Quotes from Melvyn Bragg

The masculine pronouns are he, his and him But imagine the feminine she, shis and shim! So our English, I think you'll all agree Is the trickiest language you ever did see.

That, too, is part of this adventure — there are both casualties and survivors as this hungry creature, English, demanded more and more subjects.

We shall fight on the beaches," said Churchill in 1940, "we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." Only "surrender" is not Old English. That, in itself, might be significant.

A written language brings precision, forces ideas into steady shapes, secures against loss. Once the words are on the page they are there to be challenged and embellished by those who come across them later.

One aspect of English which has been a recurring feature in its history is the way a word will be adapted from one age to another so that a 'chip' can go from wood to silicon, include golf and a slight and feature as fifty per cent of a British diet.

English was the language of protest and protesting its right to be heard and taken account of before the highest in the land. And the highest of the land used it in 1381, to chop down the revolt of thousands of English speakers.

In 1362, for the first time in almost three centuries, English was acknowledged as a language of official business. Since the Conquest, court cases had been heard in French. Now the law recognised that too few people understood that language, perhaps because many of the educated lawyers, like the clergy, had died in the plague. From now on, it was declared, cases could be pleaded, defended, debated and judged in English.

The English Bible has often been called a preacher's Bible. Written to be spoken, written to spread the word in the language of the land, a cause for which Wycliffe and Tyndale and hundreds of other English Christians had lived and died.

Queen Elizabeth I has a fair claim to be the best educated monarch ever to sit on the throne of England. Apart from her mastery of rhetoric — demonstrated at Tilbury — she spoke six languages and translated French and Latin texts.

English was emerging from the tribal Babel as a resourceful tongue, but it had no great written language and without that it would be for ever condemned to the limbo of vernaculars all over the world whose attempt to live on by sound alone has often doomed them to insularity, then to irrelevance, finally to oblivion.

to lose any language is to lose a unique way of knowing life.

Whilst a word like "impede" survived, its opposite, "expede," did not.

It is impossible to get enough books, don't you find? But where are we without them? Just words on the wind... Not words on the mind.

English was emerging from the tribal Babel as a resourceful tongue, but it had no great written language and without that it would be for ever condemned to the limbo of vernaculars all over the world whose attempt to live on by sound alone has often doomed them to insularity, then to irrelevance, finally to oblivion. Occasionally there is desperate resuscitation from a few survivors who know that to lose any language is to lose a unique way of knowing life. Only writing preserves a language.

number he was doing around the nightclubs called

According to Bede, writing at the beginning of the eighth century, Essex, Sussex and Wessex were planted by the Saxons; East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria by the Angles; the Jutes took Kent and the Isle of Wight.

In Tristram Shandy there is a passage which describes how two nuns, believing that the only way to shift an obstinate mule was to say "bugger," are hampered by the knowledge that to utter such a word was most sinful. They split it up between them. Neither syllable on its own could possibly be sinful, so one shouts "bou, bou, bou" and the other "ger, ger, ger.

Word endings fell away. Prepositions came in which took the language away from the Germanic and made it more English. Instead of adding a lump on the end of words, you could use 'to' or 'with'. 'I gave the dog to my daughter.' 'I cut the meat with my knife.' The order of words became important and prepositions became more common as signposts around sentences.

Old English 'æppel' used to mean any kind of fruit.