Another interesting channel, Bueno Estonces, uses music to teach.
The publishers choose slower tempo songs that give viewers time to read the lyrics & translation posted on the screen, with grammar connections highlighted.
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 17, 2017
Podcast of the Week: Butterfly Spanish
My podcast time in recent weeks has been largely devoted to listening to lessons on YouTube; I've been trying to restore my high school Spanish for several months now, using an app called DuoLingo on a daily basis and studying Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish as well as Spanish Made Simple. One of my favorite Youtube channels for Spanish is hosted by a young woman named Ana. who is as personable as can be imagined. She teaches Spanish like she's in high school, talking to her friends and goofing off along the way.
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
The Adventure of English
The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language
© 2011 Melvyn Bragg
336 pages
In The Adventure of English, Melvin Bragg delivers a mythic history of the language that treats our lingua franca as a living personality -- battered and now triumphant. Beginning with the arrival of the Angles and company in Britain and continuing well past Indian independence, this 'adventure' is one of a peasant tongue turned phonic empire.
English's survival was, as Wellington said of Waterloo, a damn close-run thing. After establishing a home for themselves in Britain, the English kingdoms were nearly extinguished by the Norse invasion centuries later. They were not so lucky in 1066, when England was invaded and taken by William and his Normans. Although the vast majority of English's 100 most common words are survivors from the old Ænglisc, Bragg estimates that eighty-five percent of the old English vocabulary was lost in the Norman invasion, being supplanted by their version of French. The foisting of a French ruling class upon an Anglo-Saxon peasantry created classes of words; French monopolized administration, religion, law, and so on, leaving the rude basics of life like farming to the old tongue. English survived, however, and even captured the Normans: their children picked up English from nurses and other servants. As England and Normandy grew further apart amid politics and war, and England and France became one another's favorite enemy, English reemerged as the language of court and law. It would struggle mightily to take over religion, aided chiefly by Henry VIII's libido, and by the late 16th century had started to become self-conscious, with an increasing number of people insisting that there was a Proper English, and you ain't speakin' it. Then it took over the world.
The last half of this English history largely concerns itself with the diverse vocabularies developed by Anglophones as they spread across the globe via the English empire. In North America, settlers happily acquired words from various Amerindian languages and other colonial powers. In the Caribbean, slaves from scattered African tribes used bits and pieces of English to create pidgin tongues -- and in India, English was used to establish a common language between lingual populations who found embracing a common enemy easier than embracing an intimate rival. English's growth wasn't merely in geography and population, however; as the English became the predominant commercial and technical power of the world, the language became important in its own right: to learn it was to gain access to the reams of new knowledge being acquired in the heady days of the scientific and industrial revolutions.
Bragg's colorful history of English brims over with memorable lines, like "Shakespeare threw words into bed together who had never before shared even a common acquaintance", and his regular anthropomorphizing the language -- treating it as a person, with desires and ambition -- may annoy historians and linguists alike. But for lay readers who have an interest in their mother tongue -- and wonder why, for instance, it has so many French words, and uses Latin for science, and is brimming with a wondrous amount of spelling and pronunciation quirks -- The Adventure of English is one to set out on.
Related:
The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way, Bill Bryson
© 2011 Melvyn Bragg
336 pages
In The Adventure of English, Melvin Bragg delivers a mythic history of the language that treats our lingua franca as a living personality -- battered and now triumphant. Beginning with the arrival of the Angles and company in Britain and continuing well past Indian independence, this 'adventure' is one of a peasant tongue turned phonic empire.
English's survival was, as Wellington said of Waterloo, a damn close-run thing. After establishing a home for themselves in Britain, the English kingdoms were nearly extinguished by the Norse invasion centuries later. They were not so lucky in 1066, when England was invaded and taken by William and his Normans. Although the vast majority of English's 100 most common words are survivors from the old Ænglisc, Bragg estimates that eighty-five percent of the old English vocabulary was lost in the Norman invasion, being supplanted by their version of French. The foisting of a French ruling class upon an Anglo-Saxon peasantry created classes of words; French monopolized administration, religion, law, and so on, leaving the rude basics of life like farming to the old tongue. English survived, however, and even captured the Normans: their children picked up English from nurses and other servants. As England and Normandy grew further apart amid politics and war, and England and France became one another's favorite enemy, English reemerged as the language of court and law. It would struggle mightily to take over religion, aided chiefly by Henry VIII's libido, and by the late 16th century had started to become self-conscious, with an increasing number of people insisting that there was a Proper English, and you ain't speakin' it. Then it took over the world.
