Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

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Some of it just sounded wrong, like the quote from an article that says most speakers of other languages aren’t aware there is such a thing as a thesaurus. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. So that's when the whole book fell apart for me, because if he couldn't get this part right, what other things might he have been wrong about? The French don’t have the breadth of vocabulary to distinguish between “man” and “gentleman”, the way English speakers do, proclaims Bryson. It’s a fascinating and, as is usually the case with Bryson, entertaining account of evolution of the English language.

If English is your mother tongue, this book will amaze and amuse you with interesting tidbits about just how our language evolved into the wonder it is. I know and I do even realise that Bill Bryson is considered an entertaining author and that he also seems to be much loved and appreciated by many. As a person who is not a native speaker, this book is very insightful in terms of how the most globalized language developed (and is still developing). There is evidence to suggest that some members of Congress aren’t fully sympathetic with the necessity for a commercial nation to be multilingual. Other travel books include the massive bestseller Notes From a Small Island, which won the 2003 World Book Day National Poll to find the book which best represented modern England, followed by A Walk in the Woods (in which Stephen Katz, his travel companion from Neither Here Nor There, made a welcome reappearance), Notes From a Big Country and Down Under.

I read this book in English and I must admit that although it is very interesting, as a non-English speaker, I was not able to fully appreciate it and understand it. In the next 700 years, its meaning has changed so many times that it is impossible to tell what sense Jane Austen intended when she wrote to a friend: "You scold me so much in a nice long letter which I have received from you. the true story of an American lady, newly arrived in London, who opened her front door to find three burly men on the steps informing her that they were her dustmen. I think the lesson here is that as a linguist, I should not be reading popular writings about language. Just in the six counties of northern England, an area about the size of Maine, there are seventeen separate pronunciations for the word house.

The book is entertaining and goes a long way to explain how English is spoken in so many parts of the world, much more so than Portuguese, another colonial language.On the dying of Irish (as a language), he says: "we naturally lament the decline of these languages, but it's not an altogether undiluted tragedy.

Bryson has the audacity to suggest we Finns have no native swear words and use the phrase "in the restaurant" as a curse instead. That’s some magic trick, to have a land which is both entirely uninhabited when the white folks show up but which also has indigenous people living there to just offer up words for colonisers to “borrow”! It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. Some of the stories are interesting, and even reasonably factual, but at other times the failed fact-checking is glaringly obvious--and come on, the perpetuation of the "Eskimo Snow Myth"?

If you had to learn English as a second language (and more power to you), then bless your heart for taking on the task. But even setting issues like that aside, there are so many mistakes here, both in Bryson’s discussion of the English language itself and in his characterisation of the other languages he uses as comparatives. What he does is to throw out titbits (or tidbits in the US, as they the consider the former spelling risque - so Bryson tells me) of information, some useful, some useless, some bizarre: but all fascinating. The second is worse; in the chapter on American accents and dialects he starts by agreeing that the USA shows less regional variation than britain and ends suggesting that there is, in fact, one dialect per person. From its mongrel origins to its status as the world’s most-spoken tongue; its apparent simplicity to its deceptive complexity; its vibrant swearing to its uncertain spelling and pronunciation, Bryson covers all this as well as the many curious eccentricities that make it as maddening to learn as it is flexible to use.

The Mother Tongue is a 1990 book by Bill Bryson which compiles the history and origins of the English language and its various quirks. As for Indonesia, English speakers should feel more at home here (at least in the urban areas) in the next decade or more, with all these millennials/gen-zs at the malls talking rather fluent English for their daily conversation. From its mongrel origins to its status as the world's most-spoken tongue; its apparent simplicity to its deceptive complexity; its vibrant swearing to its uncertain spelling and pronunciation; Bryson covers all this as well as the many curious eccentricities that make it as maddening to learn as it is flexible to use. I'm looking forward to reading A Brief History of Everything next before moving onto his well-liked travel stories.No place in the English-speaking world is more breathtakingly replete with dialects than Great Britain. In a more open medium like this, I am prepared to serve Bryson as he serves others, but with a little less barren pedantry. I think what bothers me most is the very thinly veiled "linguo"centrism that turns it from a piece of enthusiastic writing about the English language into a poorly-argued case for why English is better than every other language on the planet.