Rollicking Story of English course October- December 2019

I am once again offering this fun and informative survey of the English language, described by one of my students as "the best course I've ever taken".

What another student has to say:

Katherine is brilliant, and this is a FANTASTIC class packed with information both historical and practical. Katherine will provide you with the tools to legitimately assess all kinds of word questions you invariably run into. The Barber name has become a verb in our home when it comes to delving into word origin and usage, as in "I've got to Katherine Barber that when I get home." Take this class if you can!

Tuesdays, 1:30-3:30 pm, October 15 - December 10,  

Goethe Institute

100 University Ave., North Tower,
Suite 201
on the west side of University a few steps south of King
1 minute walk from St Andrew subway station
10 minutes or less walk from Union Station GO, fully covered via the PATH.
This venue is fully accessible.
For nearby parking see here:
https://en.parkopedia.ca/parking/underground/lot_372/m5j/toronto/?arriving=201712081100&leaving=201712081300 

Price: 9 2-hour classes for $275 including HST

Enrollment limited to 20 people.

Subject to space, you may attend one or more individual lectures at $35 each, but you must let me know which ones you will be attending at least a week in advance.

Please register in advance by 
emailing me at wordlady.barber@gmail.com or phoning me at 416-693-4496
and either
1) arranging an Interac e-transfer
or
2) sending a cheque made out to
Katherine Barber
201 Hanson Street
Toronto ON
M4C 1A7

Please write "English course" on the cheque

Why is English spelling so chaotic? Why do we have so many synonyms? What might your name tell you about the history of the language? What is the history behind your favourite language pet peeve? This course is a highly informative and entertaining survey of the influences that have shaped English vocabulary over the years. We will tie linguistic developments with the social and political events with which they coincided. Forget your dull high school English classes as Katherine Barber takes you on a surprisingly hilarious trip through a crazy language.

1. Week 1 Celts and Anglo-Saxons:

Celtic and Latin relics from pre-5^th century Britain. The Germanic origins of our essential vocabulary and grammar. Why we have "feet" instead of "foots" and why we use apostrophe s for the possessive.  Relics of Anglo-Saxon dialects in Modern English.

2. Week 2  Using the Oxford English Dictionary.

A primer in using this essential online and print tool to research the history of English words.

3. Week 3 The Vikings:

Old Norse borrowings into English. Why we wear skirts and shirts. Why the verb "to be" is so ridiculous.

4. Week 4 The Norman Invasion:

A brief history of French. Middle English. Why we have "pigs" in the open and "pork" on the plate. The origins of chaotic English spelling.

5. Week 5 The Renaissance: Early Modern English

Spelling and pronunciation don't jibe. The Great Vowel Shift. Why is there a "b" in "debt" and an "h" in "ghost"? Why do some folks say "y'all"? The effect of Shakespeare and the King James Bible on the vocabulary

6. Week 6 The 18th Century:

The prescriptive grammarians of the 18^th century at the origin of our present grammar “rules”. Samuel Johnson. Re-examining our pet peeves. 

7. Week 7 The 19th Century to the Present :

The influence of Sir Walter Scott, the industrial revolution, and the expansion of the British Empire. Why some people pronounce "herb" with an "h" and others without. Why Lufthansa supplies its first class passengers with "body bags". 


Week 8 American and Canadian English:

Have they corrupted the language? Noah Webster and his dictionary. Why are British and American spelling different? The history of Canadian English. Are we more British or more American? How we can be very confusing to other English speakers. 

Week 9 How are Dictionaries Written?
Are lexicographers judging you? When does a new word make it into a dictionary? Different dictionaries for different folks.

P.S. If you find the English language fascinating, you might enjoy regular updates about English usage and word origins from Wordlady. Receive every new post delivered right to your inbox! Sign up here.

Follow me on twitter: @thewordlady

 

Rollicking Story of English course October- December 2019

I am once again offering this fun and informative survey of the English language, described by one of my students as "the best course I've ever taken".

What another student has to say:

Katherine is brilliant, and this is a FANTASTIC class packed with information both historical and practical. Katherine will provide you with the tools to legitimately assess all kinds of word questions you invariably run into. The Barber name has become a verb in our home when it comes to delving into word origin and usage, as in "I've got to Katherine Barber that when I get home." Take this class if you can!

Tuesdays, 1:30-3:30 pm, October 15 - December 10,  

Goethe Institute

100 University Ave., North Tower,
Suite 201
on the west side of University a few steps south of King
1 minute walk from St Andrew subway station
10 minutes or less walk from Union Station GO, fully covered via the PATH.
This venue is fully accessible.
For nearby parking see here:
https://en.parkopedia.ca/parking/underground/lot_372/m5j/toronto/?arriving=201712081100&leaving=201712081300 

Price: 9 2-hour classes for $275 including HST

Enrollment limited to 20 people.

Subject to space, you may attend one or more individual lectures at $35 each, but you must let me know which ones you will be attending at least a week in advance.

