and the ways in which words change meaning, as well as the manner in which English speakers have coined and borrowed new words from other languages. The course is in three parts. Part I focuses on the development of English in its earliest forms. We begin with the study of Indo-European, the posited 5,000-year-old original from which the modern and classical European, Iranian, and Indian languages emerged. From Indo-European, the lectures move to the Germanic branch of languages and to the Anglo-Saxons who settled the British Isles beginning in the 5th century. Old English emerges as the literary vernacular of the Anglo-Saxons and flourishes until the Norman Conquest in the mid-11th century. The interplay of English, French, and Latin from the 11th to the 15th centuries generates the forms of Middle English in which Chaucer, among others,