The Adventure of English
by Melvyn Bragg
(London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2003)
English, like a living organism, was seeded in this country a little over fifteen hundred years ago.
Page ix.
The giving of names could be called the most democratic communal effort in our history.
Page x.
As far as England is concerned, the language that became English arrived in the fifth century with Germanic warrior tribes from across the sea.
Page 1.
This ability to plant itself deep in foreign territory became another powerful characteristic of the language.
Page 2.
Almost all of the hundred most common words in our language worldwide, wherever it is spoken, come from Old English.
Page 7.
The runic alphabet (called the ‘futhorc’ named after the first letters of the runic alphabet, just as our ‘alphabet’ is form the first letters of the Greek alphabet) was made up of symbols formed mainly of straight lines, so that the letters could be carved into stone or wood or bone.
Page 10.
To lose any language is to lose a unique way of knowing life.
Page 11.
Writing helps us fully to see what it is to be more completely human. ‘The word was made flesh and dwelt among us’ can apply to the alphabet as well as to Christ. The alphabet created and unleashed a new world.
Page 11.
Loyalty and strength could come through an appeal to a shared language.
Page 20.
Trade refined the language and made it more flexible.
Page 21.
In its later phases, English became a language with an immense capacity to absorb others, to convert others, certainly to take on board other languages without yielding the ground on its own basic vocabulary and meanings.
Page 21.
Clarity for commerce may have been the chief driving force.
Page 24.
At the time it was widely believed that the world was about to end - a thousand years after either Christ’
Page 32.
The nationality of the rulers changed. The language and those who commanded the language remained, entrenched now in a power through words given them by Alfred.
Page 32.
Though some historians now regard the survival of English as inevitable, it seemed very unlikely at the time.
Page 33.
There are two volumes of the Domesday Book (one called Little Domesday, the return from East Anglia) and they show how complete the Norman takeover of English land was an dhow widespread their influence and their language.
Page 39.
The Domesday Book was written in Latin. This was to emphasize its legal authority in a way English was now thought incapable of doing.
Page 39.
Hindsight is the easy way to mop up the mess which we call history: it is too often the refuge of the tidy-minded, making neat patterns when the dust has settled.
Page 40.
Harold, King Harold, would be the last English-speaking king, the last king to take his oath in English, for three hundred years.
Page 40.
Written English which had established itself so magnificently before the Conquest was being rapidly sidelined.
Page 41.
One way to destroy a personality is to cut out memory: one way to destroy a state is to cut out its history. Especially when that history comes out of the native language.
Page 42.
English after 1066 was still the language of the people.
Page 42.
If the grammar is changing, setting itself and meeting new challenges, if the internal engine of the language is still geared for change and adaptability in its own terms regardless of the new dominating tongue, that is good proof that a language is alive even if it is under siege.
Page 43.
The twelfth century saw the flourishing of the great Arthurian Romance poet Chretien de Troyes and the poetess of magical fables Marie de France.
Page 46.
The French culture of Henry and Eleanor has not eliminated the common tongue.
Page 50.
While the English-speaking peasants lived in small, often one-roomed mud and wattle cottages, or huts, their French-speaking masters lived in high stone castles.
Page 51.
French influence on English in terms of vocabulary was unmatched by any other language.
Page 52.
In the middle of the thirteenth century, the wool trade made parts of England rich. Great churches were built even in modest villages.
Page 54.
It was not a language of advancement, a language of power, a language of hard commerce or even of educated conversation.
Page 55.
When the barons rebelled against King John and presented their demands in the most famous document in our history, Magna Carta, they had it drawn up in Latin. Latin was the language of God, the language of deep tradition, the common language of the western civilised world, a sacred language.
Page 56.
Because French was at that time the international language of trade, it acted as a conduit, sometimes via Latin, for words from the markets of the East.
Page 58.
A word, at its simplest, is a window.
Page 58.
The French might have expected to displace the English. It did not and perhaps the chief reason for that is that people saw the possibilities of increasing clarity of thought, accuracy of expression by refining meaning between two words supposed to be the same.
Page 59.
Shades of meaning representing shades of thought, were massively absorbed into our language and out imagination at that time.
Page 59.
