Melvyn
Bragg subtitles The Adventure Of English with the intriguing phrase “The
Biography of a Language”. He thus implies that the language, specifically
English, has a life of its own, setting himself the task of creating both an
adventure and a narrative that will convince the reader that the language has
both an identity and, to some extent, a personality that identifies an
individuality. He succeeds on all counts.
The
story starts of course with a birth and then unfolds chronologically throughout
the first half of the book, before diverging to examine the different and often
parallel geographical manifestations of English in the modern world. These have
happened since the dawn of Empire and, as a consequence of their disparate
elements and different paths of development, perhaps suggest that English is
more of a family than an individual. Amazingly, Melvyn Bragg goes through
eleven chapters before considering Shakespeare. The book is thus quite careful
in its examination of the origins of the language and its early development.
Later on there are three chapters on the language in the United States, one each on
Australia, India and the West Indies. We come across a little, perhaps not enough,
Singlish from Singapore, and Africa is largely ignored, except for the
influence of African languages on English in the Americas.
Melvyn
Bragg also devotes considerable time to the discussion of accent,
pronunciation, dialect and correctness. Obviously each of these areas could
have been a lifetime’s work, let alone a book in itself, but Melvyn Bragg
succeeds at least in defining the territory and correctly identifying the parts
played by snobbishness and social class in the application of labels such as
coarse, standard or even correct.
A
decade and a half ago, I myself managed to astound an American colleague who,
having prejudged the length of my “a” asked me to pronounce the word b-a-t-h.
He was a New Yorker and was more than surprised when I intoned a sound that
rhymed with American math. He had expected, of course, a sound like “barth”.
Melvyn Bragg identifies this short “a” with an older version of English, one
that predated the strong French influence of the eighteenth century that
produced the long “a”, amongst other things, especially amongst the middle
classes of southern England. The American settlers, of course, left Britain
before this new-fangled foreign influence arrived, so they retained their short
“a”, which is of course the correct version. This serves to remind us that whatever
we speak in our daily lives and wherever we live, we are perhaps born into a
language and the one we adopt as infants becomes part of our very identity.
This
is just one example of many of interest that appear in The Adventure Of
English. Once assembled, these quirks of history really do allow the language
to create its own identity. It is thus portrayed as a living, developing
entity, constantly changing its appearance whilst many try to hold it fixed.
The
Adventure Of English by Melvyn Bragg is in no way a comprehensive look at the
language, its development and its contemporary manifestations. But is does
achieve admirably what it intends to do at the start, which is to create an
adventure and present an as yet incomplete biography.
No comments:
Post a Comment