How did today's English develop? / Kate Gardocki
What's the difference between the seemingly similar expressions "hearty welcome" and "cordial reception"? Kate Gardocki looks back at the checkered history of the English language to explain why these two semantically similar expressions evoke different images.
1)
I am going to start with a challenge.
I want you to imagine these two scenes in as much detail as possible.
2)
Scene number one:
"They gave us a hearty welcome."
Well, who are the people who are giving a hearty welcome?
What are they wearing?
What are they drinking?
3)
OK, scene two:
"They gave us a cordial reception."
How are these people standing?
What expressions are on their faces?
What are they wearing and drinking?
Fix these pictures in your mind's eye and then jot down a sentence or two to describe them. We'll come back to them later.
4)
Now on to our story.
In the year 400 C.E., the Romans ruled the Celts in Britain.
One benefit for the Celts was that the Romans protected them from the barbarian Saxon tribes of Northern Europe.
But then the Roman Empire began to crumble, and the Romans withdrew from Britain.
5)
With the Romans gone, the Germanic tribes, the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians quickly sailed across the water, did away with the Celts, and formed kingdoms in the British Isles.
For several centuries, these tribes lived in Britain, and their Germanic language, Anglo-Saxon, became the common language, which we call Old English.
6)
Although modern English speakers may think Old English sounds like a different language, you'll find many recognisable words if you look and listen closely.
For example, here is the Lord's Prayer in Old English.
7)
At first glance, it may look unfamiliar, but update the spelling a bit, and you'll see many common English words.
So, the centuries passed with Britain happily speaking Old English, but in the 700s, a series of Viking invasions began, which continued until a treaty split the island in half.
8)
On one side were the Saxons, and on the other were the Danes, who spoke Old Norse.
As Saxons fell in love with their cute Danish neighbours and marriages blurred the boundaries, Old Norse mixed with Old English, and many Old Norse words like freckle, leg, root, skin, and want are still a part of our language.
9)
Three hundred years later, in 1066, the Norman conquest brought war again to the British Isles.
The Normans were Vikings who settled in France.
Although they had abandoned the Viking language and culture in favour of a French lifestyle, they still fought like Vikings.
They placed a Norman king on the English throne, and French was the language of the British royalty for three centuries.
10)
Society in Britain came to have two levels:
French-speaking aristocracy and Old English-speaking peasants.
The French also brought many Roman Catholic clergymen who added Latin words.
Old English adapted and grew as thousands of words flowed in, many related to government, law, and aristocracy.
Words like council, marriage, sovereign, govern, damage, and parliament.
11)
As the language expanded, English speakers quickly realised what to do if they wanted to sound sophisticated: they would use words from French or Latin.
Anglo-Saxon words seemed so plain, like the Anglo-Saxon peasants who spoke them.
12)
Let's go back to the two sentences you thought about earlier.
When you pictured the hearty welcome, did you see an earthy scene with relatives hugging and talking loudly?
Were they drinking beer?
Were they wearing lumberjack shirts and jeans?
13)
And what about the cordial reception?
I bet you pictured a far more classy and refined crowd.
Blazers and skirts, wine and caviar.
Why is this?
14)
How is it that phrases that are considered just about synonymous by the dictionary can evoke such different pictures and feelings?
"Hearty" and "welcome" are both Saxon words.
"Cordial" and "reception" come from French.
15)
The connotation of nobility and authority has persisted around words of French origin.
The connotation of peasantry, real people, and salt of the Earth has persisted around Saxon words.
16)
Even if you have never heard this history before, the memory of it persists in the feelings evoked by the words you speak.
On some level, it's a story you already knew because whether we realise it consciously or only subconsciously, our history lives in the words we speak and hear.
How did today's English develop? / Kate Gardocki
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIzFz9T5rhI
Add info No1)
How did English evolve? - Kate Gardoqui
https://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-did-english-evolve-kate-gardoqui/digdeeper
What is the difference between "a hearty welcome" and "a cordial reception"? In a brief, action-packed history of the English language, Kate Gardoqui explains why these semantically equal phrases evoke such different images.
Additional Resources for you to Explore:
This is a great story, but I made it sound way simpler than it really is. If you’re a critical person, you probably have some questions already.
Like:
If the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Friesians all conquered areas of Celtic Britain, why is it that England is called England (which comes from Angle-land, the Land of the Angles) and not Saxonland or Juteland?
If Old English has not been spoken since before the twelfth century, how do we know what it sounded like?
When and how did Old English become the modern language we speak today?