Rather than replace English, French was being brought into service to help enrich and equip it for the role it was on its way to reassuming.
Page 60.
As the thirteenth century gave way to the fourteenth, English was becoming the one language out of the three that everyone in the country could be counted on to know.
Page 60.
The Bestiary, in which birds and animals were portrayed and their behaviour made the basis of lessons in Christian morality, was a particular medieval form. It was believed that the animal and plant worlds were symbolic of religious truths and that ‘the creatures of this sensible world signify the invisible things of God’.
Page 61.
Though the Black Death was a catastrophe, it set in train a series of social upheavals which would speed the English language along the road to full restoration as the recognised language of the natives.
Page 63.
The Black Death killed a disproportionate number of the clergy, thus reducing the grip of Latin all over the land.
Page 63.
As a result the Latin-speaking clergy was much reduced, in some parts of the country by almost a half. Many of their replacements were laymen, sometimes barely literate, whose only language was English.
Page 63.
The price of property fell. Many peasants, artisans, or what might be called working-class people discovered plague-emptied farms and superior houses which they occupied.
Page 64.
As far as we know, Richard II is the first recorded example of a monarch using only English since the Conquest.
Page 64.
It is a life which covered much of the important waterfront of the time and that knowingness, that lived experience is one of the factors which gives The Canterbury Tales its historical strength.
Page 71.
Chaucer’s Knight is the first of many characters who defined what we thought or wanted to believe one aspect of being English was.
Page 73.
What Chaucer did most brilliantly was to choose and tailor his language to suit every story and its teller. … He proved that the re-formed English was fit for great literature.
Page 74.
Chaucer’s reputation in France was high in his own lifetime.
Page 75.
As language became one of the markers of class, all non-London dialects began to feel they were condescended to.
Page 77.
Chaucer planted English deeply in the country which bore its name, with a brilliance and confidence that meant that there was no looking back: Confidence in England and English was growing.
Page 77.
The Bible was in Latin - a language wholly inaccessible to the fast majority, and Bibles were few. The justification was that this was the word of God and to know God was a blessing and a richness beyond all understanding. The priest, it was argued, being ordained a true man of God, would avoid sinful misinterpretation and heresy.
Page 81.
If you wanted to communicate with God in English, you might be lucky with an idealistic local priest who would preach a sermon on a biblical text - but his starting point and his finishing point would be in Latin.
Page 81.
The whole intention was to impress and to subdue and not to enlighten.
Page 82.
The priest stood not as a guide to the Bible but as its guardian and as a guardian against common believers. They would not be allowed to enter into the Book.
Page 83.
A full Bible in English was unauthorised by the Church and potentially heretical, even seditious, with all the savage penalties including death which such crimes against the one true Church exacted.
Page 85.
New words are new worlds. You call them up and if they are strong enough, they keep in step with change and along the way describe more and more, provide new insights, evolve on the tongue and on the page.
Page 87.
In the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, English was proving its worth as a language of protest against central authority.
Page 90.
For reasons sincere and cynical, Latin was held to be the language of the Holy Book and ever more must be kept inviolate. Wycliffe had threatened the very voice of the Universal Church of the One Invisible God. It is a terrible example of the power in language.
Page 92.
The obstinacy of the English dialects is as impressive as the capacity of English to standardise, to absorb and to spread around the world.
Page 96.
Because England had used Latin traditionally and French for over three hundred years as the written languages, there had never been any need to agree on a common linguistic standard for its native tongue or even how to spell particular words.
Page 97.
English was not only the language of state but the written and preferred language of the class of people most expected to be the state’s closest supporters.
Page 99.
Just because the spelling was being regularised did not always mean that it was being simplified or made to follow rules of common sense.
Pages 99-100.
The printing press reinforced the importance of a common written language.
Page 103.
Any assault on the Latin Bible was an assault on the spirit, meaning and purpose of the Church.
Page 103.
Above all, and key, the Church had unique access to God and so to eternal life. Only through the Roman Catholic Church could anyone contact God and have any chance of resurrection.
Page 106.
The battle over language became outright rebellion against the Roman Catholic Church as the gatekeeper to God, the claim to be His sole representative on earth, whose earthly laws all Christians must obey every bit as much as they obeyed the laws of heaven.
