The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language - Softcover

Bragg, Melvyn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1611450071 ISBN 13: 9781611450071

Publisher: Arcade, 2011

Synopsis

“Superb. . . . Inspiring.”—Newsday. “A captivating history.”--The Daily Telegraph. “A thorough and incredibly enjoyable trip down a linguistic memory lane.”—Bloomsbury Review

Here is the riveting story of the English language, from its humble beginnings as a regional dialect to its current preeminence as the one global language, spoken by more than two billion people worldwide. In this groundbreaking book, Melvyn Bragg shows how English conquered the world. It is a magnificent adventure, full of jealousy, intrigue, and war—against a hoard of invaders, all armed with their own conquering languages, which bit by bit, the speakers of English absorbed and made their own.

Along the way, its colorful story takes in a host of remarkable people, places, and events: the Norman invasion of England in 1066; the arrival of The Canterbury Tales and a “coarse” playwright named William Shakespeare, who added 2,000 words to the language; the songs of slaves; the words of Davy Crockett; and the Lewis and Clark expedition, which led to hundreds of new words as the explorers discovered unknown flora and fauna.

The Adventure of English is an enthralling story not only of power, religion, and trade, but also of a people and how they changed the world.

About this title

About the Author:

Melvyn Bragg has written several works of non-fiction (as well as his bestselling novels) including Speak for England, an oral history of the twentieth century; Rich, a biography of Richard Burton; and On Giants’ Shoulders, a history of science based on his BBC radio series. He was born in 1939 and educated at Oxford where he read history. He is controller of Arts at LWT and presi- dent of the National Campaign for the Arts. In 1998 he was made a life peer. He lives in London and Cumbria.

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.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Arcade
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1611450071
• ISBN 13: 9781611450071
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336