ELTWeekly Issue#10, Book of the week: The Adventure of English Language

The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language 

By Melvyn Bragg

Book Details

From Publishers Weekly

This compelling and charmingly personal companion to an eight-part television documentary (scheduled for the fall) makes for an idiosyncratic rival to PBS’s bestselling blockbuster The Story of English, by Robert McCrum et al. Titling a history of the evolution and expansion of a language an “adventure” presupposes a hero, with such obvious choices as Alfred the Great, for defeating the Danes; Chaucer, for his Canterbury Tales; Shakespeare, for his poetic inventiveness; or Samuel Johnson, for his groundbreaking dictionary. Bragg, a British TV and radio personality and novelist (The Soldier’s Return), gives all their contributions their due, but English itself, with its “deep obstinacy” and “astonishing flexibility,” emerges as his favorite character. Bragg’s enthusiasm for his subject-hero, whether the Old English of Beowulf or the new “Text English” of the Internet, makes up for his shortcomings as a linguist: his sources, unfootnoted, are at times at variance with the OED or Webster’s Third. For instance, Bragg furnishes only one putative origin for the disputed “real McCoy.” Moreover “candy” does not seem to have Anglo-Indian origins (it’s from the Arabic “qandi”), and the first recorded use of “vast” is not from Shakespeare (the OED cites Archbishop Edwin Sandys). Nevertheless, this “biography” succeeds in its broad, sweeping narrative, carrying the reader from the origins of Anglo-Saxon through the Viking and Norman invasions to the consolidation of “British” English and outward to America, Australia, India, the West Indies and beyond. After some 1,500 years, with one billion speakers now worldwide, according to Bragg, the English language has displayed an amazing ability to repair and reinvent itself, as Bragg ably shows. 32 pages of color illus. 
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.    

From Booklist

Why do Americans say fall when the British say autumn? How was English altered by the Black Death? What is Singlish and how has it evolved? Novelist Bragg explores these and other questions in his look at the English language’s long march from obscure Sanskrit origins to a global lingua franca. Along the way, he examines the roles played by the Viking invasions, the Norman Conquest, the Tyndale Bible, the writings of Chaucer and Shakespeare, and the Industrial Revolution. He also traces English’s journey across the globe in the wake of British imperialism, following it to America, India, Australia, and elsewhere. Several chapters are devoted to American English and how it has been transformed by influences as diverse as the journals of Lewis and Clark and the African dialects that were transported with the slaves. Looking ahead, the book considers how standard language will be shaped by “other Englishes” employed by those for whom English is a second tongue. It is Bragg’s contention that the prevalence of English can be explained in part by such inherent virtues as “astonishing precision and flexibility,” and whether one agrees with him or not, he is the ideal tour guide here, both entertaining and informative. Mary Ellen Quinn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved –This text refers to the Hardcover edition. 

T. Hooper (Osaka, Japan)

This easy to read volume discusses the history and development of the English language. It covers the period from the invasion of the Angles and Saxons up to modern times. There were a few close calls in the history of English. We could be speaking Danish or French, if history had turned out differently. What would the world be like then?    

Each chapter covers a different era of English history and towards the end of the book, American and International English history. It breaks down how certain important events influenced the development of the English language. It also provides some samples of word origins, and how grammar has gradually changed over the centuries. I think that anyone who is interested in English or history, and especially anyone who is interested in both, should pick this up.

Gordon C. Duus (Glen Ridge, NJ USA)

In this book Melvyn Bragg presents, in an easy to read style, the story of the evolution of the English language. Starting with the origins of Old English in the fifth century, he describes the impact on the language of the Viking invasion of England in the ninth century, the enormous effect of the victory of the french-speaking Normans over the Anglo-Saxons at the Battle of Hastings, the breakthrough of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, how the publication of various bibles spread English to the households of Britain, and Shakespeare’s preeminent impact on the development of the language. The focus then shifts to the influence on English of colonial America, the Wild West, African Americans, the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean and Australia. His central thesis is that English is uniquely adaptive, absorbing other languages with which it comes into contact, thereby growing and becoming richer and more expressive.    

This book is designed to accompany a PBS series to debut in 2006. It is aimed at the typical PBS viewer. The critical reviews on this site, which scold the author for not being more rigorous or scholarly, often seem to miss this point. This is an excellent introduction to the origins of the English language.

Eric Williams (Wollongong, NSW, Australia)

If you love the beauty, subtlety and adaptability of English, this book will give you very many insights into how English has reached its current position, as probably the world’s pre-eminent language. At no stage a ‘dry’ text book, Bragg’s book moves at the speed of light and with all the twists and turns of a Michael Connelly crime novel. This is the history of a people as well as its language. Of how it emerged from three hundred years of French rule during which French and Latin were the only ‘recognised’ written lnaguages. And how from these languages it absorbed adapted, enriched and broadened English so it could communicate on an ever wider range of issues. Touches on the Roman Catholic Church in England and, shamefully, how it insisted on all bibles being in Latin and therefore having to be mediated by the ‘chosen’ ones the bishops and priests who where then able to misuse their power of being, effectively, the voice of God. I could not put down this book and would select it as a present for most of my friends. Buy it and experience the thrill of discovery which so many readers will find. I also saw the book presented in a 25 episode program on Australian TV, enjoyed it then, and was further delighted by the book.