Please register in advance by 
emailing me at wordlady.barber@gmail.com or phoning me at 416-693-4496
and either
1) arranging an Interac e-transfer
or
2) sending a cheque made out to
Katherine Barber
201 Hanson Street
Toronto ON
M4C 1A7

Please write "English course" on the cheque

Why is English spelling so chaotic? Why do we have so many synonyms? What might your name tell you about the history of the language? What is the history behind your favourite language pet peeve? This course is a highly informative and entertaining survey of the influences that have shaped English vocabulary over the years. We will tie linguistic developments with the social and political events with which they coincided. Forget your dull high school English classes as Katherine Barber takes you on a surprisingly hilarious trip through a crazy language.

1. Week 1 Celts and Anglo-Saxons:

Celtic and Latin relics from pre-5^th century Britain. The Germanic origins of our essential vocabulary and grammar. Why we have "feet" instead of "foots" and why we use apostrophe s for the possessive.  Relics of Anglo-Saxon dialects in Modern English.

2. Week 2  Using the Oxford English Dictionary.

A primer in using this essential online and print tool to research the history of English words.

3. Week 3 The Vikings:

Old Norse borrowings into English. Why we wear skirts and shirts. Why the verb "to be" is so ridiculous.

4. Week 4 The Norman Invasion:

A brief history of French. Middle English. Why we have "pigs" in the open and "pork" on the plate. The origins of chaotic English spelling.

5. Week 5 The Renaissance: Early Modern English

Spelling and pronunciation don't jibe. The Great Vowel Shift. Why is there a "b" in "debt" and an "h" in "ghost"? Why do some folks say "y'all"? The effect of Shakespeare and the King James Bible on the vocabulary

6. Week 6 The 18th Century:

The prescriptive grammarians of the 18^th century at the origin of our present grammar “rules”. Samuel Johnson. Re-examining our pet peeves. 

7. Week 7 The 19th Century to the Present :

The influence of Sir Walter Scott, the industrial revolution, and the expansion of the British Empire. Why some people pronounce "herb" with an "h" and others without. Why Lufthansa supplies its first class passengers with "body bags". 


Week 8 American and Canadian English:

Have they corrupted the language? Noah Webster and his dictionary. Why are British and American spelling different? The history of Canadian English. Are we more British or more American? How we can be very confusing to other English speakers. 

Week 9 How are Dictionaries Written?
Are lexicographers judging you? When does a new word make it into a dictionary? Different dictionaries for different folks.

P.S. If you find the English language fascinating, you might enjoy regular updates about English usage and word origins from Wordlady. Receive every new post delivered right to your inbox! Sign up here.

Follow me on twitter: @thewordlady

 

Where there is hatred let me sow love(red)

Photo by T. Chick McClure on Unsplash

The other day, a friend of mine asked rhetorically:

"When did the word "hatred" disappear from the English language?"

She felt that "hatred" is a much better word than its synonym "hate". 

Of course, "hatred" has not disappeared from English (neither the word, nor, alas, the thing). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "hatred" occurs between 10 and 100 times per million words in typical modern English usage, in the same category as words like dog, horse, ship, machine, mile, assessment, army, career, stress, gas, explosion, desert, parish, envelope, and headache. 

But my friend is on to something. "Hatred" does seem to be waning.  

If you look at Google Books (admittedly a rather rough tool), the word has been experiencing a downward trend since 1800 (here's the link if you can't see the graph 
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=hatred&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Chatred%3B%2Cc0 ):

This trend is confirmed by other corpora.

It is not really surprising if "hatred" is on the wane, if not exactly in its death throes yet, since it has to contend with its exact synonym "hate" (the noun). 

Is "hate" some newfangled verb-noun conversion that is muscling out its venerable forebear "hatred"?

Far from it. The noun "hate" and its Anglo-Saxon ancestor hete are in fact older than "hatred", the earliest evidence for which dates from 1225.

Another phenomenon that is not in favour of "hatred" is that it is one of only two words current in English that maintain the Old English suffix -red (meaning "condition, state"), the other being "kindred". We don't have "love" and "lovered", though we used to have the latter, along with "brothered", "friendred", "gossipred", "neighboured", and a few others. So without a major semantic distinction between "hatred" and "hate", a distinction that I don't detect, the form with the old-fashioned suffix may well eventually die.

There are syntactic differences though. "Hate", rather than "hatred", is almost always used to form compounds, e.g. "hate crime", "hate speech", "hate campaign", "hate mail", "hate-filled". We don't say "hatred crime". 

On the other hand, "hatred" is much more likely than "hate" to be used when followed by a preposition: although it's possible to say "his hate of the enemy", it's much more common to say "his hatred of the enemy". "His hate of the enemy" even sounds a bit odd to me; how about you?

What do you think about "hate" and "hatred"? Is "hatred" a better word, and if so, why? Do you feel there is a semantic distinction between the two?

While we're on the topic, who's in favour of changing the spelling to a more logical "hatered"?? Ah, English spelling, how we love to hate you.

If only we could get rid of hatred by banning the word!