review í PDF, DOC, TXT or eBook Ï Bill Bryson
Only Bill Bryson could make a book about the English language so entertaining. With his boundless enthusiasm and restless eye for the absurd, this is his astonishing tour of English.
From its mongrel origins to its status as the world's most-spoken tongue; its apparent simplicity to its deceptive complexity; its vibrant swearing to its uncertain spelling and pronunciation; Bryson covers all this as well as the many curious eccentricities that make it as maddening to learn as it is flexible to use.
Bill Bryson's classic Mother Tongue is a highly readable and hilarious tale of how English came to be the world's language. The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way
November 2021: Went ahead and removed my 4 star rating for this book, which I read and reviewed in 2006. 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. I don't read or recommend his books anymore.
Here's my original review from 2006, preserved as an artifact of how I was wrong:
Published in 1990, this book is already a little out of date. In its first pages, Bryson reports OED editor Robert Burchfield's theory that American English and British English are drifting apart so rapidly that within two hundred years we won't be able to understand each other. That was a theory made back when cell phones still required a battery the size of an unabridged dictionary, long before the internet became such a large part of the way the world communicates, in a time when you couldn't imagine downloading a British Doctor Who or an American Stargate Atlantis to your iPod. We live in a new world! Unfortunately it's also a world where the Harry Potter books are translated for American readers, lest we be too confused by the lingo: What's this? Harry's eating a biscuit? And wearing a jumper? While battling Fizzolian Snargletoothed Whatsits?! This book is impenetrable! JK Rowling aside, with communication technology becoming smaller, cheaper, and more powerful, I think we'll still be able to communicate two hundred years down the line. Bryson eventually disagrees with Burchfield for many of the same reasons, though he was unable to cite the internet as a factor.
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. Bryson spends most of his time looking at how we got where we are today. Where English came from, how it got to England, where it went from there. With its in-text references, footnotes, extensive bibliography and index, this book looks almost academic, but Bryson, an American living in England, handles it all with a cheerfully low-key sense of humor -- almost as if Terry Pratchett had turned his eye to grammar -- and even a refreshingly open approach to the word fuck in the chapter on swearing.
My one complaint is that, despite being loosely hung on British and American history, for the most part the book lacks a greater structure and ends up reading like a series of interesting facts. But, hell, they got my attention, and, as it happened, the attention of everyone around me: Hey! Did you know the Romans had no word for grey? Since English, as this book proves, is a big crazy mess, I guess Bryson can be excused for not being able to wrangle its history into a more pleasing order. Lack of structure aside, I really enjoyed reading this and will be reading more books by Bryson in the future. English The one thing that bothered me the most about this book was a huge error it had on swearwords, in reference to my mother tongue Finnish:
(p. 210, Ch. Swearing, in my Penguin paperback:) “Some cultures don’t swear at all. (…) The Finns, lacking the sort of words you need to describe your feelings when you stub your toe getting up to answer a phone at 2.00 a.m., rather oddly adopted the word “ravintolassa.” It means ‘in the restaurant.’
I mean, what the hell?! We Finns have probably the world's most colourful collection of swearwords. Someone pulled old Bill's leg, and did it properly too. That casts doubt on all he has written, really. And nobody says ravintolassa unless they do in fact mean in the restaurant.
English 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.
My problem with this book is that it gets so much right, and so much wrong. The example that really set me off was his treatment of the Welsh language. To Bryson, Welsh is as unpronounceable as it looks, and Welsh pronunciations rarely bear much relation to their spellings. He then spouts off with a series of jokes that are so ethnocentric and condescending that, if you took them at face value, you couldn't help but feel sorry for the poor backward speakers of silly old Welsh.
The problem is, he's completely wrong. I happened to study the phonology and orthography of Welsh for about a week in that freshman linguistics class (I know, that makes me a big authority, right?) but in that week I learned something Bryson apparently never bothered to look up: Welsh orthography is remarkably regular, about as regular as Spanish. It's not at all difficult if you bother to learn the rules, which are far simpler than those of English. (The fact that I learned them in one week, and remember them decades later, should be some indication of how easy they are.) The phoneme represented by the double-l is called a lateral fricative, and yes, it's hard to pronounce if you don't speak Welsh, but that does not mean it's sometimes pronounced kl and other times thl as Bryson suggests. It is always pronounced just like it's spelled. But Bryson's Anglo-American tin ear failed to pick that up, and he took his ignorance and turned it into a cheap joke at another culture's expense.
Knowing that he got Welsh so wrong made me doubt all of the rest of the information in the book. And that's a real shame, because it covers such fascinating topics, and it's so very entertainingly written. But it's hard to enjoy Bryson's jokes when you have this nagging suspicion that he's bending the truth for the sake of a snappy punchline.
