**NOTE** - this already exists in some places as separate episodes, but I think it will work better as one simple torrent

Rambam1776


I came across this last week on the great BBC site theBox dot BZ, and have enjoyed it immensely. It’s almost an action / adventure thriller, watching as our language comes to exist in its present form. The shades of meaning in the presenter’s revelations often hit you with an audible “Hey, yeah! I never noticed that before!” For example, once the French conquered Britain in 1066, they imposed the feudal system on the Anglo-Saxon peasantry. This has led to multiple examples in the language where one concept will have two words (or more!) depending on the use and class. Since the serfs raised all the animals but rarely got to eat any, you will find that all the words for the ANIMALS are Anglo-Saxon, but the words for the actual MEAT are all French. Cow, Pig, Swine, Sheep, Deer = AS, but Beef, Pork, Mutton, and Venison are all French. Did you know that the standardization of words used in the English language bibles (which led to all that slaughter and civil wars) is where we get most of our Standard English spelling today? When you see people griping about being Grammar Nazis in online forums, they are continuing a bloody 600 year old fight that has a body count well over 100,000! That makes your High School English teacher into a genocidal militant, if you look at it the right way (Hee Hee!)

Who knew that grammar and spelling had so much sex and violence? If Algebra had the same history, I would sign up for more math classes! Bring on those dangling participles and improper modifiers! I’d talk about the Chaucer stuff, but I cannot type with one hand…! (Sorry, that was just tacky)


First transmitted on ITV during November 2003
 
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0343228/

The Adventure of English is a British television series (ITV) on the history of the English language presented by Melvyn Bragg as well as a companion book, also written by Bragg. The series ran in 2003.

The series and the book are cast as an adventure story, or the biography of English as if it were a living being, covering the history of the language from its modest beginnings around 500 AD as a minor guttural Germanic dialect to its rise as a truly established global language.

Episode list:

1. Birth of a Language
2. English Goes Underground
3. The Battle for the Language of the Bible
4. "This Earth, This Realm, This England"
5. English in America
6. Speaking Proper
7. The Language of Empire
8. Many Tongues Called English, One World Language
(Info courtesy Wikipedia) 

 
--- File Information --- (same for all, duration give or take some seconds)

File Name:                          Episode2.avi
Duration (hh:mm:ss):          50:35.560
File Size (in bytes):              319,224,540

--- Video Information --- 

Video Codec Name:            DivX 6.0.0
Video Bitrate (kbps):           780
frame Width (pixels):          720
frame Height (pixels):         576
frames Per Second:            25.000

--- Audio Information --- 
Audio Codec:                     0x0055 MPEG-2 Layer 3
Audio Bitrate(kbps):           56
Audio BitRate Type            CBR
Audio Sample Rate             22050 Hz


Originally uploaded on thebox dot bz by gingerz – many thanks!
 
http://thebox.bz/details.php?id=73070