Amorous Or Loving? by Rupert Gavin: Who really invented Twitter? A) Jack Dorsey B) Jeff Bezoz C) Geoffrey Chaucer D) Elon Musk E) Mark Zuckerberg

Spoken today by 1.6billion souls, English is a mongrel language, words flung together down the millennia from Latin (Saturday, amorous), Anglo-Saxon (writing, laughter, riddle, ask), Norse (slaughter, berserk, fog, mire) and Norman French (park, beef, govern, duke, commence).

In more recent epochs, Native Americans gave us skunk and moose. Hindus provided bungalow, chintz and juggernaut.

It is Rupert Gavin’s contention, in this properly scholarly yet highly accessible study, that our language evolved and came about through invasion and conquest.

The Romans, Vikings and Normans were ‘all attracted by the relative wealth of these islands’, exploiting the natives and bequeathing vocabulary.

The Romans were here for 400 years, leaving behind roads, cities, fortifications – and their Latin continued to be used in religious services and on legal documents for centuries. The first court case was not conducted in English until 1363.

Meanwhile, the Vikings were busy sacking holy places, preying upon the weak and the helpless, raping and pillaging generally. Ravens learned to follow their armies, aware there’d be plenty of dead bodies to feast upon.

From this period, English developed many words for arrows, bows, archers and fletchers.

The Norsemen were ‘the stuff of collective nightmares’, and there were still hundreds of years to go until the Normans turned up – enough time for an anonymous scribe to set down the 3,182 alliterative Anglo-Saxon or Old English lines of Beowulf.

Talk about collective nightmares. Back in the Eighties, when I sat my Finals, I had to translate and memorise the nonsense. It’s all about heroic deeds, gods and monsters, and much influenced Tolkien, let alone nerdy teens devoted to Game Of Thrones.

Gavin gives us plenty of information about battles, assemblies, treaties and ‘inter-tribal squabbling’, each mob babbling away in Kentish, Mercian and Northumbrian dialects. When he says, ‘the position of women merits consideration’, he must be conjectural, as nothing much was said about them, save praise for embroidery skills.

My theory is that, as their names were unpronounceable and impossible to spell – Aethelwynn, Aethelflaed, Eadburgh, Leoba and Berhtgyth – it was easier to ignore them altogether.

I hadn’t realised the Normans were such immense brutes, starting with William’s arrival at Hastings in 1066. Anglo-Saxon lords were killed, their families stripped of lands. Castles went up, to oppress the population. Executions, branding and the severing of noses were common punishments.

Nevertheless, in the credit column, London was developed, to concentrate ‘our language and culture’ in a single place. The Normans also had a mania for building cathedrals, which ultimately gave jobs to little old ladies to work in the gift shops.

Though Gavin has an interesting chapter on Chaucer – who in 1389 deployed 2,000 new English words in The Canterbury Tales, including twitter, femininity, narcotic, erect and plumage – his chief interest is in the industrious translations of the Bible. Wycliffe in 1384 brought in the words excellent, problem, ambitious and wrinkle, as well as graven image, keys of the kingdom and root of all evil. Tyndale, a century and a half later, gave us coat of many colours, eye for an eye, suffer fools gladly and the skin of my teeth.

Behind these enlightened tasks of translation lay much bloodshed, the whole Catholic-Protestant divide and the upheaval of the Reformation. Theologians and politicians, such as Sir Thomas More, were for some reason dead against ‘making the scriptures intelligible to the common man’.

Possessing a Bible in English rather than ornate, ritualistic Latin was a heresy punishable by death.

Thomas Cranmer, for example, was burnt at the stake – yet the simple beauty of his Book of Common Prayer, dating from 1549, was to last for more than 400 years, until shamefully replaced by the ugly nonsense of the Alternative Services pamphlet.

When I wanted the old-style liturgy used at my father’s funeral, the trendy vicar said, ‘Oh, these days people prefer a chorus from The Lion King.’

In 1611, the King James Bible was published. Fifty scholars had been kept busy for seven years, ‘agonising over the original texts’, the Hebrew and the Greek. There was a hysterical misprint in an early edition: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ They’d missed out the ‘not’.

Gavin is correct to say that the Authorised Version, as it became known, was English at its most ‘poetic, vivid, direct, rhythmic, fluent’. It is a crime that it has fallen into disuse – and perhaps no surprise that churches are empty.

Gavin omits to mention a fascinating puzzle. In Psalm 46, the 46th word from the start is ‘shake’ and the 46th word from the end is ‘spear’. In 1611, Shakespeare was 46. Spooky – and did Shakespeare have a hand in the enterprise, polishing the text, I wonder?

Apart from the pulpit, what Gavin calls the other ‘prime user of language’ was the theatre. Hence a marvellous discussion of Shakespeare, who used 31,534 different words, coining 2,000 new ones, such as bedroom, barefaced, dewdrops and leapfrog. He is matched in ingenuity only by Dickens, who invented 1,600 words, including flummox, dustbin and fairy story.

Wondering how ‘a single language would create a single and unifying identity’, Gavin explains that mass printing and education made works accessible, and made English ‘increasingly uniform across the nation’, regularising spelling, ironing out regional accents and dialects.

Don’t get me started on Welsh, brought in during my lifetime by Welsh nationalists to cut my native Wales off.

Finally, we must not underestimate how English was spread around the world by our ‘military prowess, maritime power, mercantile strength and industrial development’, ie by our colonial expansion, which made Britain globally pre-eminent, the map painted patriotic pink. People are meant to feel guilty about all this. I don’t myself.

Gavin must follow up this first-class book with others on the compilation of dictionaries, the mysteries of pronunciation, the uses of slang and swearing, the power of jokes and wordplay, the censoriousness of wokery, and finally the language of the internet, where words are fast disappearing in a blizzard of acronyms and emojis. Who needs literacy (and literature) now?