- Bragg, Melvyn.
The Adventure of English.
London: Sceptre, 2003.
ISBN 0-340-82993-1.
-
How did a language spoken by 150,000 or so Germanic warriors who
invaded the British Isles in the fifth century A.D.
become the closest thing so far to a global language, dominating the
worlds of science and commerce which so define the modern age?
Melvyn Bragg, who earlier produced a television series (which I
haven't seen) with the same name for the British ITV network
follows the same outline in this history of English. The tremendous
contingency in the evolution of a language is much to be seen
here: had Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson, or William Tyndale (who first
translated the Bible into English and paid with his life for
having done so) died in infancy, how would we speak today, and
in what culture would we live? The assembly of the enormous vocabulary of
English by devouring words from dozens of other languages is well
documented, as well as the differentiation of British English into
distinct American, Caribbean, Australian, South African, Indian, and
other variants which enrich the mother tongue with both vocabulary
and grammar. Fair dinkum, innit man?
As English has grown by accretion, it has also cast out a multitude of words
into the “Obs.” bin of the
OED, many in the “Inkhorn Controversy”
in the 16th century. What a loss! The more words, the richer the language,
and I hereby urge we reinstate “abstergify”, last cited in
the OED in 1612, defined as the verb “To cleanse”. I propose this
word to mean “to clean up, ęsthetically, without any change in function”.
For example, “I spent all day abstergifying the configuration files for
the Web server”.
The mystery of why such an ill-structured language with an almost
anti-phonetic spelling should have become so widespread is discussed
here only on the margin, often in apologetic terms invoking the guilt of
slavery and colonialism. (But speakers of other languages pioneered
these institutions, so why didn't they triumph?) Bragg suggests, almost
in passing, what I think is very significant. The very irregularity of
English permits it to assimilate the vocabulary of every language it
encounters. In Greek, Latin, Spanish, or French, there are rules about
the form of verbs and the endings of nouns and agreement of adjectives
which cannot accommodate words from fundamentally different languages.
But in English, there are no rules whatsoever—bring your own vocabulary—there's
room for everybody and every word. Come on in, it's great—the more the
better!
A U.S edition is now
available, but as of this date only in hardcover.
February 2005 