Courses

Jane Austen employed the word “intercourse” in her novels in the genteel sense of “dealings between people”; today, it means “sex” and nothing else. Shakespeare used “holp” alongside the modern form “helped”—we no longer use the former. Chaucer rhymed “breath” with “heath,” but this rhyme falls flat on our modern ears. These are just a few examples of English changing. But English is not alone in this respect, as all languages are continuously changing. Already in the 1st century BCE, Cicero, a great Roman orator and writer, complained about the deterioration of Classical Latin.

In this course, we will examine why—and how—languages change. We will see how transformations in material culture and society, as well as factors internal to language, precipitate changes in the pronunciation and meaning of words, and in grammar. While some of the illustrations will come from English, we will also draw on examples from other languages. Among the questions we will ask (and answer) are: Why are the descendants of Latin—French, Spanish, Italian—so different both from Latin and from each other? Why did the Vikings have a profound effect on English but not on Russian? And how are brand names like BlackBerry and Kindle invented?