The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

I wonder if a book like this could be written about any other language than English; perhaps so. But for English speakers this is a great "adventure" story about the most commonly spoken language in the world. English that begins as an import from Fresia across the channel, picks up bits and pieces from invaders, resists the French invasion, and becomes (somewhat) standardised through key events, but continued and still continues to change and grow.
Bragg's thesis is that English will continue to change, adapt, and borrow, and that all attempts to formalise or codify it will be a waste of time.
It's ironic that the former owner of my copy of this book saw fit to 'correct' the text a half dozen times.

'The Adventure of English' is based on a TV series (more than 8 hours long!) that Melvyn Bragg had presented for ITV back in 2003. The structure here is therefore the same -each chapter being like an episode, chronologically arranged, which makes it easy to read while displaying the evolution of a language across history.

Born out of a linguistic cocktail rooted in messy invasions, neglected for more than 300 years (from the Norman conquest in 1066 to the crowning of Henry IV in 1399) by an elite preferring French and Latin, we discover the political, religious and social changes which will ultimately turn English into a national language, before further developing, standardise itself during the Enlightenment until its expansions show more world-wide through the Empire, a process which will enrich it and influence back even British English itself.

Entertaining, funny at times, Melvyn Bragg, brilliant populariser, remains rigorous all throughout, and his use of other fields to illustrate some of his various points (e.g. literature) make this read even more fascinating. Here's a superb book, telling the history of a highly flexible and adaptable language, a language which wouldn't exist if it were not for the multitude of other languages which shaped it, yet is now accused of having turned into an incontrollable monster swallowing all in its trail. A great read! show less

We were discussing the history of English at work, after coming across a creepy-looking medieval volume in French and Latin, which inspired me to read up on the 'mother tongue'. I thought Melvyn Bragg's book might be an accessible 'middle ground' between the academic texts and Bill Bryson, and he is eminently readable but very white and very - English. For instance, he censors the word 'cunt', maybe at the request of his publisher, but dedicates a whole chapter to racial epithets and seems to mourn the treatment of a certain word beginning with 'n'. The more recent chapters are also horrendously dated, as the book was published in 2004 ('There will soon be a dictionary for texting!')

That said, I did get the gist of the timeline of the show more English language, from the Anglo Saxons to the Romans, Vikings, and French, and then the move from middle English to modern, via vowel shifts, Latin and Greek again, and the eventual standardisation of spelling and grammar., which was the whole point.

I don't agree - with Bragg in a jovial sense, and RF Kuang throwing a gigantic strop in Babel - that English 'steals' words from other languages. How do you steal words? Language evolves and grows - words are adopted and adapted to convey meaning, and if another language has the right word to describe something unfamiliar, why not use that term? Loan words don't strip one language to give to another, they just expand vocabularies.

Back to Bragg, I could also have done with fewer chapters on American English, which, let's face it, is just a simplification and popularisation of the mother tongue. Noah Webster intentionally removed the 'u' out of words like honour and colour and flipped the ending of words like centre to create a separate and 'logical' language, and that's how American English has continued. Four chapters listing (what seemed like) every addition to the vernacular from across the pond might class as overegging the pudding.

Interesting and well written, but I'm tempted to try Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue for comparison, or even search for a more up-to-date study of the language. show less

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”. show more 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. show less

This man makes me sick! Each week upon Radio 4, he discusses an esoteric subject which somehow turns out to be absolutely fascinating. Surrounded by experts, Bragg stays in control of the conversation and, in this book, he takes on the history of the English language.
Now, let us be honest, there are only two ways to do this subject: firstly, one could take the boring but educative line. This would lead to three hundred pages of tediously presented knowledge. The second method is the chatty,friendly version; a lot of fun to read but, at the end has one learned anything? Probably not.
Why can someone not conjoin the two styles and write an entertaining AND informative book? The answer is because few people have that amount of talent: Bragg show more does.
This is, by far, the best book that I have read this year - and I have perused a few good 'uns. The history is faultless and I learned an enormous amount. If I were to be critical, it would be the final chapter when Bragg looks to the future and tries to guess where English will go next. He accurately picks up upon the variation which is coming into English from its presence in many varied countries but, fails to mention the conjoining of the youth of these countries via the internet.
This is a minor flaw, if flaw it is, in a work that more than accomplishes its main goal. I want a sixth (and probably a seventh) star in the ratings box. show less

Very entertaining and loaded with terrific general knowledge trivia. I listened to the audiobook and the performance by Robert Powell alone was worth the price of admission.

