Damn, this series continues to impress me. Melvyn Bragg is the unpretentious host who guides us through the historical development of the English language. The trip is surprisingly informative.
The period covered in this episode is roughly the whole of Elizabethan England, around 1600, and a bit more. It was a time when the English were beginning to do some colonizing on their own, after the Spanish, Dutch, and Portugese had already begun. It was a mercantile age, with trade all over the globe and the importing of exotic goods like pineapples and exotic words like "ketchup." Latin was still the language of scholarship and high office but a couple of firebrands gave English a leg up in political discourse and Latin became less common in everyday use. You can still find its scattered limbs in today's medicine and law. Amicus curiae, anyone? I suspect that Latin would disappear promptly from these fields if it didn't provide a barrier between those within the trade and those without. It now serves a social purpose different from its original purpose, which was to make communication easier between scholars whose native languages were different.
We get to see the very first English dictionary -- only a few thousand words, eight hundred years after an Arabic dictionary and a thousand years after Sanskrit. Before Shakespeare (who, I understand from other sources, spelled his name sixteen different ways), the poet/knights of the court took to writing. Sir Phillip Sidney was one of the first. Virtually nobody has heard of him, despite his originality and his giving us commonplace terms like "my better half." There's occasional wit in the narration too. Bragg has just finished listing a number of expressions handed down from Shakespeare (eg., "in my mind's eye") and then says that there are many more he could quote but since "brevity is the soul of wit", he'll "make a virtue of a necessity" and "vanish into thin air." (He does.)