Language Adventure Stories…

Recently I’ve been on a bit of a thing about the history of the English Language….it’s always been a topic I’ve found interesting, and recently I came across a couple of books that fed that interest quite satisfyingly..

The first is called “Alphabeta” by John Man.

This is not a book about language as such, but as the title suggests, alphabets. Our alphabet specifically and it’s origins.
It’s told in a very entertaining way, and is a very good read considering the topic alone would be enough to put most people off from the start.
It covers thousands of years of history, from Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, through to the founding of the Roman Empire, and to the modern day, and in telling the story of the alphabet, it manages to also impart quite a lot of ancient and classical history as it goes.
It’s full of the little stories told by fragments of writing found carved on hillsides, or found scratched on discarded pieces of pottery, and all of them give fascinating insights into the lives of those who wrote them.

Next is The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language, by Melvyn Bragg.
I came across this one in an article I read in The Age whilst I was down in Melbourne.
It tells the story of the English language, from its beginnings as the language of the invading Frisians (I’ve probably spelt that wrong), through it’s many near death experiences, and it’s way of overcoming and absorbing anything that was thrown at it. The book is filled with quotes from literature of every age of English literacy, from Beowulf, to Chaucer, to Shakespear, to Jane Austen, Mark Twain and Banjo Patterson finally through to a very disturbing passage of “Text English” (no l33t speak though, but that’s probably a good thing…TXT is bad enough).
There’s a modest but still interesting chapter covering Australia, and its influence on the language too. In fact the author seems to be rather taken with it and finishes the chapter with –

“Through it’s soaps, its athletes and its writers, Australians now sound the world over like a people unself-consciously proud and totally confident in the way they talk. Australian English sounds young, it has sap in it, there’s a kick in the lines…”

“What it has done, in my view, and over the last two generations with a huge surge of energy, is to throw off the shackles of the old country while holding hard to the core of the language it gave them and turning it Australia’s way.”

The thing that I found most interesting was the way concept of English as a layered language: That each time it absorbed another wave of words from another language, they didn’t so much change the language, as add to it, and refine it – giving more subtle distinctions and meanings. So that you can strip away the layers, and go right back to using almost nothing but words directly descended from the Old English and still be comprehensible.
Bragg gives an example in the beginning of the book – Churchill’s famous speech:

“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

Of which he says that “surrender” is the only word that does not come from Old English.

Of the two books, I think that Alphabeta was actually a better read…it did an absolutely brilliant job of turning a potentially dull topic into something really worth reading.
The Adventure of English was very good too, but I felt that most of that feeling came from the fact that I was a lot more interested in the subject matter itself than I was with Alphabeta – so the writing didn’t have to make up for anything. There were a few patches where I felt that Bragg was repeating himself a bit, or overdoing the drama a little, but not so much that it became annoying.

So in summary, they’re both two books I would highly recommend to anyone interested in the history of our language.
On top of that, I would also recommend Alphabeta to anyone interested in the ancient history of the Mediterranean region, as it’s suprising just how much interesting information is crammed into such a little book.