The history of English Language

This is a wonderful infographic about the history of the English language provided by of Brighton School of Business and Management. You may read it more comfortably on VisualLoop.

For a collection of videos from the Open University about the history of the English language click here or on the tag "History of English" on the right.

Get the Embed Code to Add This Infographic to Your Site.

‘The History of the English Language’ courtesy of Brighton School of Business and Management.

American and British spelling differences

It's been quite a while since we posted an entry from Joanne Rudling and her excellent Spelling Blog.

At the turn of the year Joanne published a lesson on the differences between American and British spelling.

These are the questions she posed to her blog readers:

A lot of American spellings have fewer letters, why?
Do you know why Americans changed British spellings?
What year was the first American dictionary published?

She answers these 'history' questions in this video:



In another entry on her blog she goes over the differences in spelling between American and British English.

If you drop by this second entry you will also be able to do a short  spelling test that Joanne has prepared.

There she will explain to you the difference between the -ise and -ize ending in some verbs (realise vs realize).

Words of the World

From Nazi to Chocolate, words play a vital role in our lives. And each word has its own story. But where do they come from? What do they mean? How do they change?

Some of these questions will be answered by Words of the World - a series of short videos presented by experts from the University of Nottingham's School of Modern Languages and Cultures.

In addition to exploring the words themselves, they explore a little about the varied research experts are working on.

On the image below, you can see all the words in the project so far, and furhter below historian Paul Smith talks about the origins of Feminism.

Now, there is no transcript for the videos, although we can activate You Tube's CC on the lower side of the screen. This device is more accurate with some speakers than with others, and accent and background noise have a great influence on the accuracy of the transcription.

H/T to Free Technology for Teachers.

History of English: Chapters VIII, IX & X

Watch the final three instalments of The History of English, chapters VIII, IX and X, from The Open University.

For chapter IX we have prepared a fill-in the blanks listening activity, where you have to complete the blanks in the transcript with the missing words.

Remember that the vocabulary content of the videos is quite high, which together with their fast pace makes full comprehension a bit difficult. The videos, however, are funny and give us a general view of the development of English language to these days.

You can read the full transcript of the three chapters here.

Chapter VIII: American English or not English but somewhere in the ballpark



Chapter IX: Internet English or language reverts to type



In (1) ... the first email was sent. Soon the internet arrived: A free global space to share information, ideas and amusing pictures of cats.

Before the internet English changed through people speaking it, but the network brought typing back into fashion, and hundreds of cases of (2) ...   ...   ... . Nobody had ever had to download anything before, let alone use a (3) ..., and the only time someone said about a firewall it ended with a massive (4) ...   ... and a huge pile of charred wall paper.

Conversations were getting shorter than the average (5) ...   ...  . Why bother writing a sentence when an abbreviation would do, and leave you more time to block, poke, reboot when your hard-drive (6) ...  .
‘In my humble opinion’ became INHO. ‘By the way’ became BTW and if we are honest that a life-threatening accident was pretty hilarious simply became (7) ...  .

Some changes even passed into spoken English. For your information, people frequently asked questions like how can (8) ...  mean ‘laugh out loud’ and ‘lots of love’? If you’re going to complain about that, then UG2BK.

Chapter X: Global English or whose language is it anyway?



Key:
1 1972 2 repetitive strain injury 3 toolbar 4 insurance claim 5 attention span 6 crashed 7 fail 8 LOL

History of English V, VI & VII (with transcript)

Here are chapters V (The English of Science or how to speak with gravity), VI (English and empire or the sun never sets on the English language) and VII (The Age of the Dictionary) of The History of English.

Enjoy the videos below and try your best to understand as much as you can with the help of the images and the key words that come up in the videos.

You can read the transcript of the three chapters by clicking here.

History of English III & IV: Shakespeare & The King James Bible

The third chapter of The History of English in 10 Minutes is devoted to the importance of Shakespeare in the English language.

I think that today's episode is a little bit more difficult than usual, as there is a heavy vocabulary component  that even some advanced students will find it difficult.

For that reason, there's no task in today's episode. Simply enjoy it and read the transcript below as you watch along.

Remember that if there are any words you don't understand, it is enough for you to double-click on the corresponding word in the transcript to find out its meaning.

As for the idiomatic expressions, you can use the MacMillan Dictionary box on the left sidebar of this blog or use an online idiom dictionary like IdiomDictionary.

Transcript:
As the dictionary tells us, about two thousand new words and phrases were invented by William Shakespeare. He gave us handy words like ‘eyeball’, ‘puppydog’, and ‘anchovy’ and more show-offy words like ‘dauntless’, ‘besmirch’ and ‘lacklustre’. He came up with the word ‘alligator’ soon after he ran out of things to rhyme with ‘crocodile’ and a nation of English tea drinkers finally took him to their hearts when he invented the ‘hob-nob’.