Trivia eg. We all mostly know that Mark Twain is the pen name of Samuel Clemens, but did you know he took it from the expression to measure 2 fathoms of water depth from a riverboat?

A discovery for me was the Jamaican patois poetry of Louise Bennett-Coverley aka Miss Lou esp. her "Bans O' Killing", in defense of patois as a legitimate dialect that stands with others such as Scots, Yorkshire, Cockney etc:
BANS O’ KILLING” , 1944
So yuh a de man, me hear bout!
Ah yuh dem sey dah-teck
Whole heap o’ English oat sey dat
Yuh gwine kill dialect!

Meck me get it straight show more Mass Charlie
For me noh quite undastan,
Yuh gwine kill all English dialect
Or jus Jamaica one?

Ef yuh dah-equal up wid English
Language, den wha meck
Yuh gwine go feel inferior, wen
It come to dialect?
..
Ef yuh kean sing “Linstead Market”
An “Wata come a me y’eye”,
Yuh wi haffi tap sing “Auld lang syne”
An “Comin thru de rye”.

Dah language weh yuh proad o’,
Weh yuh honour and respeck,
Po’ Mass Charlie! Yuh noh know sey
Dat it spring from dialect!

Dat dem start fe try tun language,
From de fourteen century,
Five hundred years gawn an dem got
More dialect dan we!

Yuh wi haffe kill de Lancashire
De Yorkshire, de Cockney

De broad Scotch an de Irish brogue
Before yuh start to kill me!

Yuh wi haffe get de Oxford book
O’ English verse, an tear
Out Chaucer, Burns, Lady Grizelle
An plenty o’ Shakespeare!

Wen yuh done kill “wit” an “humour”
Wen yuh kill “Variety”
Yuh wi haffe fine a way fe kill
Originality!

An mine how yuh dah-read dem English
Book deh pon yuh shelf
For ef yuh drop a “h” yuh mighta
Haffe kill yuhself.

The example of tmesis (to insert a word inside another word) and the use of "bloody" in the poem "The Integrated Adjective" by John O'Grady was another standout :D
The Integrated Adjective
I was down on Riverina, knockin’ round the towns a bit,
An’ occasionally restin’, with a schooner in me mitt;
An’ on one o’ these occasions, when the bar was pretty full
an’ the local blokes were arguin’ assorted kinds o’ bull,
I heard a conversation, most peculiar in its way,
Because only in Australia would you hear a joker say,
“Where yer bloody been, yer drongo? ‘Aven’t seen yer fer a week;
“An’ yer mate was lookin’ for yer when ‘e come in from the Creek;
“‘E was lookin’ up at Ryan’s, an’ around at bloody Joe’s,
“An’ even at the Royal where ‘e bloody never goes.”
An’ the other bloke said “Seen ‘im. Owed ‘im ‘alf a bloody quid,
“Forgot ter give ut back to ‘im; but now I bloody did.
“Coulda used the thing me-bloody-self; been orf the bloody booze,
“Up at Tumba-bloody-rumba shootin’ kanga-bloody-roos.”

The book includes the apocryphal story that when the convict settlers to Australia asked the aboriginals what was the name of the odd animal with the pouch and heard "kangaroo," it actually meant "I don't understand what you're saying." show less

A delightful, erudite and informative read, even though I happened to spend a whole term studying the history of the English language before. It discusses English of the British Isles with a special place for Welsh and Scottish varieties, of America, Wild West, India, West Indies and Australia. A wonderful book to be read many times, with the following conclusion:
‘An adventure should have an ending but there is no conclusion to the astounding and moving journey of the English language, from its small spring to rivers of thought and poetry and science, into oceans of religions and politics, industry and finance and technology, those oceans swept by storms that poured English on to the willing and unwilling alike. It is a language that show more other languages take on, bend, adapt and grow from, just as English itself from its slow fierce forging in these islands has taken on and been tested by and absorbed many languages. Still it grows.’ show less