Great Course - Story of Human Language

As promised on Monday, today's blog covers the latest Great Course: Story of Human Language, taught by Professor John McWhorter, Ph.D., Stanford University, Manhattan Institute.

Let me start out by saying what this course is not: It is not a course on having correct grammar. It is not about writing, or speaking, "correctly." Dr. McWhorter is a linguist, and quite contrary to what lay people would expect from a linguist -- thinking perhaps of an editor -- he does not go around trying to make people speak "properly." Linguists study languages as they are spoken, and this is a key point, because we learn during this course that there are over 6,000 languages in the world today, and most of them do not have a written form -- they are only spoken. It is the spoken language which is true human language, according to McWhorter, and throughout the 36 lectures in this Great Course, we learn many fascinating things about them.

Early on in the course, the distinction between spoken and written word is demonstrated, as we hear transcriptions which show how real conversations happen. When Dr. McWhorter reads, sound for sound, a conversation between two students, we hear almost no complete sentences. We hear words left out, we hear "umms" and "stuff" and yet we know, because we have had conversations like this ourselves, that the two people involved in the conversation understood each other perfectly.

These early examples are not meant to tell us how language should be. It tells us how humans communicate, and gives us a basis for understanding how languages change over time. For perhaps the biggest lesson we learn is that languages are changing, constantly. The changes follow patterns which are easiest to understand, predict, and deduce, by watching how people talk to one another.

Words change meanings, as I blogged about earlier. Words also change pronunciation. A "t" sound often changes to a "d;" soft "th" sounds become "t" or "f;" prefixes and suffixes get shortened or dropped. These things happen because of the way people talk. It's fascinating.

Languages change their grammars, as well, and while what we Westerners know about grammar might help an English speaker learn Spanish, it does not help much when the grammar of a language is tied up in the tones used when speaking syllables, or when a language starts its sentences with verbs, or has markings which denote "how you know" something you're saying as an integral part of what you are saying (Did you hear it? See it? Hear about it? Guess it? Until you know, you can't put the words together properly.)

The historical part of the course focused on talking about the spread of language in early humans, and how that spread is used today to help classify languages, but also is corroborated by scientific advances in genetics. The search for a First Language is discussed, and while it seems unlikely that we can ever get there, hearing about the early Indo-European origination language was confusing and interesting at the same time.

I learned that the "rules" of English we cling to today were, for the most part, created by two men in the 1700s (Lowth and Murray) based on what they wanted English to be, and we've been rapping our students' knuckles for generations based on those ideas. For example, almost every other European language, when it indicates a negative, uses a double negative. A Spanish speaker might say "Nunca he visto nada" which literally translates to "Never have I seen nothing" but that word combination, that part of the grammar, is correct and it's what Spanish people say. This is true for the great majority of European-based languages. Lowth and Murray thought it didn't make sense, so they made it wrong in their grammars, despite the fact that people were saying it in most English dialects. In fact, left to our own devices, this is very much like what most English dialects will say today.

The above is just a sample of the fascinating knowledge you can gain from this Great Course. Do you know the difference between language & dialect? Do you know what a pidgin is? Do you know what a creole is? Did you know there was more than one? When you add these to the intelligent, conversational, witty style of the lecturer, you end up with a fun way to learn about language.