ENGL 360

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Final Exam Review

Our final exam is Thursday, Dec. 14 at 1:30 in the usual classroom in Avery. Here is the review sheet.

  • Know when the Great Vowel Shift happened. You don't need to know the exact pronunciation values and how they changed, but you should be able to explain the effect of the GVS on our ability to understand OE and ME
  • Name at least 2 works by Geoffrey Chaucer
  • Who introduced printing to England? What was the effect of printing on English language change?
  • What were the main positions in the Inkhorn Controversy? Name some people involved in it.
  • What were the causes of England's break with the Roman Catholic Church? What effect did this have on how people viewed English?
  • What were the "Augustans'" views of written and spoken English? What did their views mean for grammar in particular (be specific)?
  • How did the views about literary language change in the Romantic period? Name two English writers who exemplify this view.
  • What role did the expansion of education play in the English language?
  • How does the OED contrast with Johnson's dictionary? How are they alike (ideologically, not lexically)?
  • Who is considered the first structuralist theorist? Who is the first deconstructionist theorist? Describe how these theories view words.
  • Name two English-speaking countries besides England and the USA. Tell me two things about the English spoken in that country (look at the wiki for this).
  • Name two American English dialects. Tell me two notable features (lexical or grammatical) about each one.
  • Give an example of how technology is effecting the English language (grammatically or lexically)

Feel free to ask questions posted as comments on this page!

Language Nostalgia and the Geek-chic factor

Not only has the Internet increased the rate of langauge change (witness the spread of "im in ur [noun], [present participle] ur [plural noun]"), it has also brought into contact all sorts of people who enjoy participating in the nostalgic imitation of older varieties of English--even back to Old English itself! This group engages in scholarly work, making dictionaries available and editing e-texts, but some of them also play at imitation of archaic English, which has become something of a game for many self-identified "geeks."

For class today, let's look at several of these sites. I'll start with Old English ones, and move to the imitations of more modern Englishes.

Old English

Computer terms translated into Old English by Carl Berkhout

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, still going strong after all these millenia.

Wicipaedia, se freo wisdomboc (this site has some trouble with special characters)

A seasonal offering for us from the Boar's Helm Pub.


Bayeux Tapestry
Techinically, this isn't language nostalgia, but I'm fascinated by the on-line gaming jokes made in the Bayeux Tapestry image sets:

Medieval images on YTMND, particularly, shows deliberately bad "Olde Englishe" (using "thine" for "thy," for instance.

Middle English

Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog. If you're in 433 next semester, you might want to bookmark this. It will only get funnier as you get used to the ME, and the language links off to the left are a gold mine (especially the dictionary). Part of the fun here is watching him translate modern terms into ME or Latin, such as his musings on a "gret japery" (fun game)--"auriole" (ie, halo).

Katherine Swinford--another blog in ME. Hers is actually closer to ME, and a little harder to read.

The 17th century

Technically, this isn't language imitation, since it's just someone putting Pepys diary up as if it were a blog. Pepys was a real diarist from the 17th century. I still think it falls under the heading of nostalgia, though.

Victorian England

Lady Bracknell doesn't keep character consistently--unlike Chaucer, whose identity is mysterious, the author has photographs of herself up. But she still tries to sound like she's from Victorian England.

An exmple of a North American dialect

North American dialects: Northern Central (Minnesota and the Dakotas)

* Phonologically long and rounded [o] vowels. Probably from Scandinavian influence (and these features are strongest in the most Scandinavian areas)
*Periodic “eh”? at the end of sentences, although this is more prevalent in the upper peninsula of Michigan and Wisconsin
*Lexical frequency differences (frequency of use rather than a strict unique lexical set): “ya, sure, you betcha.” “no problem”
*Different words: “hot dish” instead of “casserole”, “dinner” and “supper” not synonymous (as they are in some other US dialects, but not all); dinner is what I called lunch
*Norwegian influences words: uff-da (expression of suffering or sympathy), and also the name of some distinctive dishes: lutefisk and lefse are the best known. Lutefisk is dried fish soaked in water, then in lye, then in water
Lefse is like potato crepes
* This dialect has been made known through the movie Fargo and the writings and radio shows of the humorist Garrison Keilor.

