Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

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Bryson warns that the danger of another language crowding out English is not the real problem. More and more Americans show that they are unable to grow a useful vocabulary, use educated grammar and spelling, or express themselves intelligently. If you use Facebook or other such social media, note when a popular topic comes up for wide discussion and many chime in the comment: How many comments reflect a low level of fluency in what must be the native language of people? 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. At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as “the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance.”

Mother Tongue - Penguin Books UK

Over 300 million people speak English in some fashion, and it seems as if all the rest of the world wish they spoke English. English has invaded other languages mercilessly. For years the French resisted introduction of English words into their language, but no more. There are more students of English in China than there are people in the United States. Invention out of whole cloth like, as in the way hound became dog, with no known explanation as to how it took place. 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.Bryson starts his story of the English language with the Cro-Magnons and their cave drawings, then came the Basques and their language Euskara, which pre-dates the Neolithic languages spoken in Stone Age Europe. 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

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

Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participial adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the OED 60,000 words—the length of a short novel—to discuss them all. A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know set is to know English.” There’s a wealth of articles about this half-truth (I’m being generous). Here’s one http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca... And the clue is right there in the term ‘Latin alphabet’ that it wasn’t originally crafted for use by English speakers, either.) This book contains more than you expect. Bill Bryson covers language itself with a focus on English. The book covers speech from a historical view, a physical view, an environmental view, a utilitarian view, and many other views. If you find the recorded version, you will want to play that version over again as it cruises through many concepts that leave you thinking and speculating how it could have all gone differently.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. The Mother Tongue is somewhat dated. I did not realize it was published in 1990 until hearing "Soviet Union" mentioned in the present tense. His view about machine translation is way out-of-date. He talks about a giant Chinese keyboard, which in fact never caught on. The Wubi method, invented in 1986, encodes Chinese characters by the five shapes of strokes and converts them to alphabetic characters on a generic keyboard. It gained popularity before being replaced by the Intelligent Pinyin method, which facilitates the standard phonetic representation of Chinese characters. Of course, Bill Bryson couldn't have foreseen how the Internet would change English (it would be interesting to know). The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson". www.publishersweekly.com. 2 September 1991 . Retrieved 2023-03-30. So if you are looking for an erudite and trustworthy account of the development of the English language I am sure there are many very worthy tomes out there! This is just for fun and it is absolutely that, lots and lots of fun. I found Bill Bryson about a month ago when I read hilarious In a Sunburned Country. I liked that one a lot and decided to try out his other book. And I liked this one too, but unfortunately not as much as In a Sunburned Country. And there are several reasons for that. Including the one that it can be at least partly my fault.

The Mother Tongue - Wikipedia

Linguist say parties in the conversation will tolerate silence for four seconds before interjecting anything, however unrelated.” The language had already been dead for hundreds of years, yet it managed to survive thanks to the priests who’d memorized certain hymns, called the Vedas. Though the priests were ignorant of the words’ meanings, they managed to pass them down from one generation to the next. But it’s not just geography— social class can also be a powerful influence on English dialects. The American dialectologist William Labov observed in the 1930s that middle-class New Yorkers were far more likely to pronounce the r sound in words like door, car, and more than were their fellow working-class New Yorkers. Pronouncing one’s r sounds was an indicator of higher social status. American English In Russia there are no native words for efficiency, challenge, engagement ring, have fun, or take care” Shifting meaning over time— nice, for example, has meant everything from foolish to strange to wanton to lascivious. Only in the mid-18th century did it acquire something akin to its present meaning.One curious thing: Norwegians supposedly "talk about departing like an Englishman" (p7) Eh, really? Never heard of that. Googling it, I find only quotes from this book. Although the new nation was dominated by the Saxons, it became known as England, after the Angles. These early tribes were functionally illiterate, so there is no written account of this period.

Mother Tongue Summary and Study Guide | SuperSummary The Mother Tongue Summary and Study Guide | SuperSummary

Bryson delves into the diverse origins of English, highlighting how the language has absorbed elements from various Celtic, Latin, French, and Germanic languages over the centuries. He explores the impact of historical events such as the Norman Conquest and the Renaissance, which profoundly influenced the vocabulary and grammar of English. Additionally, he discusses the often overlooked role of everyday individuals in shaping the language, from playwrights like Shakespeare to ordinary people who have contributed new words and phrases. English became a world language in large part through the political and economic power of the British Empire. Mother Tongue is a series of essays on the origins of human language, with plenty of interesting scientific insights, then to the messy origins of English amid the various waves of invasions of the original Celtic peoples of Britain by Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans, Scandinavians (Vikings), and so forth, to its growing status as a global language. I enjoyed this part of the book the most, learning a lot about the origins of the language that was especially useful now that I live in England myself. I also didn't know that Latin evolved into French, Spanish, and Italian among other languages, to my embarrassment. Given the many travels we've had through Europe in the past two years, a lot of the early origins of the Celtic peoples in Europe and the migrations of various peoples across the continent and to the British isles during the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages is really fascinating stuff. So far, we’ve explored the history of the English language mostly as it pertained to its original home—the British Isles. We’ve seen how these historical processes gave rise to a language that is notable for its malleability and adaptability, able to be written and spoken in a wide variety of ways.With dazzling wit and astonishing insight, Bill Bryson explores the remarkable history, eccentricities, resilience and sheer fun of the English language. 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. If we define dialect as a way of speaking that fixes a person geographically, then it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that in England there are as many dialects as there are hills and valleys. Just in the six counties of northern England, an area about the size of Maine, there are seventeen separate pronunciations for the word house.” Bryson, Bill, The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 2001. Nevertheless, the book itself is a bundle of joy of finding invariably humorous take on how word changed - even corrupted - over the course of time. It is amusing to know people made mistakes and those mistakes held on until today.