Creature of Mad Enthusiasms

I'm on Lecture #9 of the history of English and still digging it. Fascinating - he had a lecture on the words that were imported/imposed from Norman English, and also on the remaining uses of inflection in English. (In that the same word has different meaning and pronunciation depending on how it is used. I record the data. I play my old record.)

( For the total language geek, the Table of Contents for the supplementary material I'm pulling together. )

If there's any uberhistory geek who can point me to the entire Peterborough Chronicle (aka Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) online in the original text, please do so. The 1135 cite was the end of four citations showing the lingual shift of the phrase "in the year" but I could only find 1135 in the original Old English.

FYI, part 2 will take us through Shakespearean English, the Great Vowel Shift, and "Amerlish" hiving off from the mother tongue, so there will be lots of references pulled offline from Shakespeare, the KJV and the writings of the Founding Fathers. Part 3 will lean heavily on American dialect, as far as I can tell.

My Great Courses classes have arrived, and I've just dropped "The History of the English Language" (part 1, disc 1, lecture 1) in my CD.

The classes come with a spiffo little guidebook that has a class outline and suggested readings, and little pop quizzes questions to consider after each lecture.

It is sad, sad, sad how thrilled this makes me. It's just like school! Only without commuting and bursars, and a GPA to worry about! And also at school the professor didn't appear in a burst of Pachelbel and we didn't applaud, but other than that, I can practically smell the chalkdust.

Dr. Lerer's got a slightly funny voice (bit of a lisp; I keep expecting him to say "Never argue with a Sicilian when his life is on the line!"), but I'm vastly amused by the description of American dialects as "the afterlife of English."

And when I've done a bunch of classes, I can give myself a degree from the Unseen University. (There doesn't appear to be anyone giving degrees from Shiz, although I do have the T-shirt.

Now that the missionary project has taken wing again, I'm starting to wonder if there really is any way of spinning it into another degree. I always kinda wanted a master's degree in history in much the same manner that I covet gold monogrammed earrings - I'd like to have it, but the money is better off being used elsewhere.

But then, since the end result of this project is a book, that kinda reads "dissertation" all over it. And I wouldn't mind calling myself Dr. Dodson in the least, even if the only impact it would have on my life is keeping me in debt a few years longer.

The closest college (as in, "less than 2 miles from my house") that offers a PhD in history is U MD. Their entry requirements are a little annoying, what with having to find three professors who remember me to write letters of recommendation and taking the GRE again, on the presumption that my old scores are, well, 20 years old at this point. (Why can't I just walk into admissions and say "For the love of Riley, I have two other degrees and a credit card. You want my money, I want your accredited blessing. Let's cut this bullshit and put me on your rolls, 'k?")

More offputting is the vague generality of the actual course requirements. Naturally, if I do this, I want to spend the least amount of time in classes and the most on the dissertation. American Studies is charmingly up front - all students will take 30 credit hours. History is more vague - "Doctoral candidates must complete three sections of the General Seminar." There is nothing on the rest of the page or the course pages that define the General Seminar or its sections, so I have no idea how many courses are actually involved.

I've heard of "all but dissertation" PhDs. Is there such a beast as the "only dissertation" degree?

Current book: Rules of Engagement by Christina Dodd. I wanted to get as far away from badly written Poe or Hawaii as I could get.