The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

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Why are these words so similar? An eighteenth-century English judge wondered the same thing – and his attempt to answer that question essentially launched the field of historical linguistics. 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. The Main Library is being renamed 'The Bill Bryson Library'!". Durham University. 25 September 2012 . Retrieved 27 November 2012. By 1640, there were over 20,000 titles available in English, more than there had ever been. As printed works produced by London printers began to spread across the country, local London spelling conventions gradually began to supplant local variations. What this also meant was that old spellings became fixed just as many word pronunciations were shifting because of the Great Vowel Shift. Our inheritance is a written language with many words spelled the way they were pronounced 400 years ago.

Bill Bryson library opens 200 new study spaces and 'Small Island' café – Palatinate". 21 February 2019. Throughout the later Middle Ages, English evolved organically and developed many of its more recognizable features. One such feature was uninflected verbs with stable consonants (in other words, they are mostly the same regardless of gender, tense, case, and mood). Another was the simplification of noun endings to denote plurals (almost all English nouns are today pluralized with the addition of a simple s at the end).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. Why was this book even published? There are so many errors, inaccuracies, misconceptions, misunderstandings and whatnot, I don't even know where to begin. (And I'm not even a linguist.) 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.

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. 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.Bryson, Bill (3 July 2014). "Interview: Bill Bryson". nursinginpractice.com. Interviewed by Jenny Chou. Cogora Ltd. Made in America (UK) / Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States (U.S.) In October 2010, it was announced that Bryson would step down as chancellor of Durham University at the end of 2011. [39] 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).

University of Winchester honours prominent figures at Graduation 2016". Archived from the original on 4 January 2017 . Retrieved 3 January 2017. Then again, he seems to think that Pennsylvania Dutch is a form of pidgin English, so perhaps that’s unsurprising! Bill Bryson receives Honorary Doctorate". University Business. 26 July 2015 . Retrieved 16 July 2018. 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.”Bill Bryson receives honorary doctorate". King's College London. 14 November 2012. Bill Bryson OBE: the UK's highest-selling author of non-fiction, acclaimed as a science communicator, historian and man of letters. Bill Bryson Library renaming event, Tuesday 27 November 2012". Durham University. 22 November 2012. The Brysons moved around the United Kingdom, living in Virginia Water (Surrey), Purewell (Dorset), Burton (Dorset), Kirkby Malham, and the Old Rectory in Wramplingham, Norfolk (2003–2013). [17] They currently live in rural Hampshire and maintain a small flat in South Kensington, London. [15] From 1995 to 2003 they lived in Hanover, New Hampshire. [18] Knowing that "The Mother Tongue" was published in 1990, I had fun imagining what additions Bryson would have added to the text today, knowing how many new words have been adopted since the Internet took over our world. Overall, this was a pleasant read and is a nice complement to other books that have been written about the English language. Recommended. All of this makes me question all the other "facts" I don't know anything about, I simply don't know if I've learned more about them from reading this book.