Shakespeare knew the power of catchphrases as well as biscuits. Without him we’d never eat our ‘flesh and blood’ ‘out of house and home’. We’d have to say ‘good riddance’ to the ‘green eyed monster’ and ‘breaking the ice’ would would be as ‘dead as a doornail’. If you tried to ‘get your money’s worth’ you’d be ‘given short shrift’ and anyone  who ‘laid it on with a trowel’ could be ‘hoist with his own petard’. Of course, it is possible other people used these words first, but the dictionary writers liked looking them up in Shakespeare because there was more cross-dressing and people poking each other’s eyes out.

Shakespeare’s poetry showed the world that English was a rich, vibrant language with limitless expressive and emotional power and he still had time to open all of those tea rooms in Stratford.



The fourth chapter of The History of English in 10 Minutes is entitled The King James Bible or let there be light reading. There are also a lot of proverbs and idiomatic expressions in the script, so you can enjoy the video while you read the transcript and look up the expressions and vocabulary you don't know later own.

Transcript:
In 16011 the ‘powers that be’ turned the world upside down with a labour of love, a new translation of the Bible. A team of scribes to the ‘wisdom of Solomon’ went the extra mile to make the King James translation ‘all things to all men’. Whether from their ‘heart’s desire’ to ‘fight the good fight’ or just for the ‘filthy lucre’.
This sexy, new Bible ‘went from strength to strength’, ‘getting to the root of the matter’ in a language even the ‘salt of the earth’ could understand. ‘The writing wasn’t on the wall’, it was in handy little books with ‘fire and brimstone’ preachers reading it in every church. Its words and phrases ‘took root’ ‘to the ends of the earth’, or at least to the end of Britain.

The King James Bible is the book that taught us that a ‘leopard can’t change its spots’, that ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’, that ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’ is harder to spot than you would imagine, and how annoying it is ‘to have a fly in your ointment’.

In fact, just as Jonathan begat Merit-Ball and Merit Baal begat Micah, the King James Bible begat a whole glossary of metaphor and morality that still shapes the way English is spoken today. Amen.

The History of English: The Norman Conquest

Self-study activity:
Watch  the second chapter of The History of English, from The Opening University, and fill in the blanks in the transcript with the missing words.



1066. True to his name William the Conqueror (1) ... England bringing new concepts from across the Channel, like the French language, the Domesday Book and the duty-free (unknown word) (2) ...  .  

French was "de rigueur" for all official business, with words like "judge", "jury", "evidence" and "justice" coming in and giving John Grisham's career a (3) ...   .

Latin was still used "ad nauseam" in (4) ..., but the common man spoke English, able to communicate only by speaking more slowly and (5) ... until the others understood him.  

Words like "cow", "sheep" and "(6) ..." come from the English speaking farmers. While the "a la carte" versions "beef", "mutton" and "(7)..." come from the  French speaking toffs, beginning a long-running trend of restaurants having completely indecipherable menus. 

All in all, the English absorbed about (8) ... new words from the Normans, though they still couldn't (9) the rules of cheek kissing. 

The "bon" army all ended when the English nation took their new warlike lingo of "armies", "navies" and "soldiers" and began the Hundred Years' War against France. It actually lasted a (10) ... years but by that point no one could count any higher in French and English took over as the language of power.

Key:
1 invades 2 multipack 3 kick-start 4 church 5 loudly 6 swine 7 pork 8 ten thousand 9 grasp 10 one hundred and sixteen

History of English -Whatever happened to the Jutes?

The History of English in 10 minutes is a collection of ten one-minute videos from The Open University, which provides a funny light-hearted approach to the history of the English language.

The videos are fast-paced and dense, because they try to convey a lot of information in a very short period of time, but the cartoons greatly help with comprehension.

To kill two birds with one stone, we'll be providing the transcripts of all the chapters with some blanks in it, so that you can practise your listening skills while making sure that you get a full understanding of everything that is narrated on the video.

The first chapter in the series is Whatever happened to the Jutes?



Self-study activity:

The English language begins with the phrase Up your Caesar, as the Romans (1) ... Britain, and a lot of Germanic tribes start (2) ... in, tribes such as the Saxons and the Anglos, who together gave us the term Anglo-Saxon, and the Jukes, who didn’t.

The Romans left some very (3) ...   ... behind, but not much of their Latin language. The Anglo-Saxon vocab was much more useful, as it was mainly words for simple everyday things like ‘house’, ‘woman’, ‘(4) ...’ and ‘werewolf’.

Four of our days of the week were named in honour of Anglo-Saxon gods. They didn’t (5) ... with Saturday, Sunday or Monday as they’d all gone off for a long weekend.

While they were away, Christian missionaries stole in bringing with them with (6) ... about jumble sales and more Latin. Christianity was a (7) ... with the locals and made them much happy to take on funky new words from Latin like ‘martyr’, ‘bishop’ and ‘font’.

Along came the Vikings with their action man words like ‘drag’, ‘ransack’, ‘thrust’ and ‘die’. They made have (8) ... and pillaged but they were also into (9) ... and (10) ...    . Two of around two thousand words they gave English, as well as the phrase ‘Watch out for that man with the enormous axe’.

Key:
1 leave 2 flooding 3 straight roads 4 loaf 5 bother 6 leaflets 7 hit 8 raped 9 give 10 take