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. 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changed the way the world communicates and hence a lot of the content regarding the spread of languages is hopelessly outdated by now. We’ve seen how different migrant groups to the British Isles shaped the overall structure of the language, aided by individual innovators like Shakespeare, Johnson, and Webster. But now, let’s take a closer look to see how specific words came to be formed. Words come into being by five main processes:

Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language by Bill Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language by Bill

Cunt is perhaps the most obscene word in the English language, but it was entirely commonplace and inoffensive a few centuries ago, existing even in the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Throughout the history of the English language, however, there have been shifting definitions of which words were and weren’t considered offensive. What was perfectly acceptable in one era could be considered highly offensive in another. On the other hand, as a foreigner who had to learn English (and I’m native in non-Roman language), Bryson's insight in this area was particularly interesting and accurate for me. Especially when it comes to intricate English pronunciation. So a big plus for that. 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? I teach English as a foreign language but other than that linguistics and language learning is just a hobby, having said that, I know enough Irish, German, Czech, Russian and Spanish to know that the things he said about these languages are half truths or complete and utter codswallop. For example claiming that the German preposition/suffix "auf" is unusual among foreign words in that it has more than one meaning... anyone who has spent any time learning a language will tell you that all of them have words with dozens of meanings (Except maybe Esperanto?). Furthermore there is no preposition in any language that cannot be translated into at least three or four prepositions in English, nor are there any English prepositions that don't have numerous translations in the other language. That's just how prepositions are! They don't translate! 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 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. At first glance, it might seem unlikely that the native tongue of a people occupying just one part of an island off the coast of northwestern Europe would become the international language of business and diplomacy. To understand how this came to be, we need to understand the history of English and the processes by which it evolved into the language we speak and write today. What are the origins of English? What are the characteristics of the language that made it easier for people all over the globe to adopt and spread it? What quirks and features of English make it unique? And what is the future of the language? The History of English Roots of English

Mother Tongue: The English Language by Bill Bryson | Goodreads Mother Tongue: The English Language by Bill Bryson | Goodreads

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. 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. 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. 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.” 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.

PDF Summary Chapter 2: Later Development of English

In Chapter 2, we saw how the first English settlers were arriving in the New World just as major linguistic changes like the Great Vowel Shift were sweeping the mother country. This was an immediate point of divergence between what would become the two main branches of the language. I stopped reading, thinking I might accidentally absorb some of the "facts" and perpetuate them myself! Borrowing or adapting from other languages, as with a word like breeze, derived from the Spanish briza (although this particular word has become so thoroughly anglicized that we forget it is actually derived from a foreign source). 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: 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.

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

If you approach this book hoping for a scholarly analysis of the English language, you are going to be sorely disappointed. For that don't come to old Bill. 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. One thing you can be sure of - you won't be disappointed. I replied that in that case, Malayalam is my mother, and both Hindi and English are nannies. And I just happened to prefer my English nanny over my native one. She had no answer to that! 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).Moreover, English is based on a phonetic alphabet. That is, the written characters correspond to particular sounds. This is a great advantage and makes writing and pronouncing words simple, because there are only so many sounds that can be represented by the letters. It limits the number of characters that comprise the writing system. And the clue is right there in the term ‘Latin alphabet’ that it wasn’t originally crafted for use by English speakers, either.) I'm a longtime fan of Bill Bryson, but I had never read this early nonfiction work of his and was delighted to see that my library had a copy of the audiobook. 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.”