Investigate the remarkable history of English, from the powerful prose of King Alfred in the Middle Ages to the modern-day sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr. with the Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of California, San Diego.
Overview
Syllabus
- By This Professor
- 01: Introduction to the Study of Language
- 02: The Historical Study of Language
- 03: Indo-European and the Prehistory of English
- 04: Reconstructing Meaning and Sound
- 05: Historical Linguistics and Studying Culture
- 06: The Beginnings of English
- 07: The Old English Worldview
- 08: Did the Normans Really Conquer English?
- 09: What Did the Normans Do to English?
- 10: Chaucer's English
- 11: Dialect Representations in Middle English
- 12: Medieval Attitudes toward Language
- 13: The Return of English as a Standard
- 14: The Great Vowel Shift and Modern English
- 15: The Expanding English Vocabulary
- 16: Early Modern English Syntax and Grammar
- 17: Renaissance Attitudes toward Teaching English
- 18: Shakespeare-Drama, Grammar, Pronunciation
- 19: Shakespeare-Poetry, Sound, Sense
- 20: The Bible in English
- 21: Samuel Johnson and His Dictionary
- 22: New Standards in English
- 23: Dictionaries and Word Histories
- 24: Values, Words, and Modernity
- 25: The Beginnings of American English
- 26: American Language from Webster to Mencken
- 27: American Rhetoric from Jefferson to Lincoln
- 28: The Language of the American Self
- 29: American Regionalism
- 30: American Dialects in Literature
- 31: The Impact of African-American English
- 32: An Anglophone World
- 33: The Language of Science
- 34: The Science of Language
- 35: Linguistics and Politics in Language Study
- 36: Conclusions and Provocations
Taught by
Seth Lerer
