The Adventure of English is a British television series (ITV) on the history of the English language presented by Melvyn Bragg as well as a companion book, written by Bragg. The series ran in 2003.
The series and the book are cast as an adventure story, or the biography of English as if it were a living being, covering the history of the language from its modest beginnings around 500 AD as a minor Germanic dialect to its rise as a truly established global language.
In the television series, Bragg explains the origins and spelling of many words based on the times in which they were introduced into the growing language that would eventually become modern English.
Episode 4
In Queen Elizabeth I's time, English began to expand to even greater depths. Overseas trade brought new words from France, as well as the now popular swearwords "fokkinge" (fucking), "krappe" (crap), and "bugger" from Dutch, in the 16th century. Sailors also brought all kinds of produce like apricots, bananas, limes, yams, cocoa, potatoes, port wine from Spain and Portugal, chocolate and tomatoes from France as well words from 50 other languages including "coffee", "magazine", and "alcohol" from Arabic countries.
"The decade on either side of the year 1600 saw thousands of Latin words come into the English vocabulary of educated people, words like 'excavate,' 'horrid,' 'radius,' 'cautionary,' 'pathetic,' 'pungent,' 'frugal' [...]," states Bragg in this episode. The Inkhorn Controversy, a debate about the English language and where its new words should come from, soon followed. A few scholars, including John Cheke, wished that the language should not use Latin or Greek words to expand the English vocabulary, but rather Anglo-Saxon ones.
English eventually obtained its own dictionary. Eight years before Italian and 35 years before French. However, this is a huge difference from the Arabic dictionary, which was made 800 years before and the Sanskrit, which was created nearly 1000 years before the English.
Scholar Katherine Duncan-Jones informs on poet, courtier, and soldier Philip Sidney, who also had a large impact on the English language, introducing phrases like "my better half", "far-fetched", and words such as "conversation", which had previously had another meaning.
William Shakespeare's contribution to the English vocabulary is one of the most famous. Over 2000 words used in modern English were first recorded in his writing, words such as "leapfrog", "assassination", "courtship", and "indistinguishable". Shakespeare's vocabulary included over 21,000 words, his plays translated into 50 different languages, and Bragg states, "The Oxford English dictionary lists a stunning 33,000 Shakespeare quotations."