The last half of this English history largely concerns itself with the diverse vocabularies developed by Anglophones as they spread across the globe via the English empire. In North America, settlers happily acquired words from various Amerindian languages and other colonial powers. In the Caribbean, slaves from scattered African tribes used bits and pieces of English to create pidgin tongues -- and in India, English was used to establish a common language between lingual populations who found embracing a common enemy easier than embracing an intimate rival. English's growth wasn't merely in geography and population, however; as the English became the predominant commercial and technical power of the world, the language became important in its own right: to learn it was to gain access to the reams of new knowledge being acquired in the heady days of the scientific and industrial revolutions.
Bragg's colorful history of English brims over with memorable lines, like "Shakespeare threw words into bed together who had never before shared even a common acquaintance", and his regular anthropomorphizing the language -- treating it as a person, with desires and ambition -- may annoy historians and linguists alike. But for lay readers who have an interest in their mother tongue -- and wonder why, for instance, it has so many French words, and uses Latin for science, and is brimming with a wondrous amount of spelling and pronunciation quirks -- The Adventure of English is one to set out on.
Related:
The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way, Bill Bryson
Thursday, May 29, 2014
Who Killed Homer?
Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom
© 1998 Victor Davis Hanson
290 pages
For hundreds of years, the study of the classics was at the heart of a liberal education, thought essential to the cultivation of free men. Yet today speaking Latin would be regarded as a sign of eccentricity, not erudition. People now attend university for technical expertise in fields like business, engineering, or nursing, and such a focus is lauded as practical. A degree in Greek literature would be derided as useless as a degree in art history, the epitome of wasted public finance. Victor Hanson argues that vocational training is not the point of a university education; an education is not what you know, but how you behave. In Who Killed Homer? he examines the soul-forming virtues of the classical tradition and contemplates their reason for their unnecessary but imminent demise.
Hansen begins by arguing that the greatest virtues of western civilization have their origin, and sustaining permanence, in the Greek tradition. Drawing from philosophical treatise (to the Greeks, a category broad enough to cover politics, science, and more) in addition to extant literature, Hanson reviews a spectrum of values with origins in Greece. These range from concepts given overt legal protection (consensual government and the open criticism thereof, armies subordinate to civil power, free enterprise, etc) to ideas understood at a deeper level, and contributing to the others. These more fundamental appreciations include the belief that every polis' wellbeing depended on the average middling citizen, not the aristocracy or the mob, and that the world was fraught with meaning. Mysterious yet rational, the world was a place imbued with limits -- limits that extended to man. Part of the Greek heritage are more obvious than others; the very shape of US government structures bears witness to their past, and most histories of science will begin with the Greek enterprise. Other appreciations have been forgotten; like the belief that man was nothing without the polis; only the power of culture and threat of sanction by others kept the human animal from behaving worse than beasts. It is in civilization than man finds salvation from his own destruction. This is a hard lesson given an obscene and brutal summation by Hanson: "Man is nothing without the state." Ultimately, classical education imparted a cohesive view of the world in which science, politics, and philosophy were knit together, a part of the whole.
