Wednesday, August 8, 2012

English as a Germanic Language

Here's my first video.  It kind of sucks, but it's a start.  Hopefully I can improve.

Please comment if you have anything to contribute!  Please look forward to my next video, which shall be a general overview of the Indo-European language family--the "big, big language family" to which Germanic belongs.

Also when I get excited I tend to lean forward in my chair.  So that's why you can't see my face for part of the video.

2 comments:

  1. Brofessor,

    Where did the Thai language originate?

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  2. Good question! I can talk about it a little next time if you like. In the meantime, you may want to look up the Tai-Kadai language family, one of the larger families of Southeast Asia. The family probably originated long before the advent of civilization in the region--maybe six thousand years ago or more. The ancient ancestor languages of Thai would have been spoken by hunter-gatherer tribes in the hills of northern Indochina, some of whom are still around today. There was a really good documentary by National Geographic (it's on Netflix if you have it) called "The Human Family Tree" that traces the DNA of a Thai-American lady back to some very ancient peoples in the region that existed even before this time.

    Some controversial hypotheses exist about this family; for example, some will try to connect it to the Austronesian family, which includes Malay. This is an interesting hypothesis, since the families originated quite close to each other, but we really don't have enough evidence to say for sure.

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