Course Guidebook - THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE,

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The History of the
English Language
Part I
Professor Seth Lerer
T
HE
T
EACHING
C
OMPANY
®
Seth Lerer, Ph.D.
Stanford University
Seth Lerer is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford
University, where he currently serves as Chairman of the Department of
Comparative Literature. 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 until 1990, when he
moved to Stanford. He has published six books, including
Chaucer and His
Readers
(Princeton University Press, 1993; paperback 1996) and
Courtly Letters
in the Age of Henry VIII
(Cambridge University Press, 1997), and he is the
author of more than forty 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 (for
Chaucer and His Readers
), and the Hoagland Prize for
undergraduate teaching at Stanford.
©1998 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership
i
Table of Contents
The History of the English Language
Part One: The Origins of English
Professor Biography
........................................................................................... i
Course Scope
...................................................................................................... 1
Lecture One
Introduction to the Study of Language ..................... 3
Lecture Two
The Historical Study of Language: Methods and
Approaches ............................................................... 8
Lecture
Three
The Prehistory of English: The Indo-European
Context.................................................................... 11
Lecture Four
Reconstructing Meaning and Sound ....................... 14
Lecture Five
Words and Worlds: Historical Linguistics and the
Study of Culture...................................................... 18
Lecture Six
The Beginnings of English...................................... 21
Lecture Seven
Old English: The Anglo-Saxon Worldview............ 26
Lecture Eight
Changing Language: Did the Normans Really
Conquer English?.................................................... 30
Lecture Nine
Conquering Language: What Did the Normans
Do to English? ........................................................ 34
Lecture Ten
Chaucer’s English ................................................... 37
Lecture Eleven
Dialect Jokes and Literary Representation in Middle
English ................................................................... 40
Lecture Twelve
A Multilingual World: Medieval Attitudes Toward
Language Change and Variation............................. 43
Glossary
............................................................................................................ 47
Timeline
............................................................................................................ 52
Biographies
....................................................................................................... 54
ii
©1998 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership
The History of the English Language
Scope:
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. 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.
Each of these issues, charged with meaning in the present day, had historical
examples. 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.
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.
Some of the approaches of this course will touch on linguistics. There will be a
little bit of literary criticism. 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). These are all issues that could demand full courses of their
own. 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. 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. We will learn about the past, but also see the making of our own present.
In Part 1 we focus on the development of Old English, precursor of the modern
tongue we speak today. 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. 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
©1998 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership
1
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Course Guidebook - THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE,

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