Published in Time Out Istanbul

October 2005

A disgruntled Gustave Flaubert wrote in Madame Bovary, “The human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out a tune for a dancing bear, when we hope with our music to move the stars.”

A jaded outlook for a writer: but then, he was French. One might wonder, had Flaubert been writing in English, a language more adaptable in structure and numerous in words than its Gallic cousin, he might have felt closer to an exalted composer playing to the heavens and less like a dishevelled busker with a boogying grizzly.

English is to be extolled, according to British novelist and broadcasting veteran Melvyn Bragg, who has, with contagious enthusiasm, penned a history of the language. He has done for etymology and dusty academic scrutiny what Andy Warhol did for soup cans: he’s given them the shock of life to the point of making them interesting and even a bit cool.

The Adventure of English traces the history of the language and its particular form of evolution from its earliest roots in the fourth century, through the times of King Alfred the Great and Danelaw, to the Norman Conquest. He then goes on to cover the expansion of the British Empire and the creation of colonies in the New World, Africa and Asia, that moulded the language, added to it, and often changed it quite dramatically.

It is a remarkable fact that one third of the world’s population speak English to a basic level, whilst three hundred and eighty million people call it their mother tongue. From London to Bombay, from Sydney to Vancouver, from Jamaica to New York, it’s the language on everybody’s lips. English contains approximately two hundred and ninety thousand words, and of those, a good number are nicked from other countries, including Turkey.

The large profusion of the kiosk in Istanbul is a reflection of the Ottomans’ enthusiasm for the architectural form, and it is a word that travelled to England through France along with the tradesmen of the Ottoman Empire. Then there’s bosh, taken from Turkish, meaning emptiness or pointlessness in both languages. The word horde is also of Turkish origin, from ordu meaning a large army or military force, usually of a barbaric nature, as well as the words Cossack, pasha, turquoise and yoghurt.

Bragg argues that the reason for the spread of English and for its current global status as a lingua franca lies in its flexibility and aptitude to absorb words from other languages into its structure, and to continuously accommodate new slang and pidgin forms. Even today English is sprouting fresh buds everywhere. Take for example the use of shorthand in sms messaging, where lofty amorous declarations are expressed simply as i luv u, where ‘great’ becomes gr8, ‘forward’ becomes 4wd and the tiny word ‘at’ can be shortened further to an austere @.

Yet, English has also seen some very difficult times and there were moments in history when the language was in danger of disappearing altogether. One notably precarious moment was the Norman conquest of England, to which Bragg devotes an entire chapter. After the English defeat in 1066 at the Battle of Hastings, the country was subject to a huge influx of Norman gentry, whose presence ensured that the language originally spoken by the conquered nation was subsumed for almost three hundred years. During this time, French was exclusively used for all government and official affairs, as well as in court and in the houses of the upper class.

The latter-day form of English was spoken only by the working and peasant classes, giving rise to an interesting anecdote as to the origins of our culinary language. When British farm animals are out in the fields, gamboling and grazing, they are referred to as cows, pigs and sheep. However, when served sautéed or roasted upon a silver platter at dinner time, the names change to beef, pork and mutton; a straggler from the times of the Norman conquest when the feasts of the French nobility were stocked with boeuf, porc and mouton.

Another major chapter in the development of the language came with the imagination and playfulness of the Elizabethan poets, the most influential being, of course, William Shakespeare. Your average educated Englishman will utter about two thousand words in a week, while the great bard had an unparalleled lexicon of between twenty-one and thirty thousand words. Many of these made their debut appearances in his work, such as `obscene', 'accommodation', `barefaced', 'leap-frog', and 'lack-lustre', as well as numerous compounds that he made up himself.

Shakespeare’s genius was the intuitive way in which he manipulated English to meet his needs, and when the right word didn’t exist, he simply went ahead and invented it. Bragg writes: “It is as if a new word, if it strikes a deep chord in our minds, is immediately rooted to feed itself, to grow, to seek out more and more areas and nuances of expression, to bring back news to the mother-ship, to release a part of the brain just waiting for that word.”

Bragg is no etymologist, and denies any particular expertise on the subject, which makes the book a gem for the layman, though a reportedly tiresome read for the erudite professors that have led criticism against the author, accusing him of sloppy research.

But the nits they pick are small and negligible. On the whole, Bragg presents us with a lively and comprehensive biography of English, one that is both historically informative and wide in its coverage of present day variations of the language, like African-American or Australian dialects. Most importantly, he has the ability to inspire a flush of awe for the power and the ingenuity of the speech we mostly take for granted, when:

“...a pimp can coin a word as lasting as that of a poet, a street hawker as a statesman, a farmer as a scholar, a foul-mouth as a Latinist, vulgar as refined, illiterate as schooled. 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.”

The Adventure of English (2004) is published by Sceptre.