The pages below are for the next course on “English: the first 4,000 years”. Please join u3a Interest Groups Online and get on the Beacon database. There might be some Chinese citizens with us in 2023. If so, the start time might be 18:00 Beijing time, i.e. 11:00 BST, on Mondays.
Session one grammatical Intuitions; verb tense- modality-aspect 25/09/23? This is the start date for some university terms, so it could be ours
Session two vowels and consonants 02/10/23?
Session three Proto Indo European 09/10/23?
Session four PIE 2, spoken dialogues 16/10/23?
Session five Proto Germanic sentient trees, Asgard 23/10/23?
Session six The Danish branch; sh & sk words 30/10/23?
Session seven Old English 06/11/23?
Session 8 OE 2 Aelfric’s colloquy
Break for Christmas
Session 9: Welsh & Scots Gaelic why so little influence?
Session 10 the Danish creolisation hypothesis
Session 11 place names in Danish and Old English /01/24
Session 12 Ancrene Wisse (‘wisdom of anchoresses’) /01/24
Session 13 “Which king’s English?” Laghamon /01/24
Session 14 Chancery standard; creolisation revisited 06/02/23
Session 15 Chaucer Sobecki on “raptus” 13/02/23
Session 16: The Great Vowel Shift, 20/02/23
Session 17 French contact. Irish contact manuscripts, uncial 27/02/23
Session 18 Hebrew contact. Frisian, Yiddish, Afrikaans 06/03/23
Session 19 Spelling in Modern English 13/03/23
session 20 Ancient Greek contact; morphology in biomedical English William Tyndale 20/03/23
Session 21 swearing 27/03/23
Session 22 Conservative Dialects – children’s lore, Potteries, 03/04/23
Session 24 Black Country (Conservative 3) 17/04/23 (Easter Monday no break)
Session 23 Icelandic (Conservative 2) Lakeland 17/04/23
Session 25 Birmingham 24/04/23
Session 26 Hindustani contact Bilingualism in delaying dementia 01/05/23 (B/hol no break)
Session 27 English as second language (ESL) 08/05/23
Session 28 The information Age Tolkien, acronyms, virtual currency 15/05/23
Session 29 secret languages Polari, rhyming slang 22/05/23
Session 30 Comparing 2000 BCE with 2023 29/05/23
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, compare with the contact hours in a school GCSE: 2 hours a week for 44 weeks a year or 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
About Me
I use the name “Laghamon”. The previous owner of the name was a 13th century monk who wrote a history of the British people in English. He lived on the Severn in North Worcestershire – my neighbour.
- e-mail laghamon@yahoo.co.uk