Last modified 13 Nov 07
| The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. --James D. Nicoll |
Meetings MWF 11:00-11:50
Room George R. Brown Hall 212 West
Instructor contact Office, Herring Hall 209; Tel. 348-6225;
email, kemmer AT rice.edu
Instructor office hours MW 1:15-2:30 and by appt.
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.
| Midterm #1 | 20% |
| Midterm #2 | 25% (was 20%, now changed) |
| Final Exam | 30% |
| 10 Vocab Qu izzes | 0% (was 5%, now optional, usable as exam preparation) |
| Word Journal | 20% |
| Participation | 5% |
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.
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.
Exam policies
The midterms and final examination will be administered by making them
accessible in the Quizzes and Exams tool on Owlspace. Students can
take them from any computer, as long as sufficient web connectivity
and bandwidth is available from that computer. Students are
responsible for checking this connectivity in advance if they choose
to take the exam from a computer off the Rice campus.
The exams are pledged closed
book, in fact closed any materials beyond what is on the Exam page
when you are taking a given exam on Owlspace.
The midterms will be max 1.5 hours and the final exam will be
max 3 hours (but they are designed to take less time than that; you
either know the answer or not. )
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 Final Exam schedule has been published by the Registrar at:
Rice Fall 2007 Final
Exam Schedule.
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
The following lists of relevant terminology will be linked in the weeks
before each exam is activated.
Honor code for Word Journal
Students are welcome, in fact encouraged, to talk about their Word
Journals with classmates, as long as they don't use for their Journals
words collected from other Ling 215 students (current or former).
Some people will come up with some of the same words independently,
but that's OK if you caught the word 'in the wild' yourself. Your own
journal entry for the word (all of the writing you submit for these
assignments) should be original to you of course.
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!!)
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.
English language dictionaries
Different purposes call for different dictionaries. Nowadays online
dictionaries can be used for definitions. But for etymologies, a
better resource is needed than standard online dictionaries. Many
online dictionaries don't have any etymological information, and
some have very little.
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
Rice has access to an online version of the famous Oxford
English Dictionary Online Second Edition. [The link on this
page has been updated. If it doesn't work, please tell me. --S.K. ]
You have to be using an on-campus computer to access it, or else have
a VPN connection to Rice from off-campus. The OED, both the
unabridged print dictionary and its online version, is the gold
standard of dictionaries. The online edition has recently been
updated to include new words and citations up to about 2000.
Basic on-line dictionary
Merriam-Webster
Online. Quick search capability allow you to get definitions
instantly. However, the etymology information is not detailed enough
for our purposes.
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
See Online and Other References.
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.
List of
maps of Britain from various centuries (The most relevant ones are
selected and
linked in the proper order below, with others from elsewhere.)
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
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
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.
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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© 2002-2007 Suzanne Kemmer
Last modified 13 Nov 07