If these truths are indeed timeless, how have they fallen by the wayside during the 20th century? Hansen lays the blame solely at the feet of the Classicists, who have thrown away the responsibility of their tradition in the pursuit of status and fortune. They ought to know better, and here Hanson's attitude reveals how seriously he takes his belief that education was the moulding of character, not acquisition of knowledge. To Hanson, those who have committed themselves to knowing the Greek mind, who have studied it in earnest, bear responsibility for practicing it. Just as we expect a minister to conduct himself with greater care than the average parishioner, so to does Hanson expect classicists to be, if not moral champions, at least contenders; he expects them to live the values of the Greeks, to take their place in the hoplite ranks of the mind and defend what is theirs, to rise to the challenge of revealing the classics' enduring relevance. Instead, they focus on increasingly more pointless esoterically in pursuit of esteem, viewing fellow classicists as competition to be beat for choice university positions in which they can focus on their 'research' and leave the actual teaching to grad students, producing not keen minds but papers on mathematical relationships governing the use of similes in The Illiad. The comprehension of the whole is lost, and insult is added to injury when said scholars apply tortured modern interpretations,laying waste to The Odyssey by accusing it of being the wellspring of western sexism. Instead of defending and advancing the Greek way, classicists have allowed it to become the scapegoat for every moral self-doubt of the west. After outlining his case against his colleagues, Hanson proposes ways to put the focus back on the meaning of the classics, in part by forcing classicists to teach."Publish or perish" is anathema to this professor who sees his primary vocation as giving young people a structured education, not advancing his own prestige. The work ends on a bitter note, however, as he does not expect the modern world's slide into the moral abyss to be arrested. Instead, we will probably have to wait for civilization to collapse and demand strong men again, men who will rediscover the Greek truths.
That final bitter retort casts a pall over a strongly-argued book already shadowed by contempt for the modern world, especially ideologies like multiculturalism and relativism. The Greeks understood nuance, but in Hanson's view they stood by everlasting truths. Hanson's own stand is strident at times, to the point that he's less a Pericles calling forth citizens to stand with him and more a Leonidas rallying the troops before a final stand. His appraisal of Greek contributions is surpassed by the analysis of why classical studies have faltered, but Who Killed Homer does double duty as a traditionalist critique of modernity and a passionate appraisal of how much value the tradition still holds, even for moderns overawed by their own cleverness. As a classical partisan myself, I found it invigorating, but Hanson's zeal may spook the unconvinced.
Related:
© 1998 Victor Davis Hanson
290 pages
For hundreds of years, the study of the classics was at the heart of a liberal education, thought essential to the cultivation of free men. Yet today speaking Latin would be regarded as a sign of eccentricity, not erudition. People now attend university for technical expertise in fields like business, engineering, or nursing, and such a focus is lauded as practical. A degree in Greek literature would be derided as useless as a degree in art history, the epitome of wasted public finance. Victor Hanson argues that vocational training is not the point of a university education; an education is not what you know, but how you behave. In Who Killed Homer? he examines the soul-forming virtues of the classical tradition and contemplates their reason for their unnecessary but imminent demise.
Hansen begins by arguing that the greatest virtues of western civilization have their origin, and sustaining permanence, in the Greek tradition. Drawing from philosophical treatise (to the Greeks, a category broad enough to cover politics, science, and more) in addition to extant literature, Hanson reviews a spectrum of values with origins in Greece. These range from concepts given overt legal protection (consensual government and the open criticism thereof, armies subordinate to civil power, free enterprise, etc) to ideas understood at a deeper level, and contributing to the others. These more fundamental appreciations include the belief that every polis' wellbeing depended on the average middling citizen, not the aristocracy or the mob, and that the world was fraught with meaning. Mysterious yet rational, the world was a place imbued with limits -- limits that extended to man. Part of the Greek heritage are more obvious than others; the very shape of US government structures bears witness to their past, and most histories of science will begin with the Greek enterprise. Other appreciations have been forgotten; like the belief that man was nothing without the polis; only the power of culture and threat of sanction by others kept the human animal from behaving worse than beasts. It is in civilization than man finds salvation from his own destruction. This is a hard lesson given an obscene and brutal summation by Hanson: "Man is nothing without the state." Ultimately, classical education imparted a cohesive view of the world in which science, politics, and philosophy were knit together, a part of the whole.
