Listen to my first podcast above or read the script for it below!
Hi! I’m Jonathan!
This will be the first time I’m making my own podcast. I considered all the different topics I could cover and I decided I’d enjoy some of the questions that linguistic study has raised in my mind. For those that don’t know linguistics is the scientific study of language. I’ve been fortunate enough to take two linguistics courses so far. The History of the English Language at UC Berkeley and Language Theory at CU Denver. I’m definitely still a novice on this subject but I’m always trying to learn more about it and deepen my understanding of the field.
My introduction to linguistics was the Berkeley course and I found it fascinating! I loved learning about the history of the English language and all the changes the language has gone through from Old to Modern English and everything in between. I especially enjoyed translating passages from Old and Middle English into Modern English. Yes, I’m very weird! Just to clarify for people not that familiar with older forms of English, Old English is not Shakespearean English, despite the impression you may have gotten from movies! That’s actually Early Modern English. Old English is the oldest form of English that was first written with runes and the greatest literary work from that period would be the epic poem, Beowulf. Middle English comes next and the best known work from that period is Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
That class also answered so many questions I had going back to childhood about English language spelling. When I questioned why something was spelled the way it was I was told “that’s just the way it is” or “do as I say and learn it”. I clearly had a knack for annoying my teachers in elementary school. My teachers should have appreciated a student that took an actual interest in learning but I suppose that was too much to ask. I would have much preferred an actual explanation! I should preface this by saying that spoken English kept changing after spelling was standardized. A perfect example is the word “knight”. That’s k-n-i-g-h-t. The “k” is silent in Modern English but was not in Old English. It was pronounced something like “ka” “night”. Why couldn’t a teacher have just explained that to me as a kid! I would have been much more agreeable if I had known the actual history. I hated being forced to do something just because the teacher said to!
That leads me to one of the enduring principles of linguistics and something that I still ponder. It’s the principle that languages tend to simplify over time. Old English was much more complex than Modern English. Going back to my example of the word “knight”, that’s an example of simplification. It’s common for sounds in words to be dropped over time if they aren’t really needed to be understood. It wasn’t really needed to say “ka night” to know you were talking about a knight so the spoken word was shortened over time. It’s very similar to slang words. Like “”homeboy” eventually becoming just “homie” or even “homes”.
It’s not surprising that the speakers of a language would want to make it more efficient overtime. But that leads me to a question. Why did languages like Old English or Classical Latin become so complex in the first place if languages have a tendency to simplify over time? Since the earliest forms of human speech wouldn’t have been more than just grunting, clearly languages initially had to get much more complex before they started to simplify. I haven’t found an answer to that question yet.
On a related note I’ll leave my listeners, all three of them, with one final question to ponder. I’ve noticed that there are instances in Modern English of unnecessary redundancy being added. Examples of that include “extend out”, “retract in”, and “also too”. That’s adding extra unnecessary words that don’t add any additional meaning. That’s not efficient or simplified. So, why are these redundant expressions becoming so common?
I’m Jonathan and this is the end of my first podcast!
My personal reflection:
The way my composition process was changed with an oral delivery is that I focused on making it more conversational, made sure I injected some humor, and had a more emphatic delivery. It was a bit of oral storytelling as I used this medium to take my listeners on a journey to my past, educate them a bit on the subject of linguistics, and guide them through my own musings.
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