The course “English: the first 4,000 years” is hosted by Interest Groups Online, part of the University of the Third Age. The zoom slot on Mondays from 6:00 to 7:30 is open all year round.
I am Ed Conduit, retired as a clinical psychologist and now mainly a linguist. I use the name “Laghamon” after the supposed author of Brut, a history of the kings of England in English around 1205. In practice Brut may be a continuation of Anglo Norman political spin started by Geoffrey of Monmouth. The graphic below shows mutual intelligibility of our PIE neighbours (1.0 = no intelligibility).
The 2025-26 course timetable. Completed: 29/09/2025 Proto Indo European 06/10/2025 Intuitive grammar tense- modality-aspect . 13/10/25 Proto Germanic mythology sentient trees, Asgard. 20/10/25 Phonology of English vowels . 27/10/25 Proto Germanic – Gothic. 03/11/25 The Danish branch; sh & sk words. 10/11/25 consonants – phonology by introspection . 17/11/25 The people of Britain: genetics and ethnolinguistics. 24/11/25 Old English 01/12/25 TBC. 08/12/25 Old English 2 15/12/25 Danish creolisation hypothesis. 22/12/25 Place names: OE, Danish, Welsh. 29/12/25 TBC. 05/01/26 Ancrene Wisse (‘wisdom of anchoresses’). 12/01/26 “Which king’s English?” (Laghamon, EME2). 19/01/25 (TBC) Welsh & Scots Gaelic Celtic history and future 26/01/25 Chancery standard. 02/02/26 Chaucer Sobecki on “raptus”. 09/02/26 The Great Vowel Shift. 16/02/25 Gawain, lip-reading. 23/02/26 French contact. 02/03/26 William Tyndale Ancient Greek contact – morphology in biomedical English. 09/03/26 Spelling in Modern English . 16/03/26 Conservative Dialects1 – children’s lore, Potteries. 23/03/26 Black Country 30/03/26 Swearing, identity politics. 06/04/26 Semtic contact Amelakites 13/04/26 LLMs, E2L, Emojis.20/04/26 Icelandic Lakeland. – Conservative 3 27/04/26 Melting pot – language contact in a high migration city; Birmingham plus some Liverpool. Contact 4. 04/05/26 D&D, Tolkien, Norse mythology, gaming Future 1 11/05/26 Speech acoustics, the speech chain . Effects of AI on English.
18/05/26 The American accent
25/05/26 new vocabulary romance & dating (Assume we meet on b/hol 25/05/26) .
01/06/26 secret languages Polari, rhyming slang, glottal stops? Future 3
Near-future change. Stop elision by glottals? Morphology reduction? Syntax – more isolating? Future 4.
The Scots dialect. Possible topic
The brains of Chinese, Japanese and English speakers. Possible topic
Too difficult: Viterbi algorithm for competing utterances in Hidden Markov Models; garden paths. PRAAT would take 5-10 hours to learn the interface. In principle Workaround courses (bilingualism, speech, hearing, vision, Alzheimer’s, stroke ) could continue from 29/06.
The 7th iteration of the whole course would start around 28/09.
E-mail me at econduit@proton.me if you want an invitation to join zoom. Please tell us about your knowledge of languages. The three boxes below have been the most relevant so far, but any language helps! To describe your learning of a language, use European A,B,C levels, or compare with the contact hours in a school GCSE: 2 hours a week for 44 weeks a year for 5 years would be 440 hours.
Other links Chinese history Zheng He voyages (picture): U3A History zoom talk. Ukrainian Workbook PDF. Narcissism in Identity Politics. Energy, prices, Russia, drought, forest fire, floods, extinctions, boat people. One solution: do it now. My blog: languages and cycling
