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Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

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This account popularises the subject and makes it accessible to the lay reader, but it has been criticised for some inaccuracies, such as the perpetuation of several urban myths. At one point Bryson says that the Irish Prime Minister's title sounds like "tea-sack" when rendered into phonetic English spelling.

Then he got into some languages I have a smattering of myself – French and German—and I began questioning. Too bad the gems were scarce and some of the reading resembled the back-breaking labor involved in mining. However, I for one have generally and usually found Bryson’s general tone of narrational voice and the boastful, arrogant demeanour he constantly seems to present and yes indeed often downright spew in The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way extremely off-putting and really at best massively condescending, with his claims regarding the supposed superiority of the English language both unacademic and yes, profoundly bigoted and stereotyping (and as such of course absolutely devoid of any kind of linguistic acumen and actual bona fide language based knowledge).It's not at all difficult if you bother to learn the rules, which are far simpler than those of English. It’s a fascinating and, as is usually the case with Bryson, entertaining account of evolution of the English language.

It has since been pointed out, repeatedly, that Bryson is wrong in a staggering number of places in this book, and as I went on to read more of his work, I also realized exactly how racist he is. True, there was a stultifying effect of him becoming too enthusiastic with his many, many examples, when he already made his points. 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). It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. Summary: This amusing and informative book surveys the history of the English language and all its vagaries and perplexities of word origins, spellings, and pronunciations and why it has become so successful as a world language.It is similar with how history's made, there were wars, migrations, proliferation of mass media, the making of dictionaries, public figures making their own linguistic marks (and complete fools of themselves), class and regional divisions, and so on and so forth. Or this warning to motorists in Tokyo: 'When a passenger of the foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Published in 1990, the book was written before Internet changed the way the world communicates and hence a lot of the content regarding the spread of languages is hopelessly outdated by now. Bryson's book on the English language is a compendium of linguistic trivia interspersed with the author's biased and misinformed musings on the history and features of the language.

Mother Tongue: The English Language, by Bill Bryson, London: Penguin Books, 1990 (link is to a different, in-print edition). Registered office address: Unit 34 Vulcan House Business Centre, Vulcan Road, Leicester, Leicestershire, LE5 3EF. His new book The Body: A Guide for Occupants was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize and is an international bestseller. 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 only good thing I can say about this book is that it fired in me a greater interest in the subject, for which I turned to more accurate books by people who actually know their subject.

but in that week I learned something Bryson apparently never bothered to look up: Welsh orthography is remarkably regular, about as regular as Spanish.

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