Book review by Marion Boers. Reproduced from PEGboard, May 2004.
I was fortunate enough to receive for Christmas a copy of Melvyn Bragg's The Adventure of English. Subtitled "The biography of a language", I found it one of the most fascinating books I have ever read. As a born-and-bred English- speaker and a language practitioner to boot, I thought I had a pretty good idea of how English developed, but Mr Bragg's book showed me I had only the most superficial knowledge of this language that has billions of speakers the world over.
Mr Bragg chose the title of this book purposefully: he regards English's development over the centuries as an adventure. This is seen in its violent arrival on a small island in the wake of Roman occupation in the fifth century, the fact that it almost died under French domination but clawed its way back, its absorption of words from the myriad of languages with which it had close contact, and its growth from an unimportant dialect to a language that dominates the world stage.
Chronological start
Purists apparently maintain that English did not fully exist until the late ninth century, but there is no doubt that the language was developing over these years. The "word-hoard", as Mr Bragg calls it, is clearly founded on, and funded by, Old English. The vast majority of the 100 most common words in modern English come from Old English; there are three from Old Norse - they, their and them - and the first French-derived word - number - appears only in position 76.
Viking invasion
It was the common people who won the battle for English. After the Black Death had swept the country in the second half of the fourteenth century, it was the peasants who had survived who held the power through their labour and this saw a gradual reflection in other spheres. English was introduced in schools and in 1399 King Henry IV was crowned - "[i]n a great symbolic moment he made his speech not in the Latin language of state business, not in the French language of the royal household, but in what the official history, tellingly, calls 'His Mother Tongue'. English." He was the first king to have done so since the Norman Conquest and so English once again became a royal language and has not looked back since.
From here Mr Bragg takes us through the major influences on the development of English: Chaucer and his use of the language, the battle to bring religion and the Bible to the people in their own tongue, the establishment of English as the language of the state, efforts to standardise pronunciation and spelling, Shakespeare and his gift of new words to the language… He talks about the way English continued to absorb words from other languages and make them its own. The first English dictionary took shape - eight years ahead of the first Italian and 35 years before the first French dictionaries appeared, but 800 years after the first Arabic dictionary and nearly a thousand after the first one in Sanskrit! It appeared in 1604, produced by Robert Cawdry - The Table Alphabeticall. Mr Bragg examined the only surviving copy, in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and comments: "It is a small, slim volume, about the size of the palm of an average hand. It is a list of English words, mainly though by no means wholly, of Latinate origin, with a brief explanation of the meaning of each. […] There are only two thou- sand five hundred and forty-three words in this dictionary. It was a meagre word-hoard but a first attempt at a collection. You don't find everyday words here, like 'shoe', 'cold', 'food' or 'house', 'cow', 'wet', 'rain', 'dress', 'fish' or 'love'. More than anything, this little book was a recognition of the new status of the English language. As it declared on its first page, it was: 'full of Hard Unusuall English Wordes borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine or French &c.'."
Literature influenced the language and saw a division between ordinary and literary language. The struggle to determine the "right and proper" way to speak continued, with various dictionaries, lexicons and grammar books seeing the light of day.
In time, English continued its adventure around the world. Mr Bragg discusses how it moved to America, what influenced its development there and how it in turn influenced the language of its mother country. In the New World, too, English absorbed - Indian words, like racoon, skunk, squaw, moccasin and squash (the vegetable) - and coined new words to describe what it was experiencing - rattlesnake, ground-hog, warpaint - often adapting familiar words to new purposes. Here too the language had to battle the influence of other European languages - Spanish, French and Dutch. However, it triumphed: "What gave English…a stronger presence than the other European languages, French and Spanish in particular, came through the ploughshare. On the whole the Spanish had sent armies and priests and taken gold. The French sent fur trappers and looked for trade. The English came to settle and that finally ensured that it was the language of Tyndale and Shakespeare which would be heard in the mid-eighteenth century from the Atlantic coast to the Appalachian Mountains."
