August 21
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This first class meeting was partly taken up with administrative matters like attendance and syllabus introduction. The first activity was introductions, accomplished in 5 small groups. After exchanging names and brief introductions, the members of each
group compared notes about what aspects of the history of English they were most interested in, and what questions about the history of English they were hoping to have answered by the end of the term.
Our basic questions were:
- What are the basic origins of English. Where did it come from, and how did it get the way it did? And why is English spelling not more phonetically based?
- How did English develop, and who gets to decide what elements of
English change? Why, for example, did we stop using thou?
- What other languages have influenced English, how English spread around the world, and what changes have occurred in written forms of English.
- How are the origins of English linked to the history of words: how have meanings changed over time?
- What have been important cultural and historical influences on English, and how have words changed over time?
We'll address all of these questions in the next 15 weeks, as well as some important questions about attitudes towards English.
The next activity involved looking at 6 texts and trying to put them in chronological order. Everyone had a relatively easy time identifying the text written around 900 (King Alfred's translation of Boethius'Consolation of Philosophy as the old
est (#2 on the sheet), and Chaucer's translation of it (around 1370), as the next oldest (#6). But opinions were largely divided as to the order of the remaining texts, which turned out to be a Brewer's Guild declaration from 1422 (#1);
an extract from
an essay by John Milton, "Of Education," written in 1644 (#3); a modern
English translation of Boethius (#4); an extract from Walt Whitman's An American Primer, written 1856 and published 1904 (#5); and remarks from an essay on American English by J
ohn Witherspoon, minister, president of Princeton University,
and signer of the Declaration of Independence, written in 1781 (#7). The
difficulty we had putting the rest of the texts in order tells us
something about continuities in English.
Everyone who was in class today should have gotten a date for posting class notes to this website, and most people in class should also have gotten a reading to summarize. See Susanmarie if you didn't.