If these truths are indeed timeless, how have they fallen by the wayside during the 20th century? Hansen lays the blame solely at the feet of the Classicists, who have thrown away the responsibility of their tradition in the pursuit of status and fortune. They ought to know better, and here Hanson's attitude reveals how seriously he takes his belief that education was the moulding of character, not acquisition of knowledge. To Hanson, those who have committed themselves to knowing the Greek mind, who have studied it in earnest, bear responsibility for practicing it. Just as we expect a minister to conduct himself with greater care than the average parishioner, so to does Hanson expect classicists to be, if not moral champions, at least contenders; he expects them to live the values of the Greeks, to take their place in the hoplite ranks of the mind and defend what is theirs, to rise to the challenge of revealing the classics' enduring relevance. Instead, they focus on increasingly more pointless esoterically in pursuit of esteem, viewing fellow classicists as competition to be beat for choice university positions in which they can focus on their 'research' and leave the actual teaching to grad students, producing not keen minds but papers on mathematical relationships governing the use of similes in The Illiad. The comprehension of the whole is lost, and insult is added to injury when said scholars apply tortured modern interpretations,laying waste to The Odyssey by accusing it of being the wellspring of western sexism. Instead of defending and advancing the Greek way, classicists have allowed it to become the scapegoat for every moral self-doubt of the west. After outlining his case against his colleagues, Hanson proposes ways to put the focus back on the meaning of the classics, in part by forcing classicists to teach."Publish or perish" is anathema to this professor who sees his primary vocation as giving young people a structured education, not advancing his own prestige. The work ends on a bitter note, however, as he does not expect the modern world's slide into the moral abyss to be arrested. Instead, we will probably have to wait for civilization to collapse and demand strong men again, men who will rediscover the Greek truths.
That final bitter retort casts a pall over a strongly-argued book already shadowed by contempt for the modern world, especially ideologies like multiculturalism and relativism. The Greeks understood nuance, but in Hanson's view they stood by everlasting truths. Hanson's own stand is strident at times, to the point that he's less a Pericles calling forth citizens to stand with him and more a Leonidas rallying the troops before a final stand. His appraisal of Greek contributions is surpassed by the analysis of why classical studies have faltered, but Who Killed Homer does double duty as a traditionalist critique of modernity and a passionate appraisal of how much value the tradition still holds, even for moderns overawed by their own cleverness. As a classical partisan myself, I found it invigorating, but Hanson's zeal may spook the unconvinced.
Related:
- The Echo of Greece, Edith Hamilton
- The Way of the Greeks, Edith Hamilton
- Greek Ways, Bruce Thornton
- The Life of Greece, Will Durant
Friday, November 5, 2010
The Mother Tongue
The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way
© 1990 Bill Bryson
270 pages
© 1990 Bill Bryson
270 pages
"More than 350 million people around the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seem, try to."
While I'm reading this as part of a general English-culture theme this week, I would have inevitably picked it up at some point: language has fascinated me since high school, and I'm forever writing down words and turns of phrase in my journal to look up their derivations at a later point. I know Bill Bryson only through A Short History of Nearly Everything, which I remember favorably even if I don't recall too much about its contents, having read it perhaps five years ago.
Although I anticipated The Mother Tongue being a history of the English language, it's more than that. Bryson begins with the development of speech and evolution of languages before moving swiftly to Europe to describe the various German, French, Viking, and Celtic histories that coalesced in the British isles to give rise to a genuine world language, English. After this initial history, he dedicates separate chapters to the development of words, accents, pronunciations, spelling habits, grammar, names, profanity, and wordplay before tracking English's spread as a world language and contemplating on its future.
Bryson is an entertaining author, providing humor in bounds. The book only suffers once or twice from long paragraphs of examples, these being exceptions to the general rule of readability. Bryson's information paints a picture of English changing through the ages detailed enough to provide surprises to even a word-nerd like me. I expected that irregularities in spelling would be ironed out by the introduction of the printing press, but I was not aware that many of English's Latin spellings (in debt and doubt, for instance) were imposed long after the language came into its own by those who wished to ennoble English -- to root it in the old classical tongues and make it something other than 'vulgar'. Various attempts have been made to make English orthodox, but nothing appears to stop it from steadily growing and assimilating other languages. The Mother Tongue reveals English to have a long, storied history, one that has given its current versatility and humorous contradictions. I' recommend it if you are at all interested in the subject proper, etymology, or Bill Bryon's work in general.
Related:
- Stories Behind Words : the Origins and Histories of 285 English Words, Peter Limburg
- Words from History, Isaac Asimov
- Words from the Myths, Isaac Asimov. Haven't read either of these two, but considering the author I'll take their usefulness and entertainment value for granted.
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