🎧 Lecture 30 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lecture 30: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 30: Language Starts Over—Signs of the New
Creoles are the only languages that lack or have very little of the grammatical traits that emerge over time. In this, creole grammars are the closest to what the grammar of the first language was probably like.

🎧 Lectures 28-29 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lectures 28-29: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 28: Language Starts Over—Creoles I
Creoles emerge when pidgin speakers use the pidgin as an everyday language. Creoles are spoken throughout the world, wherever history has forced people to expand a pidgin into a full language. (finished at 8:23am)

Lecture 29: Language Starts Over—Creoles II
As new languages, creoles don't have as many frills as older languages, but they do have complexities. Like real languages, creoles change over time, have dialects, and mix with other languages.

🎧 Lectures 26-27 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lectures 26-27: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter John McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 26: Does Culture Drive Language Change?
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis proposes that features of our grammars channel how we think. Professor McWhorter discusses the evidence for and against this controversial but widely held view.

Lecture 27: Language Starts Over—Pidgins
This lecture is the first of five on how human ingenuity spins new languages out of old through the creation of pidgins and creoles. A pidgin is a stripped-down version of a language suitable for passing, utilitarian use.