Swen, Ole, and Lena jokes:
"Ole lay dying in his bedroom. He began to revive as he smelled the aroma of fresh lefsa wafting through the house. Ole managed to gather is strength and crawled out to the kitchen. Just as he reached for a sample of his loffy Lena's lefsa she slapped his hand and said, "No Ole, don't you know that's a for the funeral"

Some of these are obviously modern coinages:
"Yew have yust received da Sven and Ole Computer Virus. Because ve don't know how to program computers, dis virus verks on da honor system. Please delete all d files on yewr hard drive manually and forward dis message to everyvon on yewr mailing list. Tank yew fer yewr cooperation. Sven and Ole." (also the Amish virus joke)

The curious thing is that these jokes are mostly told and invented by Norwegian Americans. They would seem to be denigrating, like “Polack” jokes, but they have claimed the jokes as their own. This is an example of what Fennell calls “covert prestige,” perhaps—the sense of group identity that telling such jokes imparts overcomes the supposed negative portrayal of the Norwegian Americans. Irish Paddy and Mikey jokes work the same way.

AAVE
*This joking dynamic changes when you have powerfully disenfranchised dialects and groups of people, such as many speakers of AAVE. The existence of the AAVE dialect arouses disgust, rather than gentle humor, in many establishment listeners. Films that use it for humorous effect are therefore much more political in their attitude toward the speakers of that dialect
*It has also led to questions of whether or not AAVE has diverged enough from the standard American dialects to warrant EFL instruction for speakers of it.
*The dialect has features that advertisers, particularly, work to exploit—“The odds be with you” was a tagline of the Missouri lottery for a while. In standard English, this is expressing a subjunctive—a wished-for state. In AAVE (and some other local dialects), this statement is indicative—and misleading.
*AAVE is a valid English dialect—remember, no dialect is superior to another. But it poses difficulties for teachers who need to balance the need for group identity with the need to enable their students to succeed.

Saturday, November 18, 2006

Open post on wikis

The purpose of this post is to provide a place for your questions, comments, and tips to your classmates on how to put your wiki pages together. I'll quickly take the opportunity to point you to this page on world English dialects.

Have a good break, everyone!
Prof. B

Structuralism and its discontents

Hi, everyone. I'm going to post my lecture notes from Thursday's rather (a-HEM) sparsely attended class. The I'll post a wiki discussion entry. I'll give a link that I've run across for dialects, and you all can comment and give each other tips as you figure things out.

Lecture:

I. Principles and history of structuralism

  • Founded by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1913-1915, but not translated into English until the 50s
  • Structuralism looks at the larger principles of human patterning and thought.
  • Structural linguistics examines the meanings of words in relation to each other, not historically over time. It only cares about what features make up the “deep structure” of the language rather than the historical accidents of its words.
  • Language is a major structuring tool for human beings, which means that it influences the way they see the world. Words are not just transparent references to real thing, but are tied to our perception of these things. Since we only know by perception, and languages influence that, we only “know” things through language. Our knowledge is often shaped by separating concepts into “binaries” which are seen as antithetical to each other (day/night, evil/good, right/left).

II. Benjamin Whorf and the Eskimos

  • One example that has been classically given for this is the Eskimo Snow Vocabulary. Basically, the claim goes, “Eskimos” have hundreds of words for snow in order to let them structure their notion of the environment. The example was made famous in the writings of Benjamin Whorf, and is called the “Sapir-Whorf” hypothesis.
  • However, this one has been busted. The Inuit (now the preferred term for the indigenous people of Greenland and other northern territories) don’t really have many more words (ie, individual roots) for snow than English!
  • Does this bust the S-W hypothesis? This is actually not a valid question. First off, it isn’t really a “hypothesis” in the sense that scientists and most people use that term. It’s more an ideology, a set of underlying philosophical notions that Whorf was trying to clarify in his writing. As such, (as one commentator memorably noted) it can no more be proven or disproven than Buddism or Polish drinking customs.
  • And Inuit words do hint at a different structure of thought from English: for instance, they differentiate snow in the air and snow on the ground more sharply than we seem to.
  • Despite the whole furor over Inuit vocabulary, which served as a pretty big distraction, most modern theorists of language do assume that vocabulary has some shaping effect on perception. It accustoms us to thinking in certain ways

