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🎧 Lectures 6-8 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lectures 6-8: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 6: How Language Changes—Many Directions
The first language has evolved into 6,000 because language change takes place in many directions. Latin split in this way into the Romance languages as changes proceeded differently in each area where the Romans brought Latin.

Lecture 7: How Language Changes—Modern English
As recently as Shakespeare, English words had meanings different enough to interfere with our understanding of his language today. Even by the 1800s, Jane Austen's work is full of sentences that would now be considered errors.

Lecture 8: Language Families—Indo-European
The first of four lectures on language families introduces Indo-European, which probably began in the southern steppes of Russia around 4000 B.C. and then spread westward to most of Europe and eastward to Iran and India.

 

 

📺 “Baked” A Toast to Tinsel Town | Food Network

Watched "Baked" A Toast to Tinsel Town from Food Network
With Tom Papa. Tom Papa heads home to sunny Los Angeles to celebrate the city's baked gems. He stops by Vito's Pizza where the crust is so special, Vito's needs a body guard to protect his dough starter. At the legendary Canter's Deli, Tom makes a Monte Cristo sandwich stacked with ham, turkey and cheese griddled on fresh baked challah French toast. At Crème Caramel Tom samples unicorn poop, a glitter covered ...

📺 “Baked” The Baked Goods are Coming! | Food Network

Watched "Baked" The Baked Goods are Coming! from Food Network
With Tom Papa. Tom Papa visits the brash and brainy cities of Boston and Cambridge. Steps from Harvard, he learns how to make lobster rolls served on a jet black bun, and hamburgers and buns that are so decadent, they can only make 18 a night. At Maria's Pastry shop, Tom helps bake massive, flaky, cream-filled pastries called lobster tails, before he heads to Santarpio's Pizza to bake Italian bread and grill ...

🎧 Lectures 4 and 5 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

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

Lecture 4: How Language Changes—Building New Material
Language change is not just sound erosion and morphing, but the building of new words and constructions. This lecture shows how such developments lead to novel grammatical features.

Lecture 5: How Language Changes—Meaning and Order
The meaning of a word changes over time. Silly first meant "blessed" and acquired its current sense through a series of gradual steps. Word order also changes: In Old English, the verb usually came at the end of a sentence.

Some great examples of words changing over time:
eke name – nick name
(my) mine Ellie – Nellie and (my) mine Edward – Ned
brid (bird) / fowl
silly (blessed)
verb endings and conjugations
n’est verb pas in French in which pas means literally “step”

📺 The Late Show with Stephen Colbert: This Is Why Trump Doesn’t Do Solo Press Conferences | YouTube

Watched The Late Show with Stephen Colbert: This Is Why Trump Doesn't Do Solo Press Conferences from CBS

Stephen delivers a monologue about Trump's long, incoherent, rambling press conference just minutes after Trump's long, incoherent, rambling press conference.

🎧 Lectures 2 and 3 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

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

Lecture 2: When Language Began
We look at evidence that language is an innate ability of the human brain, an idea linked to Noam Chomsky. But many linguists and psychologists see language as one facet of cognition rather than as a separate ability.

Lecture 3: How Language Changes—Sound Change
The first of five lectures on language change examines how sounds evolve, exemplified by the Great Vowel Shift in English and the complex tone system in Chinese.

Interesting to hear him describe Chomsky first for his politics. I’ve always thought of him as a linguist first and only secondarily for his politics.