Name: The Adventure of English
ISBN: 9781611450071

The Adventure of English

"In this book Melvyn Bragg shows us the remarkable story of the English Language; from its beginnings as a minor guttural Germanic dialect to its position today as a truly established global language. Along the way its colorful story takes in a host of characters and locations, from the early tribes, Alfred the Great's stubborn resistance to the Danes, and through its early literary masterpieces such as Beowulf and the bawdy Geoffrey Chaucer; Henry VIII's battles with the church over bootleg bibles; a 'coarse' playwright named William Shakespeare; the songs of the Creole slaves and the worlds of Davy Crockett; street slang and Dr. Johnson's dictionary; the role of English in India and its adoption in the United States of America which returned the language with full interest."--BOOK JACKET.

What Hacker News says

alamortsubiteFeb 2026

If you enjoyed TFA, check out this excellent BBC tv doc (and companion book) with Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1XQx9pGGd0

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mdhAug 2021

I love ‘In Our Time’ - it strikes a really good balance between being academic and accessible. The range of topics is so broad too that you find yourself learning about things you didn’t even know you wanted to learn about. For example, scrolling to a random point in the podcast feed, I see than in four weeks in Dec ‘18 there were episodes on the thirty years war, ‘Sir Gawain & The Green Knight’, the poor laws and Venus.

Bragg’s book ‘The Adventure of English’ is a good survey of the evolution of the English language too.

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Mediterraneo10Feb 2020

> Most of the complaints I've seen have to do with what he gets wrong about other languages

Bryson gets many, many details about the history of English wrong as well.

> As an introductory book to a eccentric topic though, it works. It's biggest asset, imo, is that Bryson isn't a linguist.

No, Bryson is a hack writer and does more harm than good. You make it sound as if the only alternative to Bryson is eggheaded scholarly publications. In fact, there is a wide selection of popular-science treatments of the history of English and other languages that are both reliable and friendly and accessible for ordinary readers (for example, Melvyn Bragg’s The Adventure of English does right what Bryson set out to do).

It is like with archaeology: if an ordinary person wants to learn about the Pyramids, there is no need for someone to recommend Graham Hancock to them as if otherwise they would have to read obtuse archeological-dig reports and disputes among scholars.

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adamnemecekJan 2017

If this tickles your fancy, you should check out "Adventure of English" and the eponymous BBC documentary.

https://www.amazon.com/Adventure-English-Biography-Language/...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihoYL-dUK1g

Did you know that just about every English word that contains the letter combination "sk" is from Old Norse? Skin, sky, ski, skill, skid, skull, skip, skirt etc. Skim isn't though.

Until reading this book I never truly realized what sort of a Frankenlanguage English really is.

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