Book 34: The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg

As a former linguistics student, I still have a lasting love of languages.  English, I think, is one of the most interesting languages, though it's difficult to see sometimes, as we're all native speakers here in the U.S.  But even here, people are mystified by the strangeness of the language.  People ask themselves, why do we pronounce this set of letters one way in this word, but in another word it's pronounced differently.  Well, a lot of the inconsistency and seeming randomness comes from the strange and turbulent history of English.  This book traces that history in a novel fashion, that of a biography of the language itself.  I'm unsure how successful this approach will be, but I couldn't resist the title when I first heard of it.  At 299 pages, it shouldn't be too hard to finish at around 43 pages per day.

REVIEW:  This book definitely delivered what I expected of it.  The author, Bragg, traces the history of the language with each chapter outlining one significant stage in the evolution of English.  He shows Alfred the Great, defeating the Danes and unifying England, the revolt against the Church and Latin by William Tyndale and his English Bible, the rise of English literature with Chaucer and Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson writing his dictionary but, overall, his main character is the language itself.  There were multiple points where English could have simply gone extinct.  When the Danes invaded England they nearly wiped out the English speaking natives, when the Normans invaded they imposed their French language on the land, but it was the "deep obstinacy" and "astonishing flexibility" that enabled the language to survive and eventually thrive.

It is interesting to see the course of a language all at once.  And it's difficult to think of another language with a similar history to English.  Beginning with the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England, who were themselves invaded by the Vikings and Normans, then the consolidation of British English and then outward to America, India, Australia, the West Indies and beyond.  Now, some 1,500 years later the language is spoken by some 1 billion people, worldwide and is established as the modern Lingua Franca.  And it is the amazing ability of English to adapt, to repair and reinvent itself that seems to have made it possible.

As a linguist, I've always been fascinated with our aberrant language and the reasons that it makes so little sense to non-speakers and learning speakers.  We follow grammatical rules that we hardly understand; We have words that are pronounced nothing like their spelling; We have multiple sets of rules for conjugating verbs, etc.  It is illuminating to see the tumultuous history of the language, not to see that there really is an underlying logic to these things, but to see that there are good reasons that it makes so little sense.  The book did get a little dry in places, after all, it is historical linguistics in essence, but Bragg does a commendable job of making it all make sense as a single narrative.

7 out of 10