Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

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Perhaps the most famous change in pronunciation was the Great Vowel Shift running roughly from 1400-1600 CE , during which English speakers began pushing vowels closer to the front of their mouths. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. Download The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way by Bill Bryson in PDF EPUB format complete free. What are the characteristics of the language that made it easier for people all over the globe to adopt and spread it?

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

A common scene when people from southern Europe and northern Europe are conversing, as at a cocktail party, is for the latter to spend the entire conversation stealthily retreating, to try to gain some space, and for the former to keep advancing to close the gap. That may seem a trifling point, but the slight evolutionary change that pushed man's larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well articulated speech. Language, never forget, is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.

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

Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson, Used - AbeBooks The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson, Used - AbeBooks

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.

That surely conveys a world of information about the hazards of Highland life—not to mention the hazards of Highland orthography. 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. Indeed, such is the demand to learn the language that there are now more students of English in China than there are people in the United States.