One has to be a word freak to enjoy this. I LOVE it. Thanks for posting.

Hear, hear! After growing up in the 'hills and hollers' of Indiana, USA, many 'ignorant' English teachers of my youth never understood that! English is a hodgepodge of different languages, dialects and such. There is no 'standard,' correct way to write or speak. Mr. White and his "Elements of Style" be damned! It is better if English teachers begin from that unmistakable point of reality. It is better to teach students to express themselves clearly and simply, either in writing or speech. Now that I am in my fifties and an English teacher to hundreds of Spanish-speaking kids, I remind my students that the English language is a wonderful soup that has evolved throughout the ages and is still evolving.

@user-qv9im5or3i

5 жыл бұрын

The English languages afters Johnstons intervention has lots the ability of evolution. The fact tthat English scholars accepted that 1 man and his team could develope the fundamentals of their language in9 years has convictsd Engish to suffere eternally from child diseases. A Spanish illiterte sound better than an English scholar and can describe something more accurately and goherently let alone the Greeks.

@bobstone5325

5 жыл бұрын

I think in 100 years english will have absorbed alot of spanish in america.

I love that they included a mention (and demonstration) of Cockney Rhyming Slang.

Most, most interesting - great work that must have been a collective effort.

I've often considered English the embodiment of a sort of "Linguistic Darwinism", but it's nice to hear a linguist voice the opinion.

BTW, there’s a great and excruciatingly detailed podcast named « The History of English. » I love listening to it.

I recall when I took the family to Europe in 1975...My RN friend in Wilts. had invited us to visit...The kids took our kids to the local park and the local kids kept wanting to here them speak :)

@Walthur13

6 жыл бұрын

Yes - so they could laugh at them. . . BTW it's HEAR not Here

@granskare

6 жыл бұрын

true enough but I had a stroke a few years earlier so I did have the error.

At 22:32 you forgot dough for the "oh!" sound.

what happened to the presenter's jacket / blazer - as the series progresses he has less and less on 😉 not every man can wear a pink shirt so well - but seriously an wonderful series - I love putting things in this case words in context - thank you for sharing this series

in America, we began with changing consonants - dramatize instead of dramatise :)

This series was, I believe, 8 episodes. Why does it stop after 7? Can the 8th episode be posted?

Oh, Anne Elliot :)

This show was aired in 2000 where chatting in a chatroom was already taking place, but texting had yet to rear its ugly head.

Ough is the all-purpose dipthong of the English language. It ought to be thoroughly acknowledged for its tough job through the years. It's enough to make one cough. But enough of this nonsense. I need a cup of coughfee.

oops must be chilly - the blazer is back 😉

I reckon Fur flies over the proper pronunciation of words back East.

Speaking properLY.

Mutton dagger!!

Smash the Spinning Jenny! Burn the Rolling Rosalind! Destroy the Going-up-and-down-a-bit-and-then-moving-along Gertrude!

Mention is made of slang and coded communication by English subcultures, but no recognition is given to Polari - a secret lingo of British homosexuals in the early to mid 20th Century. Some words and phrases in Polari have survived to the present day.

The global language. Remarkable. 3rd most natively spoken behind Spanish and Chinese, but by FAR the most important. France was so close to being the lingua franca (and was) but the British Empire + American superpower changed all that. English will remain the global language for centuries. Chinese is not becoming a lingua franca for a variety of reasons. Mostly spoken by peasants, highly difficult, and English has already established itself. I live in China and even here, English rules when it comes to communication despite 10-20% speaking any basic form

The spoken language had to be 'standardised' in order to be understood between different language groups - many not native English speakers. Secondly, speech had to made clear down bad telephone lines and poor radio transmissions. Hence the origin of RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION, commonly called "BBC English". (this 'language' is a great boon, unlike "common speech", to those with poor hearing.)

nice

theis is really great work >do you have book about the history of english? :)

@groovysoca

8 жыл бұрын

mahmud ajj The presenter, Melvyn Bragg, wrote the book "The Adventure of English"

@lioneldufaye4254

8 жыл бұрын

mahmud ajj groovysoca is right, and this series is actually very closely based on the book (the text is often the same word for word). But you may also want to read: Crystal, D. (2005), The Stories of English, London: Penguin Books. Crystal, D. (2003), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, Cambridge University Press. Freeborn, D. (1992) From Old English to Stander English, London: Macmillan. Hogg, R. et al. (1992) The Cambridge History of the English Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shay, S. (2008) The History of English, A Linguistic Introduction, San Francisco : Wardja Press. My favourite being: Barber, C. (1993) The English Language, A Historical Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

@keithninesling6057

8 жыл бұрын

+mahmud ajj A.C. Baugh, A History of the English Language. A good source for the layman.

