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
Melting pot – language contact in a high migration city; was Birmingham, could be Liverpool/ Leeds. Contact 4.
Viterbi algorithm for competing utterances in Hidden Markov Models; garden paths – math version of 13/04
D&D, Tolkien, Norse mythology, cyberpunk Future 1
acronyms, virtual currency, computer languages, the information Age Future 2
Speech acoustics , the speech chain
Speech acoustics 2 download and practise PRAAT
Polari, rhyming slang, leet secret languages Future 3
Near-future phonological change – glottal stops? Syntax – more isolating? Future 4.
Comparison of PIE and 2026 English. End of course.
Nine topics remain after Lakeland. If we did all, this would take us to 22 June. (Assume we meet on b/hols 04/05 & 25/05/25) . In principle Workaround courses (bilingualism, speech, hearing, vision, Alzheimer’s, stroke ) could continue from 29/06. The 6th iteration of the whole course would start around 29/09.
E-mail me at laghamon@yahoo.co.uk 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
