Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

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I'm a writer, and I don't hold with slam-dunking other writers in print, because they can't reply. In a more open medium like this, I am prepared to serve Bryson as he serves others, but with a little less barren pedantry. All of this makes me question all the other "facts" I don't know anything about, I simply don't know if I've learned more about them from reading this book. Once he’d noticed these similarities, Jones began comparing other languages to Sanskrit, and he found more and more evidence for a budding theory: that a wide variety of classical languages – Persian, Latin, Celtic, Sanskrit, Greek – had their roots in a parent language.

Mother Tongue By Bill Bryson | Used | 9780141040080 - Wob Mother Tongue By Bill Bryson | Used | 9780141040080 - Wob

Another issue, Bryson wrote his book in the late 1980s. The world has changed a lot since then. First of all, we have internet, which, at least in my opinion, makes British and American English even closer to each other and more similar. That is why the book seemed to be slightly outdated at times. I would love to read its modernized version. And that's what I will start with. I am not an English native speaker. I have never lived in any English-speaking country. I have been learning English at school. I manage pretty well, I can read books in English without too much difficulty. Which does not change the fact that there are a lot of words that I do not know (and I'm fully aware of that). I am also not particularly sensitive to differences in pronunciation between British and American English. I mean, I'm aware of these differences (I am usually able to recognize an American and a British when I hear them), but I do not think I can pronounce the word first according to one and then according to the other pronunciation. 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.

Summary

Then again, he seems to think that Pennsylvania Dutch is a form of pidgin English, so perhaps that’s unsurprising! We’ve seen how invasions from the Angles, Saxons, Vikings, and Normans helped to form the basic structure of the English language. In this chapter, we’ll look at more recent developments in the history of the language that made it into the language we know today. These later developments helped give English the richness, variety, and adaptability that helped transform it from a local language into a global one. Shakespeare: Elevating the Language He surveys the history of language, the world's language families and where English is situated in the Indo-European stream, and all the other offshoots, some which are no longer living languages. He recounts the triumph of Anglo-Saxon language over Celtic (even though many of England's place names preserve their Celtic roots), the impact of the Norman invasion (of 10,000 words, approximately 3/4ths are still in use including much of the language of nobility (duke, baron prince) and much language of jurisprudence (justice, jury, prison among others). He explores the different ways words are created, sometimes by doing nothing! His discussion of pronunciation and particularly the shifts in vowel sounds was fascinating, For example house was once pronounced hoose. You weren't born in a barn but barn in a born.

The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

He certainly loves English. 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. Consider the loss to English literature, if Joyce, Shaw, Swift, Yeats, Wilde, and Ireland's other literary masters have written in what inescapably a fringe language, their work will be as little known to us as those poets in Iceland or Norway, and that would be a tragedy indeed. No country has given the word incomparable literature per head of population than Ireland, and for that reason alone we might be excused to a small, "selfish" celebration that English was the language of her greatest writers." This is a hindsight bias. Also, Irish and Welsh orthography is far more internally consistent than is that of English—but Bryson only allows the features of English to be virtues.) Update: Not sure I'll finish this book. I was worried it'd be outdated, but that's only part of the problem. There are so many inaccuracies, facts that are not facts at all and some Bryson attitude issues. The most comparable figure in America was Noah Webster. Webster’s English dictionary was the most thorough of its day, with over 70,000 words catalogued. Driven by a fierce patriotic pride in his young nation and a conviction that American English was just as worthy of exaltation as British English, Webster contributed to some of the distinctive features and pronunciations of the language on his side of the Atlantic. He repeatedly dings Irish (and even more so Welsh) for having spellings that are bizarre, strange, overly convoluted, etc, when what he should mean is that the Irish language attaches sound values to the Latin alphabet that are different from those used by English.

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Awful. Awful. I’m now retrospectively mad, five years later, that I once attended a talk by this man. Avoid. I can't go through all the mistakes, I really don't have the time, there are just too many. If it continues in this way then this is a work of complete and utter fiction. Nevertheless, it's a fun read. I've learned a lot. Maoris of New Zealand have 35 words for dung. The Arabs have 6000 words for camels and camel equipment. The aborigines of Tasmania have a word for every type of trees but no word for the concept of tree. The word "nice" meant "stupid and foolish" in 1290. 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 differences between American English and British English make me laugh! The history of swear words is fascinating. "Bloody" was worse than the F-word? And those Victorian sensibilities! Who knew the biggest contribution of American English to the language was actually "OK"! The middle portion of the book gets very involved in examining the evolution of English spellings and pronunciations as it moved from Old English to Modern English, and the further hiving off of American English from British English. Some of this was really illuminating, but the parts discussing the minute details of spelling and grammatical shifts were slow-going unless you are truly a student of the language and I found somewhat less interesting.