@jamesp960

8 жыл бұрын

+mahmud ajj Try Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson

When the door opens at Johnson's house and the camera pans in on a face - it's not Johnson's face.

@judithsochor9755

6 жыл бұрын

GrubStLodger

I really dislike the use of « decimate » to mean « kill almost everyone ». (After all, « massacre » describes that terrible level of killing perfectly well.) But trying to stop people using it this way IS like trying to lash the wind. The new meaning of « hopefully » to say « I hope » also irritates me, but not as much as the new meaning of « decimate » does.

@isabellabihy8631

6 жыл бұрын

"To decimate", to my knowledge is of Roman origin, meaning a horrible punishment in a subdivision of a legion. When the subdivision had failed in battle, a lot was drawn, so one in ten (decimus, if I remember correctly) was to be punished (killed?), regardless of personal failure. Thus, decimating is deliberately reducing, a massacre is killing them all (almost). In today's world both is unacceptable.

I think George Carlin would have enjoyed this. ref: george carlin press conference

I am a Taiwanese, i really need the subtitles or transcripts. I cannot understand some of the sentences and words.

@Tina06019

6 жыл бұрын

Nonetheless, your written English is very good.

I hope I am a word freak.

Да, конечно, интересно(Наверное). Но лично я ничего не понял. Ни самого видео, ни комментариев под ним, но гугл переводчик мне в помощь. Понимаю, что пишу на русском для англоязычных, но пусть и они хоть раз попробуют перевести какой-то текст на их язык. Пацаны, я уже задолбался ваш язык учить.

I nead grade 6 plz

Speaking properly*

I don't mind English changing, but I do decry when it moves in idiotic directions, e.g. 1. valley girl speak now also affected by young males. They turn every sentence into a question. 2. glamour speak. It started in gay culture. Random syllables are stressed and drastically elongated. This make speech harder to understand, since you can't accent and appear to be accenting random parts. 3. mumbling. This just makes it hard to understand. 4. Texas accents. This mainly because I detest George Bush, and anything that sounds like him makes me want to spit. The strange thing is Texas accents are creeping all over North America with dropped gs, and ta for to, and ts turned to ds, as is wadder for water.

@carlosdanger5741

8 жыл бұрын

+Roedy Green Don't mess with Texas!

@Roedygr

8 жыл бұрын

+Carlos Danger Texas accent is fine for Texas. I just don't want it replacing standard English.

@emdiar6588

8 жыл бұрын

+Roedy Green I don't know of a single American accent that doesn't pronounce the 't' as a 'd' in the middle of a word. Compare the British 'little bottle of bitter beer' to the American 'liddle boddle of bidder beer'. Whenever I point this out to Americans they deny it, then listen to themselves, realise that it's true and seem surprised as if they'd never noticed before. I don't mind btw. It's just an accent. I totally agree with you about your Mr Bush though. He's done the perception of the Texan drawl no favours at all.

@pamelacoles4634

7 жыл бұрын

em diar H

@alfredfarber3385

6 жыл бұрын

There ever will be little satisfaction in the preoccupation of language policing. What is called standard English is ultimately arbitrary and transitory. Compare the standard American English in movies or newsreels of 75 years ago with today's standard English. The purpose of language is for people to exchange thoughts, and that can be accomplished by any dialect or accent that is employed by more than a single person and, in fact, most American English forms are mutually intelligible. The dialect of contemporary young urban blacks differs from so-called standard English partly because it originated in a different context and partly because its speakers choose for it to be different and, perhaps, less intelligible to other segments of the population. The same can be said of valley girl speak or rural Texas drawl. But speakers of the modern urban black youth dialect can communicate clearly and precisely to each other and express abstraction as effectively as standard English speakers can among themselves. Many speakers of this dialect and other American dialects are 'bilingual' to some degree when their employment or other circumstances require more 'standard' language. Believing that one mode of speech is superior to the other or trying to standardize language is a certain path to frustration and neurosis. Although I find it a bit annoying that many people now speak every sentence as a question, there is damn little I can do about it, so I worry about it as little as I can.

The narrator don't talk right.

@matte6352

4 жыл бұрын

Neither did you.