Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

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In that way, this book is showing its age -- the chapter on online language use is, of course, conspicuously absent -- but it's got the history part down. One of the aspects that sets English apart from other languages is the richness of its vocabulary, which is owed in large part to its multiplicity of synonyms for nearly every word. 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. The average English speaker confronted with agglomerations of letters like tchst, sthm, and tchph would naturally conclude that they were pretty well unpronounceable. The fact that I learned them in one week, and remember them decades later, should be some indication of how easy they are.

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

November 2021: Went ahead and removed my 4 star rating for this book, which I read and reviewed in 2006. English is a member of the Germanic family of languages (the West Germanic branch, to be precise), which is itself part of the larger Indo-European language family. The Italians even have a word for the mark left on a table by a moist glass (culacino) while the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, not to be outdone, have a word for the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey. This was an immediate point of divergence between what would become the two main branches of the language. But certain features of the language itself aided in its worldwide adoption by native speakers of other languages: Its spelling is relatively phonetic; it is almost entirely free of gendered nouns; and it lacks the accent marks and diacritics that subtly transform pronunciation.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 possesses a number of unique properties, quirks, and complexities that set it apart from other tongues. Linguists have yet to discover a single master Indo-European parent language or identify the precise geographical area where it may have originated. In this rhyming slang, the speaker replaces a word (like mate) with a multi-word phrase (like china plate), the last word of which rhymes with the word that’s been replaced.

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

We’ve seen how, even in its earliest stages, English was highly flexible in accepting new words from Norse and Norman French. This book has also been published in the UK by Penguin Books under the title Mother Tongue: The English Language. The names of Britain’s 70,000 or so pubs cover a broad range, running from the inspired to the improbable, from the deft to the daft.Of all the words in the English language that come from Latin, over half of them have changed with time. The complex origins of English in Britain can be traced back to a series of invasions and occupations of the island that became the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland).

Mother Tongue - Penguin Books UK

With dazzling wit and astonishing insight, Bill Bryson—the acclaimed author of The Lost Continent—brilliantly explores the remarkable history, eccentricities, resilience and sheer fun of the English language. Of course, not everyone in these countries actually speaks English (in fact, many people in the US and the UK don’t) but its widespread reach can’t be denied.

Bryson eventually disagrees with Burchfield for many of the same reasons, though he was unable to cite the internet as a factor. We in the English-speaking world take French leave, but Italians and Norwegians talk about departing like an Englishman, and Germans talk of running like a Dutchman. According to Professor Hubertus Menke, head of the German Department at Kiel University, the language is “very close to the way people spoke in Britain more than 1,000 years ago. For the same reasons, when the Swiss company Brown Boveri and the Swedish company ASEA merged in 1988, they decided to make the official company language English, and when Volkswagen set up a factory in Shanghai it found that there were too few Germans who spoke Chinese and too few Chinese who spoke German, so now Volkswagen’s German engineers and Chinese managers communicate in a language that is alien to both of them, English.