Conversations 3 - Excerpt

Dr Abercrombie: I’ve taken the segments on pronunciation out– I think we can lose those easily enough. Nobody really needs to recite “Beowulf” or the “Canterbury Tales” any more– no matter how much fun it is.

Mr Fitch: And that means you probably won’t be discussing orthography much either?

Dr: I suppose not. I just want to be sure to point out clearly the main ways in which Modern English has developed from its predecessors. You know, the Great Vowel Shift, and so forth. Saving ninety minutes is not going to commit Old and Middle English to total oblivion, after all.

Mr: (laughs) Not if you can help it, certainly! So I can eliminate the phonetics quiz completely, then?

Dr: Yes, I think so. I’ll still give them a reading just so they can get a flavour of their ancestral tongue, but they can get as much of the phonetics as they want out of the textbook– and it’s rote learning anyway, really.