The History of the English Language DVDs: The Teaching Company (The Great Courses)

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 history, to the state of American speech of the present day. 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. The lectures move to the Germanic branch of languages and to the Anglo-Saxons who settled the British Isles beginning in the fifth century. Old English emerges as the literary vernacular of the Anglo-Saxons and flourishes until the Norman Conquest in the mid-eleventh century. The interplay of English, French, and Latin from the eleventh to the fifteenth century generates the forms of Middle English in which Chaucer, among others, wrote, and gives us a sense of a trilingual medieval British culture. Part II begins with the emergence of English as an official language after the decline of French in the fifteenth century. This set of lectures charts the changes in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary that distinguish Middle English from Modern English. It looks closely at the rise of an English literary vernacular, and it suggests some ways in which we can trace changes in word meanings by using the resources of historical dictionaries. Part III focuses on American English and the modes of studying the history of the language today. Professor Seth Lerer is Avalon Foundation Professor in Humanities and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.