This was one of these books that I had to read in small doses. It was interesting and I learned quite a bit about the history of our language, but it took me a while to finish it. ( )

This is possibly one of my favourite books. ( )

Appears that the author had a bit too much fun writing this book. Still enough content left to keep it interesting. ( )

The Adventures of English by Melvyn Bragg
This is the book I was expecting when I read Bill Bryson’s book “Mother Tongue”. Yes, there are lists of words, detailing when they entered the English language. But Bragg gives you the context of and behind the words so that you can understand the why of the new word—as much as possible, anyway. In this book we are exposed to language as if it were a living animal species surviving and fighting the attacks of other languages and eating and assimilating other languages and evolving over time, much as any animal species is.

“…a word, at its simplest, is a window” he writes. And THAT is what I find most intriguing. Consider the difference between the English “ask” and “demand”. When the Normans took control of England and introduced French as the ruling language “to ask” and “demander” were translations of each other, in 1066 as they are now. However, the emotional differences between the two English words today reveals something about the social interactions of then. When the ruler “asks” you to do something he generally doesn’t say please. The result is that the English words “ask” and “demand” have very different emotional associations today.

In 1350 we have the Black Plague destroying up to one third of the entire population of England and virtually eliminating Latin as a cultural influence on the written English—and at the same time giving the remaining peasantry some push-back power over the nobility to better their condition in life...and language. And with the wars in France over the French patrimony of the Norman conquerors we have the French rulers in England addressing the people in English in order to persuade them to follow and fight for him in France.

This is what I read these books to learn. Why did we adopt a particular word from a particular language at a particular time? Why did particular words totally replace the original English word? And why others were added to and thus enriched the current verbiage…and increased our ability to communicate an increasing number of conceptual/emotional subtleties?

Why do we have so many words that are spelled the same but have different meanings? And why do we have so many words that are spelled so differently and yet carry nearly the same meaning? Think about it: why are most of our nautical words of Dutch origin? And, while the animal names are Germanic, why are the cooked versions of these animals described with French words? And why are the acts and physical realities of sex crudely labeled in Germanic while romantic/poetic words and phrases are reserved for an “elevated” treatment?

How did Chaucer herald the transition from Old to Middle English? And Shakespeare later sweep us up from Middle to Modern English? It’s not just a list of the new words that interests me, it’s the “why” of the new words at THAT time? Chaucer was trying to evoke the styles (accents?) that would be encountered in and around London of his time. Shakespeare did much the same. But what they both did, so much better and more prolifically than other writers, is use whatever sound-fabrications they could think of to convey an emotional concept that had never been expressed before in so simple a way.

The one thing that I wish Bragg had done…although I can accept that it might have otherwise expanded the book more than was practical...there seems to be no accepted explanation of the Great Vowel Shift.

“In the years between Chaucer’s birth and Shakespeare’s death, English went through a process now known as the Great Vowel Shift.”

While the printing press “fixed” word spelling before the GVS started, such that English words are now spelled consistently around the world, it is because of the GVS that many of the written words are often disconnected from the way they are pronounced. Read poetry from that era and you can see that many of the words no longer rhyme; e.g. “prove” and “love” rhymed for Shakespeare.

And then there were the early dictionaries that established (determined?!) “official” spelling.

“The relationship between sound and spelling in English is a nightmare. Our writing system is not phonetic to the point of being anti-phonetic.”

Why do we have so many ways of spelling the same sound? And why so many ways to pronounce individual letters? And not just vowels but consonants are also distorted for our convenience. We used to have different letters to differentiate between “t” and “th”. [See for a listing of the English letters that didn’t survive into the modern age.]

Braggs also points out the vagaries of Victorian prudishness in “tormenting the language into shapes and sounds which reflect strait-laced manners, class prejudice and competing moralities”. Add to that the “arrogance” of the dictionary writers who took it upon themselves to dictate the way words should be spelled merely to indicate some information about the ultimate source of the word that only the people who already knew these facts cared about and saddled us with “deBt" and “douBt" and “ofTen" and “cloTHes”.

To sum up: Bragg didn’t give me everything I would have liked, but he gave a good deal of what I wanted and I heartily recommend this book for a first taste of the linguistic history of English. Truly, the history of English is the history of the English people. ( )

An exploration of the development of the English language.

Bragg is well known for his work on BBC4; he writes the book as an extremely endangered species, the passionate and well-informed non-specialist. His rhetoric is over the top on not a few occasions, and his writing can get bombastic, but the passion for the project comes through.

The author works the thesis of English's adaptability as facilitating its survival at certain dire moments, and then leading to its flexibility and dominance. He notes the overall limited number of Celtic words imported into the language of the Anglo-Saxons, and then how that English was able to withstand the Norman invasion and its effects. Once English re-establishes itself as the language of state, the narrative goes on to expound upon how it developed and adapted in different environments, in England and abroad.

A worthwhile read to help understand why English is the way it is. ( )