Page 106.
The rebellion was led by deeply religious men and women. They too believed in the virgin birth, in the divinity of Christ, above all in the Resurrection. They were light years away form atheism or even agnosticism. They wanted the souls of the people to be saved but not through orders and sermons handed down from a central Latinate control in Rome for whose authority they found no evidence in the Bible.
Page 106.
It is impossible to over-praise the quality of Tyndale’s writing. Its rhythmical beauty, its simplicity of phrase, its crystal clarity have penetrated deep into the bedrock of English today wherever it is spoken.
Page 109.
In 1537, the Matthew Bible - an amalgam of Coverdale’s and Tyndale’s - was allowed to be printed in England. In 1539 we have the Great Bible - the official version.
Page 112.
After centuries of suppression, the walls came tumbling down and three Bibles were approved and published inside six years. And it went on: the Geneva Bible in 1560, the first in Roman type; the Bishops’ Bible in 1568, a revised version of the Great Bible; and the Douai-Rheims Bible of 1609-10.
Page 112.
It was a principle of Protestantism that the Bible be available to everyone.
Page 112.
The English Bible has often been called a preacher’s bible. Written to be spoken, written to spread the word in the language of the land, a cause for which Wycliffe and Tyndale and hundreds of other English Christians had lived and died.
Page 114.
English at last had God on its side. The language was authorised by the Almighty Himself.
Page 115.
After 1588, the naval effectiveness of the comparatively small island grew even stronger and opened up the world to trade. This brought a massive injection into the language. As England imported a huge cargo of goods, English imported a huge cargo of vocabulary.
Page 117.
At the time of the Spanish Armada, England was well behind other European powers in the reach of its colonial conquests and English inevitably lagged badly in the influence it exerted abroad.
Page117.
On a very much smaller scale during the sixteenth century, English had begun to spread more widely to parts of Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Yet even in its more limited scope, English showed its voracity for new words and its power to enfold them almost instantly into the mother language.
Page 118.
The language of the Renaissance bristled with imported words. … Off they went, English ships all over the world, trading in goods, looting language.
Page 119.
It was a time when English artists, scholars and aristocrats began to explore Europe. Their preferred destination was Italy, the dominating culture of the time.
Page 119.
The Renaissance was a time when scholarship, the arts and intellectual pursuits in many areas were re-energised basically by the rediscovery of the classical past, much of it transferred to western Europe by Arabic translations and scholars.
Pages 121-122.
To give something a Greek or Latin name gave it an exclusivity, made it something of a cult, meant that you had to have at least the smattering of a superior education to be on terms with it, took it away from the common tongue, as had happened in the Church.
Page 123.
No one could control the appetites of the English language. By the end of the sixteenth century, after more than fifty years of influx and controversy, the building blocks had been laid to create a language that we can still understand today and that we call Modern English. It is shot through with Latinate words.
Page 127.
England had to wait until the dawn of the seventeenth century, 1604, to get its own dictionary. … In many ways a dictionary is particularly well suited to the English language, a language that has absorbed so many others.
Page 129.
The English population was growing, and growing more educated. One estimate is that by 1600, half of the three and a half million population - at least in towns and cities - had some minimal education in reading and writing. Their minds were hungry, wanting to be fed.
Page 130.
To write in your own language, to play with it and mould it - these all became aims to which the educated wished to aspire.
Page 131.
Queen Elizabeth I has a fair claim to be the best educated monarch ever to sit on the throne of England. Apart from her mastery of rhetoric - demonstrated at Tilbury - she spoke six languages and translated French and Latin texts. Furthermore, she enjoyed writing poetry.
Page 132.
Class was discovering a fertile home in speech differences. But by this time to be at the top table was not to speak Latin or French but English of a particular variety
Page 136.
It has never been a clever bet to disregard the potential energy in what is so very popular.
Page 137.
The Renaissance saw the beginning of the great writing rift, the spitting away of literature from everyday speech.
Page 138.
Because the theatres of the time had no scenery and barely any props, language was the means of choice on the state to captivate the audience.
Pages 139-140.
