Middle English: Languages of the World: Introductory Overviews

Alexander Arguelles presents a series of videos to provide introductory overviews of the languages of the world. Working diachronically through various language families in turn, he demonstrates how to identify each language, translates a text sample to show how it works, and discusses its genetic affiliation and cultural context. For further information about the series, please refer to http://www.foreignlanguageexpertise.com/

Category:

Education

Tags:

• polyglottery
• polyglots
• foreign
• languages
• Middle
• English

[ProfASAr]

@Mistreena Certainly you may also use it. In the course of doing so, if you can work it in smoothly, I would appreciate it if you could mention that it was made by someone who has plans for an intensive foreign language studies institute where languages and language learning skills will be taught in a special way. If enough people are pointed in the direction of my ideal institute, the idea may pick up momentum and become a reality.

[Mistreena]

@ProfASAr

I may also use this for a presentation in my History of the English Language class, if that is alright.

Thank you for posting this!

[planetes1973]

My only major complaint with your pronunciation is that you should've shifted the long vowels back to continental values. Otherwords, it was very nicely done..

[ChuckyJJCthulhu]

@SubjectAlpha100

No English is still a Germanic language, esp for orthography and structure, not Romance. A glossary may have a lot of French-derived vocab in it but the language you speak to people at work, school is almost entirely germanic in vocab too. Look at most other Euro non-romance languages and they also have scads and scads of words from French and Latin- it's what the nobles and scholars used. Russian is still Slavic, Irish is Celtic and English Germanic despite their Latin vocab.

[abcmikke]

Is this how cough drops got invented?

[moomoochacoo]

i bet he is an awesome teacher, he really wants people to know this stuff. I am highly interested now.

[ANARCHYGOD2012]

@rbthelanguageguy well I would think english would have pronounced the a always as the o as modern spanish and romance language do

[SubjectAlpha100]

@74stigma The way I see it, English is a Romance language with a lot of Germanic words. I don't often agree with language purists, but I find Old English much more beautiful and majestic than what we are usin and I wish we were speaking it instead. If only the English had won in 1066!

[74stigma]

@JimmyPi314 yes i agree, because 56 percent of modern english is derived from latin especially french, only around 30 percent of modern english is derived from old english, and a massive percentage of that has changed compared to it`s original text

[GarF1eId]

Nice. why not try an eastern language... like bisaya, for example. there is a rift of sorts between the eastern and western dialects of the language. "He ate that there" would be "Gika'on niya kana anha" in west and "Gekaon nya kara ara" in east.

Not sure if it would be interesting to study for thine kind though.

[MarvellousMuffin]

@GodOfUnbelief

It survived in the Scots language, mind you.

[JimmyPi314]

It does look like foreign language to me. I think I can read french better than this text (and I'm not that good at french).