The Adventure of English
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| The Adventure of English | |
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| Format | Documentary/History |
| Run time | 45-52 min per episode |
| Creator(s) | Melvyn Bragg |
| Starring | Melvyn Bragg |
| Channel | ITV1 |
| Air dates | 6 – 30 November 2003 |
| No. of episodes | 8 |
| IMDb profile | |
The Adventure of English is a British television series (ITV1) on the history of the English language presented by Melvyn Bragg as well as a companion book, also 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 guttural Germanic dialect to its rise as a truly established global language.
[edit] Episode list
- Birth of a Language
- English Goes Underground
- The Battle for the Language of the Bible
- "This Earth, This Realm, This England"
- English in America
- Speaking Proper
- The Language of Empire
- Many Tongues Called English, One World Language
[edit] Criticism
Critics of the programme have pointed out that it contains a significant share of factual errors: for example, it asserts unequivocally that the Indo-European languages stem originally from India; and it credits the Venerable Bede with authoring a letter to Aetius, who had at the time been dead for 300 years (Bede was actually citing an old source). Additionally, Bragg mispronounces several key Australian words, including waratah and Macquarie.