English The Mother Tongue is the story of the evolution of the English language, from its humble beginnings as a Germanic tongue to what it has evolved into over the centuries.
So, Bill Bryson + cheap equals insta-buy for me, apparently. Too bad even Bill Bryson couldn't make this terribly entertaining.
I have a long history as the obscure facts guy at social gatherings, at least, I did when people still invited me to such things. However, even I had trouble sticking with this one at times.
Old Bill is in fine form, cracking wise and still being informative at every opportunity. He didn't get much in the way of interesting material to work with in this case.
The book was not without its moments, however. I did enjoy the chapter on swearing, as well as numerous tidbits, or titbits, as they were called in a less prudish era, that peppered the other chapters. Too bad the gems were scarce and some of the reading resembled the back-breaking labor involved in mining.
While I found the book informative and mildly amusing, at the end of the day, it's still a book about the history of words. Even one of the funnier travel writers alive can't make chicken salad from chicken feathers in this case. 2.5 out of 5. English Ever since I learned to read, English has been my favourite language - I took to it like a duck takes to water (at least, I guess they take to it willingly, and that baby ducks are not paddled until their feathers fly by Mamma Duck to make them). This was the cause of the eternal chagrin of my mother who, being a staunch nationalist, wanted me to prefer Hindi over English. She recited to me a famous couplet in Malayalam, which said:
Other languages are merely nannies;
For man, the native tongue is the mother.
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!
Well, I am glad I stuck to English over Hindi, because this is one crazy nanny - totally idiosyncratic and eccentric, just like me. And to tell you how eccentric, who better than Bill Bryson?
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.
This book is a linguistic, historical and geographical romp through English wherein Bill tackles such varied subjects as
1. The origin and spread of English
2. The evolution of words
3. Pronunciation
4. Spelling
5. The varieties of English, both inside the UK and outside
6. Dictionaries and their producers
7. Where names come from
8. Profanity
9. Wordplay
... and much more.
There is not a single boring sentence. You are guaranteed to be snickering throughout. English
Sorry Mr Bryson, but as a historical linguist of English myself, I cannot take this book seriously. There are simply too many mistakes that have no place in a well-researched book. The subject matter is not that hard, so I can only guess The Mother Tongue was written in such a hurry that you only consulted one or two sources, where it should have been five or six. The history of English is not something you learn from reading one textbook; there is a lot of ongoing research and debate. And most of your sources are a decade or two out of date, even for 1991. Get your facts straight and publish a revised edition is the best advice I can give you.
And as for my fellow readers: buy David Crystal's The Stories of English instead. Far better researched and just as entertaining. English 1★ (DNF)
I thought this would be fun. I love words and languages and have a passing interest in linguistics. I started this with enthusiasm and was enjoying his breezy style until it occurred to me that a lot of what he was saying seemed to be anecdotal. You know, limited or no research.
Then I thought, well, it was written more than 25 years ago, so things that sounded like old stories to me may have been new stories then – like this one:
“The Eskimos, as is well known, have fifty words for types of snow—though curiously no word for just plain snow. To them there is crunchy snow, soft snow, fresh snow, and old snow, but no word that just means snow.”
There’s a wealth of articles about this half-truth (I’m being generous). Here’s one http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca...
So how many grains of salt would I need to swallow the declaration that immediately followed? An unhealthy amount, I’m sure.
“The Italians, as we might expect, have over 500 names for different types of macaroni.”
He goes on to say these include “spaghetti and vermicelli.” He obviously means types of pasta.
Then he got into some languages I have a smattering of myself – French and German—and I began questioning. Some of it just sounded wrong, like the quote from an article that says most speakers of other languages aren’t aware there is such a thing as a thesaurus.
At this point, I decided I’d read some reviews to see if anyone who knows more than I do felt the same way. Sadly, there are a lot. You can check the low-rating reviews on Amazon that actually discuss the many factual errors.
I stopped reading, thinking I might accidentally absorb some of the facts and perpetuate them myself!
How disappointing. One star for the writing. English 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!
The first chapter of this book has so many mistakes that I couldn't finish it. Almost every sentence has a mistake.
It is a collage of newspaper clippings. If you read the credits at the back you'll see that he only consulted newspapers and magazines and did no real research.
I can't go through all the mistakes, I really don't have the time, there are just too many. If it continues in this way then this is a work of complete and utter fiction.
