The Adventure of English

"These is real passion and lively erudition. Bragg at his best."
–The Times

TABLE OF CONTENTS . . .

01. The Common Tongue (38:42)
02. The Great Escape (39:57)
03. Conquest (19:55)
04. Holding On (28:40)
05. The Speech of Kings (34:57)
06. Chaucer (22:59)
07. God's English (29:39)
08. English and the Language of the State (23:04)
09. William Tyndale's Bible (24:03)
10. A Renaissance of Words (30:22)
11. Preparing the Ground (27:05)
12. Shakespeare's English (29:51)

13. "My America" (42:23)
14. Wild West Words (36:08)
15. Sold Down the River (28:10)
16. Mastering the Language (47:16)
17. The Proper Way to Talk (44:28)
18. Steam, Streets and Slang (32:24)
19. Indian Takeover (35:56)
20. The West Indies (24:05)
21. Advance Australia (26:06)
22. Warts and All (23:08)
23. All Over the World (23:08)
24. And Now . . . ? (16:38)

PART 1 05:49:20
PART 2 06:19:55
––––––
TOTAL 12:09:15

SUMMARY (from Front Flap) . . .

ENGLISH is the collective work of millions of people throughout the ages. It is democratic, ever-changing, and ingenious in its assimilation of other cultures. Today, English runs through the heart of world finance, medicine, and the internet, and it is understood by nearly two billion people across our world. And it seems set to go on. Yet it was very nearly wiped out in its early years.

In this thoroughly researched and ground=breaking book, Melvyn Bragg shows us the remarkable story of the English language, from its modest beginnings around A.D. 500 as a minor guttural Germanic dialect to its current position as a truly established global language. Along the way its colorful story takes us in a host of characters, locations, and events. Bragg brings the reader from the early Angle-Saxon tribes and Alfred the Great's stubborn resistance to the Danes, through the impact of the Norman invasion in 1066, and on to the arrival of such early literary masterpieces as "Beowulf" and Geoffrey Chaucer's bawdy "Canterbury Tales". With anecdotes only a novelist as accomplished as Bragg could capture, he tells the tales of Henry VIII's battles with the Church over bootleg Bibles, and the influence of the "coarse" playwright William Shakespeare, who alone contributed 2,000 new words to the language! With its spread to North America, English expanded with the songs of the Creole slaves, with the bold language of Davy Crockett, and with Lewis and Clark's expedition West, which coined hundreds of new terms as the explorers discovered hitherto unknown flora and fauna. From street slant and Dr. Johnson's dictionary to the role of English in India, Bragg leaves no stone unturned in his linguistic adventure.

Embracing elements of Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Hindi, and Gullah, this 1,500-year story covers a huge range of countries and peoples. "The Adventure of English" is an enthralling narrative not only of power, religion, and trade but also of people and how they have changed–and continue, day by day, to change, along with the extraordinary language that is English.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR (from Back Flap) . . .

MELVYN BRAGG has written several works of nonfiction and is the author of more than a dozen works of fiction, most recently "A Son of War" and "The Soldier's Return" (winner of the W. H. Smith Literary Aqard), also published by Arcade. In addition to writing, Lord Bragg has worked extensively in television and radio, and currently hosts a weekly program on British television called "The South Bank Show". In 1999, he was made a life peer. He lives in London and in Cumbria, in northwestern England.


ABOUT THE READER . . .

Robert Thomas Powell (born 1 June 1944 in Salford, Lancashire, England) is an English television and film actor, probably most famous for his title role in Jesus of Nazareth (1977) and as the fictional secret agent Richard Hannay. His distinctive voice has become well known in advertisements and documentaries. He is also known for his role as Mark Williams in BBC One medical drama, Holby City, and in the sitcom The Detectives alongside Jasper Carrott. On 29 October 2001 a state-of-the-art theatre named after him was opened at the University of Salford. He lives in London with his wife and 2 children.

SERIES - Melvyn Bragg travels through Britain to tell the story of how an insignificant German dialect which only arrived in the country in the fifth century evolved into a language which is now spoken and understood by more people than any other around the world. We trace English from its humble roots to its flowering in the writing of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. English is a global language. Every day in cities all around the world English is used in encounters between people of different countries. It is estimated that well over a thousand million people around the world speak or have a working understanding of English.This is its story. Its a story that really reads like an adventure of extraordinary survival invasion near extinction on more than one occasion and astonishing flexibility.


EP. 1: BIRTH OF A LANGUAGE - We are going to delve down to the roots of the language and deduce its history - and in that one sentence we hear words from four different sources delve from Dark Age Anglo-Saxon root from Danish invaders language from medieval French and deduce from Renaissance Latin four of the main - but not all - contributors to the richness of modern English.

EP. 2: ENGLISH GOES UNDERGROUND - We see how England was ruled for three centuries after the Conquest by a French-speaking king and court which used Latin for their official business. English was the language of the peasants a third-class tongue in its own country.

EP. 3: THE BATTLE FOR THE LANGUAGE OF THE BIBLE - This is the story of how English became the battleground in the fight for mens souls. The medieval church establishment kept the Bible in Latin while those possessing an English translation risked death. We see the impact of printing on the English language and how that fixed many of the anomalies of spelling and grammar that still make English so difficult for students to learn.

EP. 4: THIS EARTH, THIS REALM, THIS ENGLAND - Visiting the England of Queen Elizabeth the First shows how naval enterprise and foreign trade brought scores of new words into the language. Scholars were bringing new Latin terms into the language and there was a movement to stop this and keep English pure. Shakespeare combined the languages of the common people and the aristocracy to take English to new heights and to invent so many memorable words and phrases.

EP. 5: ENGLISH IN AMERICA - Following the English language on its journey overseas and tracing the story of how the language of the British Isles became a language for the world - the most widely spoken and understood vernacular in history. In America the language of a small group of seventeenth-century English immigrants only survived through the most unlikely coincidence but America was to develop a vigorous new vocabulary and to spread it around the globe.

EP. 6: SPEAKING PROPER - In eighteenth century Britain the first English dictionary was produced. A cohort of grammarians imposed new rules on the language. English continued to change and develop and the way people talked and the words they used became a badge of class and breeding and social death could result from dropping an h or using an inappropriate word.

EP. 7: THE LANGUAGE OF EMPIRE - Traveling to parts of the former British Empire we see how English met other cultures and other languages and was enriched by them. We travel to India to see how English began as the language of a few hundred pioneer merchants and became the force that unified an Empire of a thousand tongues. In the Caribbean Bragg discovers how a whole flock of new English dialects grew out of a mix of European and African influences and in Australia he traces how the slang of transported convicts grew in confidence and finally escaped from the shadow of Standard English.

EP 8: MANY TONGUES CALLED ENGLISH - The concluding episode looks at how in the 20th century the rise of America as an industrial power has made it the driving force behind the global spread of English. The English language is now used by more people than ever before in history. As cultural influences affect the way people use English and new words come into everyday use how does the Oxford English dictionary the greatest repository of the language keep up with developments.