Episode 172: Succession

The History of English Podcast

Kevin Stroud

History, Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 6.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 November 2023

⏱️ 95 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, we explore the concept of a successful succession. During the early 1590s, France was divided by a bitter conflict over the succession of Henry of Navarre to the French throne. Meanwhile, William Shakespeare wrote a couple of … Continue reading →

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.
0:15.6	This is episode 172. Succession.
0:19.8	This time we're going to explore the challenges of succession. Now I'm not referring to a
0:24.8	popular television show about a fictional media magnate. I'm actually referring to the
0:29.7	challenges faced by the monarchs of England and France in the late 1500s.
0:34.0	And I'm also referring to William Shakespeare, who succeeded the first wave of London playwrights,
0:40.0	to become one of the most popular writers in English history. This is also the story of the
0:45.1	pronunciation of words like succession. Specifically the changes that caused words
0:50.7	ending in SIOM and ION to be pronounced as Shun.
0:57.2	So this time we'll explore the concept of a successful succession and we'll examine how these developments shaped the English language.
1:06.8	But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is History of English
1:11.8	podcast.com, and you can sign up to support the
1:15.5	podcast and get bonus episodes at Patreon.com slash history of English. Now this time we're going to look at the concept of a
1:25.1	successful succession and to do that I want to begin by looking at the ultimate
1:30.3	root of words like successful and succession. That route takes us all the way back to the
1:36.4	original Indo-European language and a word in that language that meant to go and
1:41.4	sometimes meant to yield. It was something like Kate. As we know, the ancient
1:48.0	Indo-European language is the ultimate ancestor of English and Latin and most other European languages.
1:55.0	Well that very old root word passed into Latin, and then in the middle ages, as Latin evolved
2:01.3	into the various romance languages, that root word continued to exist and became part of other words.
2:07.5	But along the way, the hard K sound at the beginning of that root word Ked was softened into an S sound, from Ked to an S sound, from Ked to S said or Ses.
2:20.0	It's still meant to go, and it survives in many words that English borrowed from Latin and the various romance languages over the centuries.
	...

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