III. Feminists and language

  • For instance, language can reinforce notions about empowered and disenfranchised groups, if it posits one as “normal” and the other (binary) opposite as “other”
  • If “men” is normal (and the use of the word to encompass human experience suggests that it is), then anyone who does not fit the category of “men” is not-normal and inferior.
  • One linguistic example that I’ve noticed the (fortunately dated) use of co-ed to mean female students. If co-educational means men and women, then why are co-eds only female? The use of the word suggests that “students,” the “normal” category, is male and female students are “co-ed”—different.
  • The sort of sloppy thinking that such terminology invites has lead to sloppy thinking in research, such as:

1. Heart attack symptoms. The “classic” symptoms that (until recently) everyone was taught to identify are typically male. No one bothered to research heart attacks in women to notice that they have a much lower instance of chest pain. If men are “normal,” then only the normal people need to be studied for a representative sample. Heart disease remains the number-one cause of death in women, at least in part because it is often not identified in time.

2. Car air bags. All the crash-test dummies in the first few generations were “average” humans—ie, adult males. No one tested shorter dummies, because no one thought about women drivers. Turned out the airbags could decapitate shorter drivers. This hadn’t been tested.

IV. Post-structuralism

  • Structuralism posited that words (signs) don’t refer to actual objects in the world, but to our mental construction of the objects, which is influenced by the words themselves
  • Deconstruction goes further—words only refer to other words. We only understand a word by relating it to other words to which it is related or opposed to.
  • So there is no actual “meaning” for a word. Meaning is “deferred” by the endless chain of signifiers that it relates to, and what passes for meaning is only the “difference” between it and other words. Derrida called this “différance", combining the French words for differ and defer.
  • So we have no understanding of the “real world,” only of language—and we have no real understanding of any words, either.
  • Because all our understandings of words is bound to what they aren’t, all of the binaries that Saussure noticed we use to shape our perception—they’re all false. Deconstruction is all about examining the ideologies and meanings we think things have (texts, and also our very notions of our identities) and seeing where there are tensions, ambiguities, or downright contradictions.

V. Post-structural identities .

  • Post-structural criticisms (feminist, racial, disablity) often try to deny the categories that make discrimination possible (race, gender, ability, etc).
  • One radical feminist, Mary Daly, has attempted to re-define the dictionary in feminist deconstructivist terms (handout). You’ll notice a lot of puns, breaking words, capitalization in order to defamiliarize the “meaning” of the word and uncover the layers of différance inherent in it.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Wiki Dialect Pages

Sorry, folks--I got a little behind on the course blog. The lecture notes from Tuesday are posted below. I thought I might post the dialect assignment on the blog, so you can all look at it on-line as well as in the paper copy I handed out in class.

Our course wiki is here. I have not posted our password; it's on the paper assignment sheet. It is the name of the cafe on the main level of the Student Center, if you don't have your sheet and don't remember.

Group Project ENGL 360: Wiki Dialect pages

For your final project, I’d like you to get into groups of 3-4 and write a report on a dialect of English. Include the following areas:
· The geographic location(s) of the dialect
· Features of pronunciation
· Lexical and/or grammatical features that distinguish this dialect
· The social function of the dialect in the surrounding groups
· Any works of literature that are written in this dialect or include written representations of the dialect
· Bibliography.

You will be asked to present a brief version of your findings to the class on Thurs., Nov. 30. The final version of your report should be presented as a page on the ENGL 360 wiki (www.engl360.pbwiki.com) and must be in place by Tues., Dec. 5.

The EETS, the OED, and the late 19th century

Some of the information from today's lecture is delightfully presented in a couple of non-fiction books by Simon Winchester:
The Professor and the Madman discusses the contributor who was working while incarcerated in an asylum. I've read this and recommend it.
The Meaning of Everything marked Winchester's return to the OED, this time discussing its creators more generally. I haven't read this, but intend to.