The Mother Tongue - English And How It Got That Way: Bryson

Anagrams (words or phrases made from rearranging the letters of other words and phrases) are also highly popular. Thus, one can turn Emperor Octavian into “Captain over Rome” or Osama Bin Laden into “Is bad man alone.” These shifts in pronunciation led to strange divergences between how words were spelled and how they were pronounced. The troublesome orthography (the set of conventions for writing) of English can still be seen in words like debt, know, knead, and colonel, with their silent letters, as well as their hidden, but pronounced letters. How did these divergences come to be? Since the words for “snow” and “cold” are similar, we can deduce that the Indo-Europeans didn’t live in tropical climates. By the Victorian Age (1837-1901), many English words that would have scarcely raised an eyebrow in the Middle Ages or in Shakespeare’s time were considered totally out of bounds. Indeed, this era was famous for its prudishness and squeamishness. Even non-taboo parts of the body were considered too delicate to mention in polite society. Thus, legs became limbs and belly became midriff. No place in the English-speaking world is more breathtakingly replete with dialects than Great Britain. In America, people as far apart as New York State and Oregon speak with largely identical voices. According to some estimates almost two thirds of the American population, living on some 8o percent of the land area, speak with the same accent—a quite remarkable degree of homogeneity.

PDF Summary Chapter 4: English Beyond England

Webster was responsible for the American aluminum in favor of the British aluminium. His choice has the fractional advantage of brevity, but defaults in terms of consistency. Aluminium at least follows the pattern set by other chemical elements— potassium, radium, and the like.”

The Mother Tongue Summary - Bill Bryson - Shortform [PDF] The Mother Tongue Summary - Bill Bryson - Shortform

For all the little anecdotes and copious bits of trivia it contains, I really want to like the book more than I do. Unfortunately once it becomes clear that many of these factoids won't stand up to closer scrutiny -- Bryson doesn't even blink as he repeats the age-old and very disputed claim that the Eskimos have 50 words for snow -- it becomes hard to believe anything the book claims. The poet Robert Browning caused considerable consternation by including the word twat in one of his poems, thinking it an innocent term. The work was Pippa Passes, written in 1841 and now remembered for the line "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world." But it also contains this disconcerting passage: I know exactly a little bit about English, and a little bit less about linguistics in general. Studied a few foreign languages, took a linguistics class or two in college. I'm what you might call a big fan of language. A dabbler. Certainly not an expert. But boy, did I find this book infuriating. Then I thought, well, it was written more than 25 years ago, so things that sounded like old stories to me may have been new stories then – like this one: As we’ve seen, English words are derived from many different sources . This helps to explain why English is rich with varied pronunciation and dialects. There are an astonishing variety of dialects within England (let alone Wales, Scotland, and Ireland). The linguist Simeon Potter has observed that there is more difference in speech between two points 100 miles distant from each other in England than there is in the whole of North America.

In 1066, the Norman king William I conquered England and displaced the reigning Anglo-Saxon ruling elite. Norman French came to exert its own powerful influence on English vocabulary and structure—no fewer than 10,000 words can be traced to the time of the Norman Conquest. Historical Evolution The story of English began when Germanic peoples known as the Angles and Saxons, hailing from what is now Northern Germany, began migrating to and conquering the Roman province of Britannia in the mid-5th century CE. These Angles and Saxons brought their Germanic language to their new home, where it morphed over time into the language we now call Old English. Some of our most fundamental words today come from Old English, particularly words related to family— man, wife, child, brother, and sister, to name a few. Old English was a rich literary language as well, leaving behind a trove of letters, charters, religious works, and legal texts. Old English works like Beowulf and Caedmon’s Hymn are the starting points of English literature. The first chapter of this book has so many mistakes that I couldn't finish it. Almost every sentence has a mistake.