He is not only thought to be the greatest writer the world has seen but the most written-about writer the world has ever known.
Page 141.
Over four hundred years ago, Shakespeare had a vocabulary of at least twenty-one thousand different words: some have estimated that with the combination of words, this could have reached thirty thousand. Comparisons are entertaining: the King James Bible of 1611 used about ten thousand different words. The average educated man today, more than four hundred years on from Shakespeare with the advantage of the hundreds of thousands of new words that have come in since this time, has a working vocabulary of less than half that of Shakespeare. His personal vocabulary was as but as entire languages.
Pages 144-145.
Words can stand for ideas. Words are both an expression of and a report on the human condition.
Page 146.
Shakespeare’s accent would have sounded rather like some current regional accents as used today by older speakers.
Page 149.
He would have used a rolled ‘r’ in words like ‘turn’ and ‘heard’. ‘Right’ and ‘time’ would be ‘roight’ and ‘toime’.
Page 149.
The Mayflower families and those who followed them were, on the whole, people of above-average literacy, moral certainty, religious passion and, possibly, among the most stout-hearted.
Page 154.
The Mayflower group were religious separatists with a powerful and sustaining belief in the word of God. The Bible in English was the foundation of their faith and their works. They wished to create a new community in which they could worship as freely as they wanted.
Page 155.
In terms of the European ‘competition’, the English Protestants were to score heavily because they came primarily not to plunder, which had been the gleeful purpose of the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French and the Dutch and the English before them, nor even to trade; but to settle and build a new world in accordance with God’s law and above all following God’s word. They came to stay.
Page 156.
It could be argued that what is really remarkable is not that Indian words came into the English vocabulary - what could be more natural or necessary? - but that so few of them were admitted. … In America, faced with hundreds of languages, English took on words only in handfuls.
Pages 159-160.
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.
Page 165.
Correct spelling came to be seen as the standard of a good education throughout America and the famous American spelling bee was born and became part of the social and self-improvement life of every town and village in the land.
Page 169.
Language leaps out of mouths regardless of class, sex, age, or education: it sees something that needs to be said or saved in a word and it pounces.
Page 175.
The word ‘immigrant’ is an American invention. Migration of people had occurred in the Old World but in the New it was the single common defining experience.
Page 176.
It took some time for scholars to realise and then acknowledge that black speech was not inept white speech but a tributary language of its own which could and did in time enlarge the whole language.
Page 191.
Generally black speech did not really begin to influence white speech until the great nineteenth-century migrations to northern industrial cities like Chicago.
Page 192.
For the African peoples captured and shipped over to America, the English Bible was full of hopes of peace, and above all promises of freedom.
Page 194.
In the 1880s and 1890s, segregated education was brought in in the south and the laws prompted a great black migration to the industrial cities of the north.
Page 196.
English, like water, will find its own level. The language itself through usage and natural selection will see that what is survivable will survive. Those who attack words can hasten the departure of the weak and useless and only hammer into further obstinate strength the words which we all somehow agree have come to stay.
Page 218.
The attempt to fix the sound of the language became an obsession.
Page 220.
The relationship between sound and spelling in English is a nightmare. Our writing system is not phonetic to the point of being anti-phonetic.
Page 220.
The pronunciation of English provided its speakers with a matchless gamut of prejudices and added greatly to the spleen and gaiety of the nation.
Page 223.
One of Wordsworth’s contributions to the adventure of English is that, in the preface to his Lyrical Ballads in 1798, he stressed that poetry could be written in ‘the language really used by men’ and did not need a special poetic diction or an elaborate vocabulary or any other ‘fine clothes’ to express deep feelings.
Page 227.
Polite society was organised around a way of talking. If you could not talk that talk you risked ridicule.
Page 229.
Morality censored language.
Page 232.
Correcting English is one of our great indoor sports.
Page 234.
The Industrial Revolution both exploited and educated the working mases; it changed the possibilities of life.
Page 237.
It has been estimated that between 1750 and 1900 half the world’s published papers on mechanical, industrial and scientific advances were written and distributed in English.
Pages 240-241.
