10 Quick Tips to Improve Your Writing By Richard Nordquist Whether we're composing a blog or a business letter, an email or an essay, our usual goal is to respond clearly and directly to the needs and interests of our readers. These 10 tips should help us sharpen our writing whenever we set out to inform or persuade. Lead with your main idea.As a general rule, state the main idea of a paragraph in the first sentence--the topic sentence. Don't keep your readers guessing.See Practice in Composing Topic Sentences.Vary the length of your sentences.In general, use short sentences to emphasize ideas. Use longer sentences to explain, define, or illustrate ideas.See Sentence Variety. continue reading below our video Loaded: 0% Progress: 0% Use specific nouns and verbs.To convey your message clearly and keep your readers engaged, use concrete and specific words that show what you mean.See Detail and Specificity.
Indo-European Languages The Indo-European languages are a family of related languages that today are widely spoken in the Americas, Europe, and also Western and Southern Asia. Just as languages such as Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian are all descended from Latin, Indo-European languages are believed to derive from a hypothetical language known as Proto-Indo-European, which is no longer spoken. It is highly probable that the earliest speakers of this language originally lived around Ukraine and neighbouring regions in the Caucasus and Southern Russia, then spread to most of the rest of Europe and later down into India. The earliest possible end of Proto-Indo-European linguistic unity is believed to be around 3400 BCE. Since the speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language did not develop a writing system, we have no physical evidence of it. The ancients came up with the explanation that the Latin language was a descendant of the Greek language. Branches of Indo-European Languages Anatolian Indo-Iranian Greek
EvoLang coverage: Boeckx on integrating biolingustics and cultural evolution | Replicated Typo Cedric Boeckx gave a remarkable plenary which tried to pull together the fields of cultural language evolution and biolinguistics, with surprising concessions on either side. Boeckx started from a relatively uncontroversial part of Chomsky’s claim: That aspects of language can be studied scientifically as part of biology. However, Boeckx noted that Luria in 1976 was confident that ‘within a few years’ linguists would be interfacing with and contributing to findings from biology. Boeckx outlined his own position as minimalist, in the sense that a fully specified UG is not plausible. Instead, Boeckx suggests that the subject of study should be a set of formal properties. An edge property: This removes selectional restrictions on concepts in different domains and makes it possible to combine them. These specify a minimal specification of universal grammar for which might realistically find biological explanations. Like this: Like Loading...
Where did English come from? - Claire Bowern There are two other TED-Ed lessons related to this topic: How languages evolve and How did English evolve? (a lesson that fills in some of the details that we omit here due to the fact that the focus of this lesson was further in the past). There is still a great deal of debate about Indo-European, most importantly about the location of the homeland. To read more about this debate, there are classic books by Mallory and Renfrew, as well more recent works by Anthony. Then, read these articles by Bouckaert et al. To learn more about the distribution of languages across the world, see LL-map or The Ethnologue.
10 tips for perfect English pronunciation Accurate pronunciation is an important part of learning any language. The way your speech sounds can have a big impact on whether or not people understand what you are saying and their initial impression of you. The tricky thing about pronunciation is that it not just a question of acquiring knowledge, it’s a physical skill that you need to practise regularly. There are no shortcuts to perfect pronunciation, however there are some ways you can practise more effectively and improve your skills faster. Follow our ten top tips, start improving your pronunciation today and take a step closer towards your goal of perfect English pronunciation. Listen to yourselfSlow down! Give each of these tips a try next time you have a chance and find out which of them works best for you. Not an EF English Live student?
The History of English (BBC animation) - LinkEngPark Anglo-Saxon The English language begins with the phrase ‘Up Yours Caesar!’ as the Romans leave Britain and a lot of Germanic tribes start flooding in, tribes such as the Angles and the Saxons – who together gave us the term Anglo-Saxon, and the Jutes – who didn’t. The Romans left some very straight roads behind, but not much of their Latin language. The Anglo-Saxon vocab was much more useful as it was mainly words for simple everyday things like ‘house’, ‘woman’, ‘loaf’ and ‘werewolf’. Four of our days of the week – Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were named in honour of Anglo-Saxon gods, but they didn’t bother with Saturday, Sunday and Monday as they had all gone off for a long weekend. The Norman Conquest Click for the transcript Shakespeare Click for the transcript The History of English 2 The History of English 3 The History of English 4 Source: BBC More Series for You:
History - William Caxton 25 maps that explain the English language English is the language of Shakespeare and the language of Chaucer. It’s spoken in dozens of countries around the world, from the United States to a tiny island named Tristan da Cunha. It reflects the influences of centuries of international exchange, including conquest and colonization, from the Vikings through the 21st century. Here are 25 maps and charts that explain how English got started and evolved into the differently accented languages spoken today. 1) Where English comes from English, like more than 400 other languages, is part of the Indo-European language family, sharing common roots not just with German and French but with Russian, Hindi, Punjabi, and Persian. 2) Where Indo-European languages are spoken in Europe today Saying that English is Indo-European, though, doesn’t really narrow it down much. 3) The Anglo-Saxon migration The next source of English was Old Norse. 7) The colonization of America 8) Early exploration of Australia 14) Where people read English Wikipedia