The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg (Abridged)

(Book Review)

As you can see in the title to this post, this is the abridged version I'm reviewing.

Ordinarily I don't like abridged versions. (I'm enough of a stickler for details that I always wonder what I'm missing.) I do make certain expectations however, particularly if it's on audio book and I don't think that realistically I'll ever get around to reading the print version.

Of course you do never really know what you're missing. And my two main criticisms of this book (that it was very abrupt, and that most of it I already knew) could well be unique to the abridged version. In fact these types of criticism usually are. But I don't know. I can only review what I've listened to.

So, briefly, I'll deal with my two main criticisms. The first being the abrupt pace of the book.
This is set right from the opening sentences of the book, where without much of an introduction at all we're plunged right into the middle of the Germanic invasion of England, without any historical background at all as to what had been going on in England before the Anglos and the Saxons came, or why they came in the first place.

"So where did it begin? How did the billion tongued language of modern English first find it's voice? When and where did it begin to assume the form we know? How did it set out from such a remote and unlikely place on the map to forge it's way to spectacular success?
As far as England is concerned, the language that became English arrived in the 5th Century with Germanic warrior tribes from across the sea...."

The author then rushes from one fact to another without really letting the significance of any of it really sink in.

My second criticism, that I already knew most of it, is perhaps a bit of "know-it-all" thing to say. And to be fair, if I had come across this book a year ago much of it would have been completely new to me.
In the past year, however, I've been doing a lot of reading about linguistics (for example "The Mother Tongue" by Bill Bryson and "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker.)
And I've also been brushing up a lot on my history of Britain. These two things combined manage to cover a lot of the same ground as a book about the history of the English language.

And in fact some of what Melvyn Bragg states as hard truth is challenged in these other books. Steven Pinker in his book casts doubt on the hypothesis that some prototype Indo-European language is the mother of all languages (something Melvyn Bragg states as a simple fact without qualifications.)
And at least one of these books (don't remember offhand if it was Pinker or Bryson) challenges the conventional folk linguistic story that the "beef/cow" distinction originated from the ruling Norman class never encountering farm animals until they came to their table served as meat. (Something else that Bragg states as a simple fact.)

However that's not to say I didn't learn anything at all from this book. About a quarter of the book, maybe half, was new information. For example much of the history of the English language bible was new to me.

The book is written by a British author for a British audience. (At least the version I listened to was. I know sometimes publishers re-edit books for their American release.) Some of it, the emphasis on place names in Britain, is of limited interest to Americans. But as the story of English expands it does include sections on American English. And Australian English gets some attention as well. (My own surname gets mentioned twice in the section on Australian English.)

Not anything Earth shattering in this book, but fairly interesting and pleasant enough to listen to.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky-Propaganda And Control Of The Public Mind
and
A Defense of Wikileaks

The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg (Abridged): Book Review (Scripted)