Today's lecture notes:

I. In Late Victorian period, again notions of progress surged in the wake of industrialism.
* Universal education became public (but only in English) in 1870
* English education was used as a way of preventing non-speaking groups from having access to power or from developing a sense of community other than that of their conquerors (British or American)
* Children were taken from parents and forced to attend English-only schools, where they were beaten if they spoke their native language

II. EETS
* Founded mid-century by scholars so that texts would be available to middle-class readers, and to women (who would emotionally connect to the history but were not expected to study it professionally)
* “We are banded together to trace out the springs, and note the course, of the language that shall one day be the ruling tongue of the world, which is now the speech of most of its free men” (EETS report 1869; qtd. in Biddick 93). The EETS tied its activities to an imperialist agenda and the learning of English language history to the projection of the English language future.
* Medieval material, now widely available, was used as a claim that English culture (and the English language) was superior to native cultures in America and India, and therefore served as a justification for the conquest and subjugation of the natives. The editing of medieval English and of Sanskrit laws took place with some of the same people involved as organizers.

III. The OED (I am deeply indebted to Charlotte Brewer's terrific study of the OED for this portion of the lecture)
*The Philological Society began explorations of new discoveries in linguistics in the 1850s, and rapidly realized that they needed a new dictionary that would reflect the new theories.
*They began assembling words and citations, and in 1879, J.H. Murray had taken over as editor in chief.
*The OED meant to include all words, and provide etymologies and examples that would show how the word had changed through time.
*Its view was shaped by theories of science, which had fine-tuned the experimental method of starting with data then forming assumptions. As one of the period’s best-known literary characters states, “It is a cardinal mistake to theorize ahead of the facts.” The editors tried to adopt this approach to lexicography.
*The "scientific" associations of the philological method somewhat obscured the project's ideological underpinnings. The OED was founded on assumptions that English could demonstrate the superiority of England. The notions proceeded that there was an inherent superiority of European and/or Germanic.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Close Reading

I found some good web sites on how to go about closely reading and analyzing a text:

This site is general and some of the steps only apply if you're reading fiction, but it should still be useful.

Don't feel bad if this is new to you--even the folks at Harvard aren't born knowing how to do this! One of the options for the essay is a poem; if you think you might discuss it, look at this site on close reading poetry (it also has some good general advice).

A google search on "close reading" turns up tons of sites, so feel free to keep looking on your own.

I think I'll spend Thursday's class working with you on the difference between summary and analysis (which can be tricky) and I'll show you a type of pre-writing that can be really helpful when you're writing about a text that is difficult to understand (those of you in ENGL 311 or 411 next semester--you'll see this again!).

Late Early Modern England and the Augustans

Please note a change to the syllabus: Tuesday we will have an in-class peer reading day for Essay 3. Essay 3 will now be due on Thursday, Nov. 9 . Next class, we will spend some time practicing close reading. Keep up with the reading schedule on the course syllabus, however.

Here is the web site that has the mnemonic poem about English monarchs from the Conquest to Elizabeth II.

Some later early-modern English history:
*After Queen Elizabeth I died without children, the crown passed to King James of Scotland (He was James VI of Scotland, and James I of England, so is sometimes called James the Sixth and First)
*He believed in an autocratic monarchy, free of restraints from Parliament. He was also fairly shrewd—he listened to the complaints of the Puritans that the maintaining of the episcopacy in the Church of England was a doctrinally problematic remnant of Roman Catholicism, but did not removed bishops. His response was, “No bishop, no king.” Turns out he might have been right about that. . . .
*He was succeeded by his son, Charles I in 1625. Charles was the second son (his older brother died early) and had been sickly as a boy. His father persisted in calling him “Baby Charles” until the end of James’s life (royal families have a famous knack for messing up their kids!). Charles came to the throne determined that he would show everyone what a strong king he was. He exaggerated his father’s autocratic tendencies. He thought Parliament should pass whatever taxes he asked of them, and wasn’t willing to listen to their grievances or consider any governmental or religious reforms. He used his private courts to circumvent some of the traditions of English legal practice (like the use of juries).
*Finally, in 1641, a civil war started. The King’s party fought against a party consisting of an alliance between Puritans and Parliamentarians. There was a brief cease-fire, but war started up again and in 1649, Charles I was tried for treason and executed.
*The country was ruled by Oliver Cromwell, who took the title “Lord High Protector.” When he died, however, the Parliamentary party, who had gotten tired of Cromwell’s Puritanism and disregard for procedure, invited Charles II back to be king. He returned, and the following period is called “the Restoration.” Drama began to be written again—racy stuff, with lots of illegitimate kids and whatnot.
*The crown passed to Charles’s brother James II, who was Catholic. The Parliament didn’t like that, so they removed him from office, and offered the throne to William and Mary. They came to the throne in 1689. Their daughter Anne ruled in the early 18th century, then we get a line of kings from the House of Hanover—Germans (the early ones could barely speak English). The first 4 of them were named George.

