Chicago Shakespeare Theater has printable handbooks for many of Shakespeare's plays. "Each of our entirely original teacher handbooks includes active, engaging teaching activities, 400 years of critical thinking, synopses, and much more. Teaching activities-all aligned with the Common Core State Standards-are designed to draw upon some of the same practices and techniques that actors use in the rehearsal process to break open Shakespeare's challenging language."
"Each of our entirely original teacher handbooks includes active, engaging teaching activities, 400 years of critical thinking, synopses, and much more. Teaching activities-all aligned with the Common Core State Standards-are designed to draw upon some of the same practices and techniques that actors use in the rehearsal process to break open Shakespeare's challenging language. "
History of English
(Source: A History of English by Barbara A. Fennell)
The English language is spoken by 750 million people in the world as either the official language of a nation, a second language, or in a mixture with other languages (such as pidgins and creoles.) English is the (or an) official language in England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; however, the United States has no official language.
Indo-European language and people
English is classified genetically as a Low West Germanic language of the Indo-European family of languages. The early history of the Germanic languages is based on reconstruction of a Proto-Germanic language that evolved into German, English, Dutch, Afrikaans, Yiddish, and the Scandinavian languages.
In 1786, Sir William Jones discovered that Sanskrit contained many cognates to Greek and Latin. He conjectured a Proto-Indo-European language had existed many years before. Although there is no concrete proof to support this one language had existed, it is believed that many languages spoken in Europe and Western Asia are all derived from a common language. A few languages that are not included in the Indo-European branch of languages include Basque, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian; of which the last three belong to the Finno-Ugric language family.
Speakers of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) lived in Southwest Russia around 4,000 to 5,000 BCE. They had words for animals such as bear or wolf (as evidenced in the similarity of the words for these animals in the modern I-E languages.) They also had domesticated animals, and used horse-drawn wheeled carts. They drank alcohol made from grain, and not wine, indicating they did not live in a warm climate. They belonged to a patriarchal society where the lineage was determined through males only (because of a lack of words referring to the female's side of the family.) They also made use of a decimal counting system by 10's, and formed words by compounding. This PIE language was also highly infl