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The Story of Human Language (The Great Courses)
Language defines us as a species, placing humans head and shoulders above even the most proficient animal communicators. But it also beguiles us with its endless mysteries, allowing us to ponder why different languages emerged, why there isn't simply a single language, how languages change over time and whether that's good or bad, and how languages die out and become extinct. Now you can explore all of these questions and more in an in-depth series of 36 lectures from one of America's leading linguists.
You'll be witness to the development of human language, learning how a single tongue spoken 150,000 years ago evolved into the estimated 6,000 languages used around the world today and gaining an appreciation of the remarkable ways in which one language sheds light on another.
The many fascinating topics you examine in these lectures include: the intriguing evidence that links a specific gene to the ability to use language; the specific mechanisms responsible for language change; language families and the heated debate over the first language; the phenomenon of language mixture; why some languages develop more grammatical machinery than they actually need; the famous hypothesis that says our grammars channel how we think; artificial languages, including Esperanto and sign languages for the deaf; and how word histories reflect the phenomena of language change and mixture worldwide.
Course Lecture Titles
1. What Is Language?
2. When Language Began
3. How Language Changes—Sound Change
4. How Language Changes—Building New Material
5. How Language Changes—Meaning and Order
6. How Language Changes—Many Directions
7. How Language Changes—Modern English
8. Language Families—Indo-European
9. Language Families—Tracing Indo-European
10. Language Families—Diversity of Structures
11. Language Families—Clues to the Past
12. The Case Against the World’s First Language
13. The Case For the World’s First Language
14. Dialects—Subspecies of Species
15. Dialects—Where Do You Draw the Line?
16. Dialects—Two Tongues in One Mouth
17. Dialects—The Standard as Token of the Past
18. Dialects—Spoken Style, Written Style
19. Dialects—The Fallacy of Blackboard Grammar
20. Language Mixture—Words
21. Language Mixture—Grammar
22. Language Mixture—Language Areas
23. Language Develops Beyond the Call of Duty
24. Language Interrupted
25. A New Perspective on the Story of English
26. Does Culture Drive Language Change?
27. Language Starts Over—Pidgins
28. Language Starts Over—Creoles I
29. Language Starts Over—Creoles II
30. Language Starts Over—Signs of the New
31. Language Starts Over—The Creole Continuum
32. What Is Black English?
33. Language Death—The Problem
34. Language Death—Prognosis
35. Artificial Languages
36. Finale—Master Class
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