The Augustans
The Augustans were a group of writers who wanted the English of their day (the 18th century) to represent the height of linguistic and literary achievement, like Latin had supposedly done under Caesar Augustus. To heighten this parallel, they laid down several "rules" of English that were based more on the usage of Latin than the way anyone really spoke or wrote English:
* Don't use double negatives
* Don't split infinitives
* Don't end sentences with prepositions
These are all prescribed, artificial "rules" that did not evolve out of spoken English at all!

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

English Reformation and Early Type

Today's class introduced you to the English Reformation and also gave you a chance to try reading "black-letter" type from the early sixteenth century.

I looked over the biographies of Edward VI on the Biographic database that LMU links to. It says that Edward caught measles and/or smallpox, recovered but was weak, and then eventually died of tuberculosis. So now we know.

Here are today's lecture notes:
Henry VIII and the making of English identity
* Henry VIII was the second son of Henry VII. His older brother died before their father, so Henry became king, and married the woman who had been engaged to his brother, Catherine of Aragon.
* Henry and Catherine had one daughter, Mary Tudor. Henry and Cath had no more kids and H sued for divorce. The pope refused to grant this. In 1534, H declared himself the head of the church of England and married his paramour, Anne Boleyn. Their baby was Elizabeth Tudor. H had all the monasteries dissolved in one of the biggest land-grabs in English history.
* H had Anne executed on suspicious of infidelity (treason, if you’re married to the king). He then married Jane Seymour, who had Edward Tudor.
* Henry (after 3 other marriages but no more kids) died in 1547. Edward became Edward VI as a boy. His main advisor was the Protector, who supported much more radical reform of the English Church (under H, it was pretty close to Catholicism)
* Edward died in 1553. His older sister, Mary succeeded him. She was Catholic. The Church of England returned to Catholicism, and she had several Protestant “martyrs” (or, if you like, “heretics”) killed. She is now called “Bloody Mary” (not to be confused with Mary, Queen of Scots, by the way, who is a different person).
* Mary wasn’t well, either (probably had cancer). She died in 1558. Her sister, Elizabeth took the throne and England was Protestant again. This wavering back and forth produced something of an identity crisis, and, once the country had settled itself with a Protestant monarch, they felt a need to differentiate themselves from “non-English” identity categories. The origin of English “national identity” is often located at this time.

English typography of the early 16th century.
Remember, the early sort of type (now called black-letter) is not identical to modern characters in several ways (some of which continued in early modern roman type). Let’s get ourselves accustomed to reading some of it in the original.
* “s” at the start of a word is above the line of writing, with a long vertical stroke hooked to the right at the top. It can easily be mistaken for an “f”. We can also sometimes see a long S in words “foulneffe”
* U and v are often interchangeable, with V at the start of a word and u in the middle (although this is not necessarily consistent). A lower case v can be closed at the top, with a stroke angling up from the left
* Y and I are interchangeable in some instances, as are I and J
* R after vowels or other (orthographically) round letters can be written “upside down” in the “rounded r” form
* Ink can often smudge a page, and letters can be worn and have missing bits or odd appearances.

Monday, October 23, 2006

The Great Vowel Shift, Chaucer, and Caxton

Do go spend some time reading Melinda Menzer's excellent site on the Great Vowel Shift. (If you've read the reading for Tuesday, can you identify the term for how "Do" is used in the previous sentence?)

Great Vowel Shift!!!!

  • one of the kookiest things to happen to the English language since proto-Germanic moved the accent off the end of the words.
  • Melinda Menzer has an excellent web site that lets you hear the differences and talks through the stages of the GVS. It also has a little dialogue that you can listen to to hear the sounds change in speech. You need Quicktime on your machine (I don’t know if library machines will have this or not).
  • all the vowels sounds moved up in the mouth, except the top front and back, which dropped, centered, and became dipthongs (I->ai, for instance).
  • probably this happened for prestige reasons. Several dialects were in contact in London, remember. Some of them pronounced different letters differently, so that certain words were homophones (like around here, bowl and boll can be). This caused other speakers to change their own speech to differentiate themselves. Still, it’s a striking change for the language to undergo.
  • It began around 1450-1500, and was progressing through the early modern period (in Shakespeare, “eat” and “ate” are homophones, for instance).
  • This is why ME sounds so odd to us. The GVS changed English pronunciation drastically, even after orthography had been set.

