The Adventure of English, by Melvyn Bragg

I remember once on my mission being flummoxed while trying to explain, in German, the concept of understanding something spiritually, rather than intellectually.  I was teaching the school teacher of the St. Gallen Gemeinde's Bishop's daughter, in the Bishop's home, near Appenzell.  Bishop Edwin Koch understood the linguistic difficulty I was having and explained to me that, in German, the word I was using ("geistig" if I remember correctly) could refer to both spiritual and mental processes, such that my word choice was obscuring the very distinction I was trying to draw.  He helped me out of my perplexity with some wording which I no longer remember, but which I do remember feeling, at the time, lost something in translation.  It was one of many moments during my time in Switzerland when I realized how important it is, while speaking a foreign language, to try to think in that language, using its own idioms and expressions, without mentally translating back and forth into my native English.  Because the truth of the matter is, when getting beyond communicating rudimentary facts, and when talking about more ethereal concepts or feelings, something is almost always lost in translation.  I always know, for example, when I hear a lawyer demand from a translator an "exact, word-for-word, translation" of deposition or trial testimony, that the lawyer only speaks one language.  There is no such thing as an exact translation from one language to another of any very interesting concept, and some languages are better at conveying certain ideas than others.  (Oh how I miss the German "doch" or swiss-German "mohl".  There's just no pithy English word that accomplishes the same thing.  And "namely" will never do justice to "und zwar". )

The English language is an amalgamation of so many other tongues that its spelling will forever be senseless.  But what it loses in phonetics it gains in richness of expression.  English has so many "near synonyms" taken from different languages over its history, that it allows for a precision in connotation and nuance that I doubt any other language can match.  The Adventure of English, by Melvyn Bragg, tells the story of how this came to be.

A book about the history of the English language had better, first and foremost, be really well written. Its prose ought to exemplify the many stylistic variations the language allows, with memorable similes, metaphors, and turns-of-phrase jumping off the page. This book definitely succeeds. ("The English language by now was a thickly plaited rope, a rope of many strands, still wrapped around the Old English centre, still embellished with Norse, lushly fattened and lustred with French . . . .")  

The chief linguistic tool used by the author is personification, as should be expected in a book subtitled "the biography of a language." Thus, the story of the Norman invaders' impact on the language is told from the point of view, not just of a people, but of a language, which resisted obliteration, while at the same time hungrily consuming new words. The story of martyred protestant reformers and their attempts to translate the Bible into English is told from the point of view, not only of those reformers, but of the language itself trying to assault the citadel of faith (and Latin) which violently fought back but ultimately embraced the invader and left both faith and the invading language richer for the outcome:

"It is impossible to over-praise the quality of Tyndale's writing. It's rhythmical beauty, its simplicity of phrase, its crystal clarity have penetrated deep into the bedrock of English today wherever it is spoken. Tyndale's words and phrases influenced between sixty and eighty percent of the King James Bible of 1611 and in that second life his words and phrases circle the globe."

"English at last had God on its side. the language was authorised by the Almighty Himself."

English has become such a global language today (see another good book on this subject, Globish by Robert McCrumb) that it may start to fragment, like ancient Indo-european, into new languages around the globe. Such new splinter languages would share the common root of a language which is itself made up of many different sources, all contributing to a language which, while phonetically non-sensible, is otherwise, in my opinion (reinforced by this hagiographic "biography") the greatest instrument of communication ever known.