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Fall 2008 Course description As far as possible, students will be encouraged to make their own investigations and discuss their findings and questions about words in class. Students will work to increase their mastery of English vocabulary from the technical, literary, scientific and other domains by acquiring recurrent morphemes and words incorporating them; and by generally increasing their awareness of the structure, history, and use of English words. Course objectives Course schedule and announcements "Read-by" dates for the readings and due dates for the assignments will be posted on the Course Schedule. Dates for exams will soon be added. The Announcements on the Ling/Engl 215 site on Owlspace will be the first place I announce any changes, so check the Announcements often. Disabilities Any student with a disability requiring accommodations in this class is encouraged to contact me after class or in my office. Contact also the Disabled Student Services office in the Ley Student Center to find out how they can be of further assistance. Course requirements
In addition to assigned readings specified on the Course Schedule, students are responsible for reading the pages in the Course Content Links, from the bordered grid of links on this page below, as these links become activated on the web. Participation points for the course are based students' questions posed or answered in class; my perception of your presence as the course goes on; and submission vs. non-submission of the first 5 words assignment. Students are responsible for getting an Owlspace account so they can read the Announcements and take the exams online. Course records will be maintained on the Owlspace site and will be made accessible to each student as far as is possible. Word Journal project The one significant piece of writing in this class is the Word Journal project. The purpose is to get you attuned to the words in the language used around you. One part of the assignment is to help you expand your vocabulary in the specialized subject matters that you are dealing with in your academic subjects. The other part of the assignment is to notice and collect neologisms and figure out how and why they were created; and to describe the various linguistic processes they demonstrate. The vocabulary you are learning in classes is not that different in kind from the neologisms: all technical vocabulary and jargon, for example, were once neologisms, either borrowed from other languages or created out of existing morphemes. The Word Journal is covered under the Honor Code as well: you have to to 'catch' the words in use yourself -- that means you must hear or read them in a real context, and not take them from anyone else's written or online discussion of them as words; and your definitions for the words must be in your own words. See the three links below under Honor Code issues for further explication. The Word Journal will end up kind of long, if you do it right. That is why it is advisable to use the whole semester to collect and write about the words. There is nothing worse than trying to find a whole bunch of words and think of things to write about them in a short period of time. The project will go smoothly if you do a little at a time and keep up with the class so you can use concepts from the course in your observations about the words. To help ensure that you are at least collecting words during the semester, and hopefully thinking abut them too, we will have a an assignment due before midterm in which you will submit 5 words, with definitions, that you have collected (no full write-ups necessary); and another due later, in which you will submit another five words, this time with draft writeups. Exams Exam coverage Exam policies Any illness or other disaster that keeps a student from taking an exam during the accessibility window must be reported to me (kemmer AT rice.edu) before the exam is due (if you can't notify me, then ask your parent or college master to do so). There are no make-up exams. Final exam The exam slot for our course time is Block Q, so all exams for this course must be submitted by Dec. 17, 2007, 10:00 p.m. Our online exam counts as a "take-home exam", meaning that it must be submitted by the end of the above assigned final exam period, but can be accessed and submitted before that. The beginning of the accessibility period for our exam on Owlspace is the official beginning of final exams, Wednesday Dec. 12, 9:00 a.m. Exam reviews
Exam review session Honor Code issues Honor code for exams Honor code for Word Journal To avoid unclarity about academic standards relating to use of the World Wide Web, these standards are posted on the following links: Students should consult these before using the web to produce coursework (in this or any course!!) Grading Grading is done by points. The course has 100 points total. The mean is set at about a B-/B. The quantity and nature of the material is set with the expectation that if a Rice student (i.e. a student preselected for academic ability) does everything required in the course, spends a few hours a week studying the material, and takes the Word Journal assignment seriously, it should be possible to get at least a B- in the course. To pass the class, a student needs 50% or more of the total points. This is expected to be well below average performance, but it is acceptable for passing given the amount and nature of the material. Text and reference materials Textbook English language dictionaries The following print dictionaries can be used for preparing and/or checking your etymologies for the Word Journal assignment; or you can use the OED Online, see below. The unabridged dictionary referred to in our textbook is the Webster's 3rd New International Dictionary of the English language, unabridged (Springfield, Mass.: Merriam Webster, 2002) which is in Fondren, call number PE1625 .W36 2002 . The print dictionary I prefer for etymologies is the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. My copy is the 2nd edition which has the Dictionary of Indo-European Roots in the back, as well as an excellent article on the Proto-Indo-European language. The publisher removed