HOTEL Lecture 1.1 – Why We Study the History of English, and What Evidence We Have

Why does a speaker of modern English need to know what the language looked like a thousand years ago? This first part of Lecture 1 answers that, and then asks a harder question: how do we know any of it? We look at what actually survives from Old English – four manuscripts of poetry, about three million words in total, almost nothing of ordinary speech – and at what the record does not give us. We also look at the evidence for the period before English was written at all: Roman authors, names, and the early Germanic loanwords that Finnish preserved better than Germanic did. #historyoftheenglishlanguage #oldenglish #anglosaxons #beowulf #historicallinguistics #HOTEL