Learning another language is one of those things I wish I would have done when I was young enough to pick it up in the same way I learned English. Unfortunately, the once-a-week-at-lunch twenty-minute French lessons I took in elementary school didn’t really stick (and never went beyond a handful of nouns and numbers, anyway), and by the time I took a couple years of Spanish in high school and German in college, those malleable language circuits that receive so much attention in neurology and educational circles were quite calcified, and I was preoccupied with giving priority to learning multivariable calculus, controls theory, and other subjects more directly applicable to my intended career path. These days, all I remember is a tiny dribble of vocabulary, and a decent amount of linguistics.
One of these days, perhaps I’ll turn my attention to seriously learning to speak another language, ideally accompanied by a trip to a country or region where that language is spoken (maybe Japan or Germany). I find linguistics almost or more fascinating than language, though, and arguably more relevant day-to-day as I work with prose and English communication. When a colleague recommended I try a podcast called The History of the English Language, it seemed a perfect opportunity to indulge that fascination along with a healthy helping of history.
Begun in 2012, the podcast is a history podcast about the English language, although it takes dozens of episodes for the host, Stroud, to reach the advent of the oldest English dialects from the start of the proto-Indo-European language. Stroud is a practicing attorney, so more a practitioner of language than a professional linguist, but this does not detract from his impeccably researched, thorough, and educational series (complete with references on his website). His presentation is orderly and detail-oriented, although it does contain a great many lists intended to illustrate a particular point about the evolution of language, but which I find to go on longer than is useful to demonstrate that point. This is not like Carlin’s somewhat dramatic and intense approach to telling history – it is rehearsed and rational in its approach, with a focus more on the abstracts and facts of history than on its people and characters.
While learning about the history of English may improve your ability to use the modern language, I find it most directly applicable in two ways. One is rather niche: it has improved my ability to parse excerpts from historic sources, both in English, and untranslated from related languages like Latin (this was especially helpful in reading The Book of Memory which, as fantastic as it is, has a challenging number of untranslated passages of Latin, French, and Old and Middle English). The other is a writing application, for understanding the history and evolution of the English language is helpful in incorporating language into your worldbuilding, whether it’s through naming conventions, dialects, constructed languages, idioms, or any other element of culture. The culture you develop for your stories should permeate the language used by the people within the stories, and Stroud shows just how true this is in English and its ancestral tongues.
The History of the English Language is not the sort of podcast you should jump into in the middle or from the most recent episode; it should really be listened to starting from the first episode and continuing on in order, as Stroud presents the history chronologically (for the most part – a few episodes will go back in time a bit or cover a parallel event that is relevant to the overall history of English). It is well worth the effort of listening in this fashion, despite the podcast app I use not giving an easy way to listen to a series from the beginning, instead of from newest to oldest. This is one of the few podcasts I listen to regularly, and I suspect many of you will find it interesting, too.
IGC Publishing 