Free Thinking 2013 - Language Wars
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 27 August 2014
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Defenders of traditional English language and grammar often present themselves as purists but New Generation Thinker John Gallagher, from Cambridge University, argues that we have always borrowed words and adapted phrases. His essay outlines the impact C16th and C17th global exploration and trade had on our native tongue. Recorded on Sunday 27th October 2013 in front of a live audience at Sage Gateshead as part of Radio 3's Free Thinking festival.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.4 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids |
| 0:25.5 | the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.9 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.1 | This is a special download from the BBC Free Thinking Festival. |
| 0:35.9 | For more information and our terms of use, |
| 0:38.1 | go to BBC.com.ukuk slash Radio 3. |
| 0:45.5 | Thank you. English is a mongrel language. |
| 0:52.4 | Try to string a sentence together |
| 0:53.9 | and you find yourself drawing on Latin, Greek, Dutch, Dutch. English is a mongrel language. Try to string a sentence together, |
| 0:58.8 | and you find yourself drawing on Latin, Greek, Dutch, Italian, |
| 1:03.8 | street argot, beggars camped, backslang or, God forbid, French. |
| 1:08.1 | And Britain, for a country that's prone to throwing a fit over the inclusion of twerk or retweet in the Oxford English |
| 1:11.5 | Dictionary takes a strange pride in this rag-tag tongue. But why? Our love for the mongrel is the |
| 1:19.3 | product of a long history of debates over correct English, a tug of war between old, established |
| 1:24.6 | language and newly imported words. |
| 1:30.2 | Today I want to ask how the mongrel language was bred, |
| 1:34.3 | and I want to do it by looking at the 16th and 17th centuries, |
| 1:39.0 | a time when a small island was rethinking its place in an expanding world. |
| 1:43.9 | When we pick this story up, England is no powerhouse, not politically, not culturally, not economically. No gambler would put money on English becoming a global language. In fact, English is undergoing a crisis. It seems poorer, not only in comparison to the great classical languages, Hebrew, Latin and Greek, but also in relation |
| 2:01.8 | to contemporary French and Italian. Thomas Hobby, an early continental traveller, wrote in 1561 |
| 2:08.4 | that the English were still counted barbarous in our tongue, and 20 years later the poet Edmund |
... |
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