Chaucer

  • One of the most important literary figures from the Middle English period, Chaucer was the first English poet whose work inspired national sentiment about the English language and its literary potential.
  • He was middle-class—his father was a wine merchant, and he served as a Customs official in London.
  • At the time of his life, the war with France had gotten rather bitter, so that French was no longer as popular
  • Chaucer’s major work is The Canterbury Tales, a set of stories that are told by fictional pilgrims (including one named Chaucer) on their way to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. This site itself was a locus of some national feeling—the origin and center of the Church in England, and a saint who was local but highly venerated.
  • The works are in some ways drawing on a set of “estates satire”—a very formalized set of portraits of people from different levels of society. Many critics have felt that Chaucer’s pilgrims are taking that tradition and moving it towards what we now call “realistic” characters. Some critics, however, maintain that his portraits are all entirely conventional.
  • at any rate, the Tales, as well as several other short and long poems of Chaucer’s were hugely popular, and circulate in several manuscripts, some of which are richly illustrated
  • But manuscript transmission carries with it problems of accuracy, as we see in Chaucer’s poem “Adam Scriveyn” (Adam the Scribe) (handout). It also doesn’t circulate as widely, even though scribal workshops seem to be coming into fashion to provide books for wealthy, middle-class patrons. Often one would read aloud from a manuscript; early punctuation was probably an aid to audible reading.

William Caxton

  • About 100 years after Chaucer’s death, William Caxton introduced to England one of the most revolutionary inventions in the history of Europe—the printing press.
  • Caxton didn’t invent the press, but he saw the business possibilities in it. With the expansion of a wealthier middle class, the literate population was growing. Manuscript production was very expensive; books could be produced more cheaply.
  • Early books were made to look like manuscripts. The decorated initials were drawn in and colored by hand (the origin of modern paragraph indentation).
  • The effect of printing on language was to retard spelling change. Writing slows language change in the first place; the introduction of texts to an ever-expanding section of the population really slowed it down.
  • Caxton wrote and spelled in a way that reflects his Westminster location, using in the London dialect. As rival presses sprang up, they also centered in London. So while in Middle English we have manuscripts from all over preserving several dialects, in the early modern period we don’t have all that evidence.
  • Texts became somewhat more stable—although printed versions of a text could differ from each other, the variety is much less than hand-copied manuscripts.
  • As the renaissance draws on, people even begin to argue a need for spelling reform—a sure sign that orthography was becoming fixed even as the GVS was continuing to shape pronunciation
  • Words begin to become “reified”—become “things” rather than supposedly immediate and translucent referents to the concept they convey.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Exam review

For Tuesday's exam, you will need to look over your lecture notes and the notes up on the course blog. Pay attention to the people who are mentioned--both scholars and historical figures. Also, label your book so that you can easily find information in it for the open-book portion of the exam.

Some things to know:
Who were the Proto-Indo-Europeans? What language subgroups come from Proto-Indo-European? Which subgroup includes English? Which other subgroup has directly influenced English, and how did this happen?

What groups of people have lived in Britain, and who displaced them? How did the successive displacements come about?

What are some of the characteristics of Old and Middle English? What type of language is each of these? What are some of the changes that occur between Old English and Middle English, and what brought these changes about?

What do we mean by strong verb "classes" in Old English? What sort of information can we determine about a verb by knowing its class?

What are the 4 primary cases of Old English nouns, and what does each case mean grammatically (what does it tell us about the noun's role in its sentence)?

What can the definite article tell you about a noun's case and number (this is on a handout, not in Fennell)? Which articles are unambiguous?

What are some identifying characteristics of Middle Scots?

A good link for Middle Scots

This website on Middle Scots lists the differences between it and Middle English.

We'll take a good bit of time tomorrow to review for an exam, but we'll also listen to some Middle English lyrics sung by the group Anonymous 4. Just for fun, I've included a link to their website. It looks like they're touring right now, and they'll be in Danville, KY next month! It's about 2.5 hours from here, if anyone thinks it sounds like a fun road trip.