The invention of the telescope in the early 1600s laid the foundation for the scientific revolution, but it also disrupted the traditional view of the universe and led to a conflict with the Catholic Church. Meanwhile, the Anglican Church completed a translation of the Bible that became known as the King James or Authorized version. In this episode, we look at how these simultaneous developments changed the modern world and shaped the English language.
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For whatever reason, I’m getting an error when parsing the RSS feed, today. It says the first character is invalid. Hex code 0x1F (31), which is a “unit separator” according to the ASCII table.
Could someone take a quick look and see if there is a strange character on line 1?
Hi Gary. What app or platform are you using where you encountered this problem?
Hi Kevin, did you reload the whole podcast to Spotify? My listening history is gone, and according to Spotify that would only be caused if the podcast was re-uploaded.
There was an issue with the RSS feed of the podcast over the past week or so. That is how Spotify and other podcasting platforms (like Apple) access the episodes and content. I suspect the issue you had is related to the work that was done that feed. The feed itself should be back to normal now, but it may have altered some settings within those apps. That is probably what Spotify meant by ‘reload the podcast.’
Hi there
I’m new to this podcast. I’m interested in the episodes related to modern English. Which episode marks the beginning of that period? I couldn’t tell from the titles, sorry. Your help is appreciated.
The early modern English period begins around Episode 140. You might find the Great Vowel Shift episodes to be a bit overwhelming if you haven’t listened to the earlier episodes, so I would recommend starting after those if you just want to focus on modern English. However, I strongly recommend all new listeners to begin with Episode 1 because the content of the early episodes is very important to the entire series.
Kevin started at the year dot and has worked his way up to the 1600s (where we are at the moment). Modern English, in the sense that Shakespeare is modern English, has just begun. The auxiliary verb ‘do’ is not yet a significant feature of the language, for example.
Hi Kevin, in many places in the podcast, when you mention that a sentence or a word is recorded for the first time, you usually say two things, the first is that the author coined it, the second is that the word or sentence existed before and the author recorded it for the first time. For example, you mentioned the word ‘honeymoon’ and many words recorded by Shakespeare for the first time. I’m wondering what your basis is for judging, since the word has not been recorded before.
Hi Joyde. When I say that a word or term is “recorded” for the first time in a particular document, that typically means that it is the earliest citation of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary at the time the episode is prepared. (The OED is a work in progress, and sometimes an earlier citation is found after the episode has been prepared.) When I say that a word was “coined” by a particular author, it means that the overall evidence suggests that the author invented the word or phrase.
I am very careful in the way I use the word “coin” in the podcast. I think you will find that I typically qualify the use of that word by noting that a particular word or phrase was “probably coined,” or “apparently coined,” or “likely coined” by the author. As you noted, it is difficult to assert with certainly that a word was coined by a particular author. However, there are occasions when the evidence suggests that a particular word or phrase was coined by a specific author. The evidence is based on the context in which the word or phrase was first used, and also the evidence surrounding its usage. For example, if a word is found for the first time in one of Shakespeare’s plays, but the same word appears a short time later in other documents, then it is likely that the word was in widespread use at the time, and Shakespeare just happened to be the first to record it. But if a word appears for the first time in a Shakespeare play, then is unrecorded for a century or so, and then pops up again in later centuries, that suggests that Shakespeare invented the word because there is no other contemporary use of the word at the time. In that case, it would appear that later readers picked up the word from Shakespeare’s plays after they become popular in later centuries. While that type of evidence suggests that he coined the word, it doesn’t prove it. That’s why I usually qualify my comments in the podcast.
Hi Kevin,
Thank you for this amazing podcast. I’ve finally caught up on it after a year or so of commutes, and continue to be amazed by the amount of fascinating detail and thoughtfulness you’ve put into every episode over the years.
Since this episode discusses scientific terminology, I was wondering whether you’d ever encountered the short essay “Uncleftish Beholding” (https://groups.google.com/g/alt.language.artificial/c/ZL4e3fD7eW0/m/_7p8bKwLJWkJ?pli=1). It’s by the science fiction writer Poul Anderson, and it’s a very clever and amusing attempt to write a scientific text as if English only consisted of Germanic words, with no Latin, Greek, French, or other loanwords. So an atom is an “uncleft”, elements are “firststuffs”, radiation is “lightrotting”, and so on. There are lots of little jokes, like the fact that uranium becomes “ymirstuff”, or the translation of quantum mechanics 🙂