The adventure of English continued at an inner level with the gradual standardisation of the language - vocabulary, spelling, grammar and usage. This was not an orderly, organised process. There were many movements, each pulling its own way, convinced it was the best. The process was made more difficult by the fact that the language was not stagnant, enabling it to be pummelled into a particular form that it would then retain; it was constantly developing, evolving, metamorphosing, altered by myriad influences. The account of this period makes fascinating reading and brought about in me a better understanding of the problems faced by our indigenous African languages in their efforts to standardise.
The adventure is by no means over. The English language has been influenced by all the countries in which it settled during Britain's colonial period and today there are many varieties of English. As its early survival was determined by its ability to absorb and adapt, so it continues to do this and each new edition of an English dictionary includes new words from varieties of English around the world or combinations of old words adapted to new meanings. In addition, other languages are now absorbing from English: Russian uses futbol, klub, boykot, parlament, while the French talk of le weekend, un holiday, le jogging, le sandwich. The Internet and e-mail have had a huge influence on the way English is used, and the latest challenge to the language is the development of "Text English" - quite incomprehensible to many of the older generation, it will undoubtedly in time spill over from mobile phones into the written language.
What I have given you here just scratches the surface of the information Melvyn Bragg has included in The Adventure of English. The facts will amaze, fascinate and enthral you. The style is informal and easy to follow, despite the many turns the tale takes. The book is well written and put together; so often I find myself mentally editing as I read, but I came across hardly a sentence I would have wished to improve upon in this volume. Although the narrative does not follow a strictly chronological path, with deviations along alleys and side-paths along the way, you never feel lost or confused. The wealth of examples and illustrations given to underline the points made in the text is impressive and reveals the depth of research that has gone into compiling this book.
The Adventure of English has given me a new appreciation of my own language and I cannot recommend it highly enough to anyone with an interest in words.
[Bragg, Melvyn. 2003. The Adventure of English. Hodder & Stoughton: Great Britain. ISBN: 0 340 82991 5. Price: Approximately R250.]
This adventure is first treated chronologically. Mr Bragg traces the development of English through its major ups and downs over the first millennium or so. The adventure began in the fifth century, when the Romans abandoned England and it was invaded by Germanic warrior tribes. There were numbers of these tribes and it took time for one of the various dialects they spoke to be- come dominant. For a while they all existed alongside one another and the local Celtic, but over time a Frisian dialect gained ground. You wouldn't recognise it looking at a printed page, but even today the spoken language has an echo of familiarity that can be seen in the similarity of many words. As Mr Bragg comments: "When you look around the island of Terschelling in Friesland, you encounter words so close to English, again in the pronunciation as much as in the spelling, that any doubts fade: Frisian was a strong parent of English. 'Laam' (lamb), 'goes' (goose), 'bûter' (butter), 'brea' (bread), 'tsiis' (cheese) are in the shops; outdoors we have 'see' (sea), 'stoarm' (storm), 'boat' (boat), 'rein' (rain) and 'snie' (snow). Indoors there's 'miel' (meal) and 'sliepe' (sleep)."
The next stage in the adventure of English occurred in the late eighth century, when the Vikings invaded England and for three centuries threatened to supplant the growing language as they devastated the land. However, English survived, absorbing words and expressions from the invaders' languages, and Alfred the Great then used the English language to help meld his people back into one. Yet less than two hundred years later, the Norman conquest led once again to English going underground, absorbing elements of the dominant language (this time French) so that the people could communicate with the overlords, but maintaining the indigenous terms too. This resulted in many instances of pairs of words with the same meaning, one of English origin and the other of French: ask and demand, bit and morsel, room and chamber, wish and desire. Over time a subtle distinction often developed, leaving the words with slightly different emphases or usages. In addition, the language gathered words from various elements of the French way of life that were brought to England. It was the age of chivalry and many of the terms used in English in this regard are of French origin. Poetry started to be written under the influence of French forms. Various sports were brought to England along with their vocabulary, as was a system of government and its word-hoard. So English grew.