In the first part of the nineteenth century these small islands had become the world’s leading trading and industrial nation, ‘the workshop of the world’, and the language, built over centuries, supple in all the arts of absorbing, stealing, invention and restructuring, had matched the economic explosion. The expanded English language, a product of the Industrial Revolution, became an engine which drove it forward.
Page 241.
A lingering myth of English is that the rural poor and the largely rural aristocracy were brothers and sisters under the skin.
Page 246.
Dickens’ mass of characters in their very number and variety express the massing of industry, population, achievement and invention in the nineteenth century.
Page 247.
As the Victorian age hit its stride and fired on all cylinders including the censorious, public language, mainly innuendo and slang, became an enjoyably risky way to tweak noses.
Page 248.
Accent and language became a game, sometimes cruel, of fine distinctions which seemed intended to put everyone in his or her place.
Page 248.
In India the English had to learn and obey a rigid power system whose stratifications of status made Elizabethan and Jacobean England look like beginners.
Page 251.
It seems to be agreed that the creole spoken in Jamaica is the deepest in the Caribbean, partly because of the sheer numbers of Africans transported there and partly because a good number of them escaped to the hills and established language groups of their own early on.
Page 272.
It was not until about a century after the first British had settled that the word ‘Aboriginal’ came into use. At first those found living in the new continent were called Native Australians. ‘Australian’ derives from the Latin adjective for ‘southern’. ‘Aboriginal’ is a Latin term meaning ‘from the beginning’: the Romans used it to name the peoples they displaced. As the word ‘Aboriginal’ came into use for the natives, so the word ‘Australian’ was appropriated by the settlers.
Pages 277-278.
About a hundred and fifty thousand prisoners were taken halfway around the world in the eighty years of transportation.
Page 278.
Some English dialects travelled well. Those who came to Australia, just as those who went west, were largely from classes to whom a dialect was standard.
Page 279.
As with many dialects, creoles, and non-standard versions of English, what is condemned by the establishment is often held on to with pride and affection in part because it is one in the eye for Proper Speakers. It is a language of Outsiders who are confident enough to set themselves up against the Insiders.
Page 281.
It is often curious what great men are remembered for.
Page 287.
English is astounding in describing and enlarging many areas of our external and internal experiences; these also include swearing and blasphemy, obscenities, vile insults and racism.
Page 287.
Racism has to make other groups inferior. Racial denigration is always a demonstration of power, an attempt at total control, the use of language to stave off fears, reinforcing ignorance with prejudice.
Page 288.
One of the characteristics of language is that no word is safe. No word is wholly clean.
Page 289.
For all their extraordinary subtleties, in the end words express current feelings, passions, sensations often out of control of correct vocabulary.
Page 290.
A language becomes global because of the power which supports it … . Latin became an ‘international’ language thought he Romans (like the British) were b y no means as numerous as those in their empire: they were, however, more powerful. Their army, our navy. … There is an analogy between British English (Roman) and American English (the Roman Catholic church).
Page 291.
The spread of English … comes because having achieved power through the sword and sea power, it retained it through trade.
Page 292.
Language follows trade which follows the flag and the seeding of English in America is the key to its current success and may well be a prime determinant in modern history.
Page 292.
We as a species must have begun speaking one language. There are linguists who believe that one basic breeding language will eventually be discovered behind every language we now speak.
Page 297.
A characteristic of English throughout is the ease with which it can borrow or steal words from other languages.
Page 301.
The Americans are more polite about our English than we are about theirs.
Page 302.
From the mid twentieth century the English language flooded all over the world until by the year 2000 no one was in any way surprised that a Polish-speaking Pope, the head of a Latin-speaking Vatican, on his arrival in a Hebrew-speaking state, should say in English: ‘May this be God’s gift to the land that He chose as His own - Shalom.’
Page 304.
Many from different languages now speak to each other in English rather than in either one of their own languages.
Page 305.
The more English spreads, the more it diversifies, the more it could tend towards fragmentation. … so may the future of English be not as single language but as the parent of a family of languages.
Pages 308-309.
There are scholars who believe that the future of English will no longer even be shaped by its founding family but by L2 speakers - those who vastly outnumber the ‘core’ speakers - for whom English is a second language.
Page 309.
English it seems has to name and so claim everything in the world that comes on its radar.
Page 311.