Gord Wilson 2007-10-04
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This book first appeared in 1986 in connection with a British TV series run in the US on PBS. While I've not seen the TV shows, the book at first take reads like a transcript, focussing in on particular individuals to support generalizations, as would a news crew or documentary film maker. The angle of approach is also slightly odd, in the circumscribed manner typical of History Channel TV specials and BBC multi-part documentaries. This means losing both breadth and depth in favor of concentrating on interesting peculiarites or visually arresting features of the subject at hand. In this case it works, because the history of English is too large a topic for either a book or a nine-part TV series. Instead, we get something that tantalizes even as it fails to satisfy.
Although the book lists three authors, it seems primarily to be the work of McCrum. I say that having just finished his bio. of P.G. Wodehouse. Twenty years ago he was editorial director for British publisher Faber and Faber; currently he is an editor at the Observer. Both of these books are maddening to the reader for the same reasons: he glancingly alludes to things no one knows, and then hammers on things everyone does. An example is the Irish "troubles". While it's extremely illuminating to find out that the Scottish highlanders were actually Irish and the lowlanders Scots-Irish, some brief background would help ground the many dropped names of Irish and English politicians, at least for American readers who may have come late into the discussion.
It's also clear that McCrum styles himself as a "liberal", whatever he means by that tag, since he is incapable of referring to "conservatives", equally undefined, except in terms of abuse. In the epilogue of the original edition he also proceeds in the manner of a TV script, redundantly summing up arguments repeatedly made throughout the book. There are also continual quote marks throughout the book, without attribution. However, one can jump to the back, and referencing the page number, find fascinating and extended notes. This again makes the book seem like a transcript.
That said, McCrum is at his best on his home turf of literature. Here he is eager to communicate his own enthusiasm, and to quote his favorite authors. Here he is in his element, and his book clips along. It's possible these parts may bore some readers, but I found them the most engrossing. He vividly portrays the possibilities inherent in English as a new written language, exploited so masterfully by Shakespeare and Chaucer, realized so dazzlingly in the Authorized version of the Bible, AKA The King James. This proved a double- edged sword, however. The dissemination of English meant also its standardization, and its later use as a political tool to destroy non- English languages like Gaelic, as well as regional variants like Cockney. It also began the trend away from Shakespeare, who would spell the same word numerous ways, to standard spelling and grammar. The varied spellings in the US and UK of the same word may be traced back to Benjamin Franklin, who deliberately set out to simplify American English.
What makes this book and series interesting, however, is its underlying thesis of the validity of worldwide English variants, so that there is not so much an English language as Englishes, worldwide varieties stretching from Canada to Australia, Asia to Africa. While standard English, also known as the RP or Received Pronunciation, remains a second language to numerous cultures, and a shop language for much of the world, these customized pidgins and creoles arose naturally from the collision of British English and native languages worldwide. In one interesting speculation, one expert suggests that English is at the point Latin was before it split into the various offshoots of French, Italian, and Spanish. Another speculation is that Spanish and Chinese will rise to dominance and English usage begin to shrink. Whatever the future of the English language, this book is a good introduction to its long and colorful past.
