The Adventure of English — Season 1, Episode 4: This Earth, This Realm, This England
Documentary • 65 min • 1 season, 8 episodes • ★ 8.6/10
Episode synopsis
Visiting the England of Queen Elizabeth the First shows how naval enterprise and foreign trade brought scores of new words into the language. Scholars were bringing new Latin terms into the language, and there was a movement to stop this and keep English 'pure'. Shakespeare combined the languages of the common people and the aristocracy to take English to new heights and to invent so many memorable words and phrases.
About The Adventure of English
The history of the English language presented by Melvyn Bragg; from its modest beginnings around 500 AD as a minor Germanic dialect to its rise as a global language.