Foreign Perspectives

Doing the English component of my modern languages degree as the very last course after years of learning both French and Spanish gives a slightly peculiar perspective.

For one thing, I know a lot of the linguistics words that they’re using but I only know the French and Spanish words for the relevant terms. It’s a little peculiar being able to speak about English using French or Spanish words!

It’s taught quite differently to the foreign language components too and seems, to me, much easier than they were even though, in principle, this course is at the same educational level as the foreign language ones. One very noticeable aspect of this is that I find that I can work on the English well into the evening whereas I couldn’t do that with either the French or the Spanish until towards the end of those segments.

The course starts off with something of a potted history of the English language itself and in particular it homes in one how very old English words and expressions live on in many of the dialects that are spoken around the UK today. Interestingly, some of these are now strongly associated with particular regions whereas they’d have been used throughout what is now the UK several centuries ago. For example, “wee” is very much seen as a Scottish term for “small” but it’s actually an Old English word dating back over 1000 years and one of many where the Scots even retain the phraseology of Old English in their use of it.