This is the quote from Simeon Potter which inspired the visual exercise at the beginning of the lecture:
"English and French expressions [in English] may have similar denotations but slightly different connotations and associations. Generally, the English words are stronger, more physical, and more human. We feel more at ease after getting a hearty welcome than after being granted a cordial reception.
Compare freedom with liberty, friendship with amity, kingship with royalty, holiness with sanctity, happiness with felicity, depth with profundity, and love with charity." (Simeon Potter, Our Language, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950/66, pp. 37-38.)
Add info No2)
The secret behind how Chinese characters work - Gina Marie Elia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0EySK4T2aY
According to legend, in the 27th century BCE, the Yellow Emperor of China charged his historian, Cangjie, to develop a writing system. Sitting alongside a riverbank, Cangjie noted the imagery that surrounded him. From this, he created the first Chinese characters. So, how has Chinese evolved in the last 3,000 years? Gina Marie Elia explores the history of one of the earliest written languages.
1)
According to legend, in the 27th century BCE, the Yellow Emperor of China charged his historian, Cangjie, to develop a writing system.
Sitting alongside a riverbank, Cangjie noticed the imagery that surrounded him.
From this, he created the first Chinese characters.
And that night, the sky rained millet while ghosts cried,
fearing their actions may now be condemned by the written word.
We can’t say for sure whether the story is true.
2)
However, the earliest artefacts containing Chinese characters date to the Shang Dynasty, around 1250 to 1050 BCE, making it one of the earliest forms of written language.
Characters etched on ox bones and turtle shells show Shang kings’ writings to their ancestors, discussing everything from agriculture to the origins of a toothache.
3)
As the legend suggests, these ancient characters were mainly pictograms, or symbols that resembled what they were meant to represent.
Even today, some of the most foundational Chinese characters remain pictographic, like rén (人), which means person, and mù (木), which means wood or tree.
4)
Some characters are ideograms, or symbols that represent abstract concepts, like the numbers yī (一), èr (二), and sān (三).
Others are compound ideograms, which combine two or more pictograms or ideograms.
For example, xiū (休) places the character for person next to the character for tree and means to rest.
5)
However, most modern-day characters are known as logograms, and they are constructed of two components: a radical component, which gestures at the character's meaning, and a sound component, which hints at its pronunciation.
And all characters are built from various strokes, often simplified to eight basic types.
6)
There are 214 radicals, each with its own definition.
Some can stand alone, while others cannot.
For instance, the radical rì (日), written on its own means sun.
It’s also used in characters with sun-related definitions,
such as xiǎo (晓) meaning dawn.
The radical cǎo (艹), on the other hand, never stands alone, but can be found within characters related to grass and plants, like huā (花) meaning flower.
7)
The radical shuǐ (水), meaning water, always stands alone but has a variant (氵) that is used when it’s part of more complex characters like hé (河), meaning river.
Radicals can appear in different positions: to the left, to the right, above, below, or even surrounding the rest of the character.
8)
There are many more sound components than radicals, with estimates ranging in the thousands.
Similar-sounding words often share the same sound component, and their radicals help shed light on their meanings.
Take fēng (峰) and fēng (蜂).
The radical shān (山) means mountain, which hints at the first character’s definition: summit.
9)
The radical in the second character, chóng (虫), means insect, and with the sound component, means bee.
While many words in Chinese sound similar, context or tonality helps clarify their meaning, just like in other languages.
Yet how each character is pronounced depends on dialect, which varies across the country.
10)
So, while conversations in Chengdu may differ vastly from those in Nanjing, the written language is the same.
And unlike the romance languages, Chinese has no gendered nouns or verb conjugations.
11)
So the character chī (吃), meaning to eat, remains unchanged whether the subject is yourself, a coworker, or a lesion of fearful ghosts.
A marker like le (了) can be added to indicate the past.
So “I eat bread” becomes “I ate bread.”
12)
Over the years, the Chinese writing system has undergone many changes.
As characters went from being etched in bone to cast in bronze to brushed on paper, their scripts evolved along the way.
13)
In the 1950s and 60s, the Chinese Communist Party introduced new simplified versions of the traditional characters, which are now standard in China. However, traditional characters remain in use in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
And while the Chinese character system may seem unique, its development greatly influenced its neighbours' spoken languages and writing systems.
14)
For example, around 60% of Japanese dictionary entries are kanji—characters that originated in Chinese or were created from its elements.
With a 3,000-year history, Chinese characters have and will continue to leave their mark.