those materials in the 3rd edition, but restored them in the 4th edition by popular demand. Fondren has the 4th edition in its stacks, call number PE1628 .A623 2000 . OED Online: Comprehensive on-line dictionary Basic on-line dictionary Among online dictionaries, only the Oxford English Dictionary Online linked above gives sufficient information on etymologies to be used as the source for etymologies presented in class. If you don't want to digest all the detail of the etymological information in the OED, use one of the large print dictionaries referred to above. Additional resources for this course DVD series on the history of English We viewed the first 2 parts of the video series "The Adventure of English: 500-2000 A.D." The host of the series is the British television personality Melvyn Bragg. These 2 DVDs are now available for checkout at the Circulation Desk at Fondren. They are on 2-hour reserve until about Sept. 20. During this period you can check them out overnight after 10 p.m. ; they will be due 10 a.m. the next day. In the week before the first midterm, they will be on 2-hour loan exclusively (no overnight), to accommodate more people wanting to review for the exam. Only the two parts we viewed in class are required viewing, but the rest of the episodes are enjoyable to watch and may help reinforce the material on the history of English for the exams. Course content links The other web materials for this course have been organized into a website, Words in English. The relevant pages from this site will be linked below as we come to them. You can also surf around on the public site from 2004, which is available to the world as a stand-alone website with an organizational logic independent of this course. See the site map. Extra materials for the historical parts of the course: Maps: Visual Aids for the History of England and English List of maps of Britain from various centuries (The most relevant ones are selected and Map: Germanic tribes arrive in England from the Continent, starting 410 a.d. Map: Tribal control ca. 550 a.d. England prior to Viking attacks and before rise of Wessex (700s) Viking Invasions in Europe (800s and later) England after rise of Wessex and after partition between Anglo-Saxons and Danes (800s) The Danes take the whole thing: England under Canute, Scandinavian king (1014-1035) Dominions of William I, Post-Conquest Texts and Images from English History The Lord's Prayer in English Through Time Excerpt: Anglo-Saxon Chronicle View the Whole Bayeux Tapestry Canterbury Tales, First Page of Prologue The Canterbury Tales, Digital Facsimile Caxton, First Printed Book in English The King James Bible: Source of common phrases in Modern English William Shakespeare: His Dramatic and Linguistic Legacy Beowulf Recent translations of Beowulf and a new high budget movie coming out in November can make this epic come to life for those interested in ancient Germanic stories (ultimately, the same source from which Tolkien created the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy). The movie homepage and other links are on our Resources Page under the heading for Beowulf. The links are optional, but recommended, and in the case of the movie, very cool. Spelling reformers have gained supporters at various times in English history. George Bernard Shaw was perhaps the most famous, as he left his fortune to an association promoting English spelling reform. This little article is a joke, but it does suggest some of the problems that would arise with spelling reform. Proto-Indo-European links Proto-Indo-European demonstration and exploration website The Comparative Method and IE Languages "Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans", by Calvert Watkins. This is the essay that was originally published in the 2nd edition of the American Heritage Dictionary in about 1976--the dictionary I had when I was in high school and which I bring to class when I remember. I read it and was blown away by all of this information, which was completely new to me, and as I found, completely unknown to anyone else around me. It put me on the path to becoming a historical linguist (although I did not become an Indo-Europeanist, but a diachronic typologist, another variety of historical linguist.) Dictionary of Indo-European roots This dictionary of reconstructed roots of the Proto-Indo-European parent language can be used a) to explore the deeper origins of words whose etymologies are given in the American Heritage Dictionary; these etymologies cite the roots which you can then look up here; and b) to browse through, and thereby explore word families, that is, sets of words that are etymologically related (i.e. descended from the same parent root) although you might never know it from their current forms. Collections of neologisms from Ling 215 The latest neologism entries were collected in December 2005 by students in the last version of this class. A searchable database for them was created by Daniel Rasheed in consultation with the instructor, and with participation from other students. The words collected were entered by the students, each entering his or her own collection. In addition, a number of students input entries (and/or edited and corrected entries, in teamwork coordinated by Daniel Rasheed) from Word Journals from Fall 2004 and from the earlier online Journals cited below. This database can be accessed at: The Rice University Neologisms Database. It is still a work in progress and will be fixed up to include full searchability on all fields, similar to an online dictionary like the Oxford English Dictionary Online. Eventually it will be moved to a production server. If there is anyone who knows mysql/php and would like to work on this project, I can hire a student to work on it for money. Earlier incarnations of class neologism collections: New Word Journal Interactive, 1998-2002 Web interface. Designed by Jenn Drummond. Click on the link under Output near the bottom, "View a list of existing entries", to see the collection of words. New Words in English, 1996-97 A collection of new words (neologisms) begun in Fall 1996 from Word Journal entries by students in this class. |
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