Week 3 (21 January): Early modern lexicon (loanwords, mostly colonial) and codification

You'll be explaining (aim for 5 rich minutes) how two words (taken from two of these three lists) entered the English language (think about form, meaning, spelling, spread through the language, as relevant). Keep things in perspective: articles (Nick Hudson) and books have been written about words like race: try to zero in on a linguistic issue. For instance, for the foreign loanwords, think about the extent to which the linguistic borrowing reflects the specificity of the cultural contacts and contexts. Need vs prestige? Oral vs written (the nine billion spellings of alligator? Specialist vs general use?
Did the word change dramatically in pronunciation or meaning (denotation? connotation?) upon borrowing?
By Monday January 13th at 5, please email me with your top three preferences from the two lists that you've chosen (e.g. "potato", "banana" and "guitar"; "creole", "negro", and "tribe").

Here is the OED for you to play with.

Topic 1: alligator, banana (Tim), canoe (Alex), chocolate (Cheratra), coca (Rebecca), coffee (Zach), embargo (Brad), guitar (Dale), ketchup (Senka), maize (Susana), moose (Andrea), plunder, potato, sherris (Jennifer), tea (Jan), tobacco (Dan), traffic; a word of your choice (non-classical, trade/colonial, pre-1700). Stop press: penguin.

Topic 2: barbarian/barbarous (Jen), cannibal (Jan), caste (Susana), creole (Tim), horde, India/n (Senka), Mussulman (Alex), native, negro (Cheratra), nigger (Brad), pariah (Zach), race, savage (Dale), Shemite (Rebecca), tribe (Dan), vulgar (Andrea); a word of your choice (denoting "Others")

Topic 3 (if you don't like Topic 1 or Topic 2): Use Ian Lancashire's Early Modern English Dictionaries Database to identify what kinds of headwords are included in early English-English dictionaries (i.e., not English-Italian or Latin-English) and how they are treated. Pick a semantic field where you expect to find "native" words coexisting with "hard" words (anatomy, disease?), or pick a semantic field that you're just plain interested in. Words might include: bugger, piss, pox, dictionar* ...

In order to use EMEDD, you'll need to get a password. You can do this independently, or may email CP for her "class" password.