Our English Language: Its Life and Times

Elinor Clark Horne

Fridays, 9:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.
January 13 - March 3, 2006
D.O.C. House

You've been speaking English all your life - perhaps without being fully aware of how remarkable this language of ours really is. It's led a dramatic life — and who knows where it's headed from here? Languages change constantly, as the life and times of their speakers change. We'll explore present-day English and its workings and then follow its course back through the centuries to see how it got this way, as we observe the English used by its earlier and earliest speakers and writers. We'll take generous samplings of the records left by these tellers of tales, as they recorded the world of their contemporaries.

Meanwhile, back in real life, participants will no doubt become increasingly aware — in new ways — of our language in action. Each session will include (a) Discussion of assigned reading (the equivalent of a chapter or two each week); (b) Discussion of topics handed out ahead of time (samples: "When we learn our language, what is it that we learn?" and "Do you speak English exactly as your [grand]parents did and your [grand]children do?"); (c) Show and Tell: English-language oddities or whatever that participants have come across in their new alertness to the speech around them.

Main reading sources: Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, and Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue, supplemented by handouts from various sources.

Elinor Clark Horne has a Yale degree in Linguistics and is the author of four books on languages of Asia, most recently a Javanese-English Dictionary (Yale University Press, 1974). Her major fields of research are Linguistics and Folktales. She has taught both of these subjects, as well as writing courses, for a number of years — at Yale, at Dartmouth, and at community colleges in the Upper Valley.