VI. Scope of the Lectures.

A. The overall lectures will examine issues of methodology; the Indo-European context; and the development of Old English into Middle English and into Modern English.

B. We will consider English in its various colonial manifestations, from American dialects to Indian literature. ©1998 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 7

C. We will examine the role that scientific study has played in the development of English.

D. We will explore the development of linguistics as an intellectual discipline from the medieval world to the modern.

E. Finally, we move toward a conceptual goal: to consider the relationship between language and mind; between language and self; and between language and the culture in which it develops.

Suggested Readings:

Bolton, W. F. A Living Language. New York, 1982.

Baugh, Albert C., and Thomas Cable. A History of the English Language. 4^th ed. Prentice Hall, 1993.

Questions to Consider:

1. What effect did the creation of dictionaries have on the history of English spelling?

2. How has English changed over time with regard to inflected endings? ©1998 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 8

Lecture Two

The Historical Study of Language:

Methods and Approaches

Scope: This lecture introduces students to the methods of studying language historically. It reviews the approaches of the course and defines some of the key terms of its inquiry.

Objectives: Upon completion of this lecture, you should be able to:

1. Define the central problems in the historical study of language, with special reference to the methods of describing linguistic change.

2. Explain the key terms of the study of language.

3. Describe and discuss the myths or presuppositions that have governed discussion of language use and change and recognize their social and ideological foundations.

Outline

I. The major purpose of this course is to trace the development of the English language from its earliest forms to the present.

A. We need a larger notion of what language itself is and how it changes.

B. We need a practical method for the historical study of language.

C. We will consider three tools for the study of language:

1. articulatory phonetics: the representation of a language’s sounds using symbols developed for that purpose

2. sociolinguistics: the study of language in society, social attitudes toward language variation, use, and change

3. comparative philology: the reconstruction of earlier forms of a language, or of earlier languages, by comparing surviving forms in recorded languages

D. With these tools, we will spend the course examining four specific areas of language change:

1. pronunciation

2. grammar and morphology

3. meaning (semantic change)

4. attitudes toward language change

II. What is the evidence for language change?

A. Surviving written evidence is important, though not definitive.

1. We must establish relationships between speech and writing; people spoke before they wrote; individuals speak before they learn to write; language is not writing

2. How reliable are texts? what is the relationship between, e.g., spelling and pronunciation? Learned forms and popular speech? Fixed traditions of grammatical usage and historical changes?

B. Knowledge of speech sounds is critical. The historical study of language presents us with certain rules and conventions of sound change; nineteenth-century historical linguistics codified many of these as “laws” that established relationships of sound among different languages and language groups. We thus can work backwards from these laws and conventions to reconstruct the sound of earlier languages.

C. We also consider writing about language: manuals of, for example, Latin schoolroom teaching; interlinear glosses; dictionaries, grammar books, diaries and journals, etc.—all can give us evidence for the spoken and written forms of a language over time.

III. We need to recognize that language is a form of social and human behavior.

A. Thus, no language is inherently better or more grammatical than any other; and no earlier form of a language is any simpler, or more complex, or more or less “grammatical” than any other form.

B. Languages have rules and conventions of successful communication; and yet, throughout history, people have judged language, language performance, and individual linguistic competence.

C. The historical study of language has often operated along two axes:

1. Should the teaching and study of language be prescriptive: i.e., should it be designed to prescribe standards of language use drawn from historical examples and, in the process, trace a lineage of development?

2. Should the teaching and study of language be descriptive: i.e., should it be designed to describe language use and linguistic behavior in order to characterize different forms and habits?

3. Can we really draw the line between describing and prescribing?

IV. Four Myths of Language.

A. The myth of universality: There is, as far as we can tell, no “universal” language, no form of utterance that can be understandable to every human being. While there have been attempts to recover historically an ultimate, “ur-language” for human beings, and while some psychologists and linguists have sought to understand the neurological structures involved in language learning, acquisition, and processing, we cannot at present posit a universal form of language.

B. The myth of simplicity: No language is harder or simpler for its own speakers to learn as a first language. All children learn to speak at the same rate, and all children, regardless of nation, speak their own languages comparably well. As a corollary, no historical form of a language is simpler or more complicated than any other. English may have lost its old inflectional system, but it has gained new patterns of syntax and word order. No language decays or gets corrupted from an older form.

C. The myth of teleology: Languages do not move in a particular direction with a goal. In retrospect, we may observe certain patterns of change, but there is no discernible predictive value to evidence from the current state of a language that can enable us to posit a goal or telos for language change. We might also call this the myth of evolution in language: Languages do not evolve from lower forms into higher ones.

D. The myth of gradualism: Languages do not change evenly over time. Languages change at different rates and in different areas. For example, the language of Shakespeare, 400 years old, is relatively comprehensible to us. But the language of Chaucer, 150 years older than the language of Shakespeare, was almost incomprehensible to Shakespeare’s contemporaries (here, changes in pronunciation were rapid and wide-ranging during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries). Languages change in different areas (pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar) at different rates and at different times.

Suggested Readings:

Bolton, W. F. A Living Language. New York, 1982.

Samuels, M. L. Linguistic Evolution. Cambridge, 1972.

Steiner, George. After Babel. Oxford, 1975.

Questions to Consider:

1. For the speakers of a given language, are some languages inherently more difficult to learn than others?

2. Do most languages gradually evolve toward a higher or lower form? ©1998 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 11