I loved A Short History of Nearly Everything and now I am frightened that if I knew anything whatsoever about Everything I would have found that that book too was filled with amusing but completely made up factoids. English What a hilarious, fascinating, and educational look at our wacky, wonderful, and WAY complicated language. If English is your mother tongue, this book will amaze and amuse you with interesting tidbits about just how our language evolved into the wonder it is. If you had to learn English as a second language (and more power to you), then bless your heart for taking on the task. You will read this book, and say YES, absolutely, I always wondered..., etc. Bill Bryson turns his sharp-eyes to The Mother Tongue and takes us all on a fabulous journey through and overview of the intricacies of human language. You will laugh, smile, and learn a few things while you're at it!!! English Where to begin? The Mother Tongue is a book which is not merely not good: it is maddeningly terrible, riddled with factual errors and utterly lacking in self-awareness. I don’t expect Bill Bryson to be clairvoyant, of course, and a book written in 1991 about the history of language can be forgiven for having predicted neither the rise of the internet nor the scientific breakthroughs that proved that modern humans and Neanderthals interbred. But even setting issues like that aside, there are so many mistakes here, both in Bryson’s discussion of the English language itself and in his characterisation of the other languages he uses as comparatives.
Bryson repeatedly shows that he doesn’t understand what he’s talking about when it comes to the English language. Take this for instance:
“A rich vocabulary carries with it a concomitant danger of verbosity, as evidenced by our peculiar affection for redundant phrases, expressions that say the same thing twice: beck and call, law and order, assault and battery, null and void…”
Except that none of these are examples of redundancy? A beck is a gesture and a call is verbal; a law is a codified rule and order is a lack of chaos, and so on. What we’ve got is a use of related ideas in order to create a broader overlapping concept. He generally shows a confused understanding of a lot of grammatical concepts/parts of speech, and is inconsistent in his conception of the relationship of spelling to spoken language.
Then again, he seems to think that Pennsylvania Dutch is a form of pidgin English, so perhaps that’s unsurprising!
To focus on the languages I know best out of those he discusses—Irish, Hiberno-English, and French—is to make me sigh heavily. His discussion of Irish and Hiberno-English was full of mistakes and condescension. He claims that Irish people pronounce the word “girl” as “gull” (I said “girl” to myself in a variety of Irish accents as I made a cup of tea just now to see if I could figure out where he was coming from, and nope), says that the phonetic rendering of “Taoiseach” in English is “tea-sack”, and more. Has Bryson ever spoken to an Irish person?
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.
(And the clue is right there in the term ‘Latin alphabet’ that it wasn’t originally crafted for use by English speakers, either.)
(Also, Irish and Welsh orthography is far more internally consistent than is that of English—but Bryson only allows the features of English to be virtues.)
The final bit of assholery is that he excuses British imperialism in Ireland and its policies both direct and indirect aimed at the destruction of the Irish language on the basis that, well, it’s given him more English-language literature to enjoy.
“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.”
Let me draw upon all of my Irishness here, Bill, to point out first the fact that translators exist; second, that Irish writers are not writing for you; and third, fuck you, you scuttering gobshite.
Bryson’s clearly lived in England long enough to have imbibed the British combativeness towards the French. He’s sneery enough towards the Académie Française to make me eyeroll even though I think the Académie is full of jackasses, and makes bizarre pronouncements about the French language that a quick look at the dictionary would have proved wrong. (The French don’t have the breadth of vocabulary to distinguish between “man” and “gentleman”, the way English speakers do, proclaims Bryson. “Homme” and “gentilhomme”? They can’t distinguish between “mind” and “brain”! Uh, “esprit” and “cerveau”?)
And then there’s the racism. His use of “we” oscillates throughout, from encompassing British people, to American people, to a kind of Anglo-American hybrid, but there’s always the underlying assumption that the English speaker who will pick this book up will be one of the two, and almost certainly white. He refers to Spanish as an “immigrant” language to the U.S. in comparison to English, when there have been Spanish speakers in what is now the U.S. for longer than there have been English speakers, I’m pretty sure. Then there’s a strong undercurrent throughout of racialising language, making it reflect something both innate and straight-jacketing about those who speak non-English languages—“Orientals”, for example, are “inscrutable” who just can’t do honest business like those straight-talkin’ Anglo-Saxons. Then there’s absolute bullshit like this discussion of Australia:
“When the first inhabitants of the continent arrived in Botany Bay in 1788 they found a world teeming with flora, fauna, and geographical features such as they had never seen. “It is probably not too much to say,” wrote Otto Jespersen, “that there never was an instance in history when so many new names were needed.” Among the new words the Australians devised, many of them borrowed from the aborigines, were…”
That’s some magic trick, to have a land which is both entirely uninhabited when the white folks show up but which also has indigenous people living there to just offer up words for colonisers to “borrow”!
Awful. Awful. I’m now retrospectively mad, five years later, that I once attended a talk by this man. Avoid.
The audiobook narrator was also bad. Not only did he clearly do little by way of preparatory work for discussion of the non-English words (I think I replayed his attempt at the Irish word “geimhreadh” 3 or 4 times because it was that bizarre), but also did things like repeatedly pronounce “short-lived” with the same I in “lived” as in “live music.” English
