Yesterday, I had a Golf student who requested an alternative lesson. One of the questions he had asked me was what was I reading.
“Well, I’m reading Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of the Five Rings and a book on the history of the alphabet.”
He was intrigued by my second choice of reading. I went on to explain how I love studying such aspects of English and I would be more than happy to give him brief lesson on historical linguistics. I don’t know if he was humoring me or what, but he accepted my proposal.
I hate that I wasn’t able to go too terribly in depth, though. I showed him a sentence in Old English (thanks Melany!), Middle English (opening line of Canterbury Tales), and explained really briefly the differences between Early Modern Englsih and Modern. I made it a point to explain about the etymology of the word “England” and “English” since he was going to be moving there for six months, and of course, gave him the most important date of all (according to Dr. Kim) — the Norman Conquest of 1066. I told him about the influence of Norman French on our language and some other choice pieces of information like some changes in orthography.
In retrospect, I probably should have explained a bit about the Proto-Indo European Language families and stuff, but let’s be honest, 40 minutes just isn’t enough time to talk about historical linguistics.
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While I’m on the thread of linguistics, I’m finding other philologists hidden in Nova. One of the new girls, Kat, is Welsh (a language in which she is fluent) and we chatted up a bit about linguistics. We played the number exchange game and she hopes that we can meet some time for coffee and gush about language. She happens to be Braden’s newest interest. It’s quite amusing. He gets so embarassed when he’s around us because we’re usually nerding out about something like labio-dental fricatives and glottal stops. (”I mean, look. Here’s one that’s just “m” question mark. What the heck is that?”)
I also did a bad, bad thing. While I was in Umeda today I of course had to go to the bookstore. They had a copy of Yule’s The Study of Language which you better believe I purchased!!
I am such a nerd.
Yeah! Lingustics!
was it about se stan or seo naedre?
You did know I’m getting married on the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, right? And totally by coincidence….or is it?
i love linguistics!
and phonetics…even more!
The Yule book is very basic - ISU uses it for its English 143 class (”baby linguistics” according to Aaron) - but I think you will find it to be very useful as a teaching tool. Aww, there I go gushing about linguistics.