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The Mother Tongue - English And How It Got That Way, by Bill Bryson
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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. From the first descent of the larynx into the throat (why you can talk but your dog can't), to the fine lost art of swearing, Bryson tells the fascinating, often uproarious story of an inadequate, second-rate tongue of peasants that developed into one of the world's largest growth industries.
- Sales Rank: #18592 in Books
- Color: Multicolor
- Brand: Bryson, Bill
- Published on: 1990
- Released on: 2001-10-23
- Ingredients: Example Ingredients
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .72" w x 5.31" l, .45 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 272 pages
Amazon.com Review
Who would have thought that a book about English would be so entertaining? Certainly not this grammar-allergic reviewer, but The Mother Tongue pulls it off admirably. Bill Bryson--a zealot--is the right man for the job. Who else could rhapsodize about "the colorless murmur of the schwa" with a straight face? It is his unflagging enthusiasm, seeping from between every sentence, that carries the book.
Bryson displays an encyclopedic knowledge of his topic, and this inevitably encourages a light tone; the more you know about a subject, the more absurd it becomes. No jokes are necessary, the facts do well enough by themselves, and Bryson supplies tens per page. As well as tossing off gems of fractured English (from a Japanese eraser: "This product will self-destruct in Mother Earth."), Bryson frequently takes time to compare the idiosyncratic tongue with other languages. Not only does this give a laugh (one word: Welsh), and always shed considerable light, it also makes the reader feel fortunate to speak English.
From Publishers Weekly
Bryson's blend of linguistic anecdotes and Anglo-Saxon cultural history proves entertaining but superficial. "While his historical review is thorough. . . he mostly reiterates conventional views about English's structural superiority," said PW. "He retells old tales with fresh verve . . . but becomes sloppy when matters of rhetoric and grammar arise."
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
YA-- Bryson traces the English language from the Neanderthal man of 30,000 years ago to the present. Interestingly, he contrasts the language as it developed simultaneously in various locations. He also presents examples of the evolution of words and their spellings. The book is well researched and informative; the thorough index will aid novices in the exploration of the language.
- Diane Goheen, Topeka West High School, KS
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
651 of 715 people found the following review helpful.
A multitude of errors
By Whimemsz
This book is certainly amusing. It's very enjoyable for a novice to read.
But, as many others have pointed out, every page is just error after factual error. Bryson simply does not understand how languages work, and whatever his sources are are frequently wrong. My favorite mistake is when he claims that in Finnish, there is only one swear word, ravintolassa, meaning "in the restaurant" (page 214). Now, ravintolassa DOES mean "in the restaurant," but that's ALL it means. Finnish has plenty of native swear words (saatana, perkele, vittu, jumalauta, and more), and I still cannot imagine how Bryson came to the conclusion that, not only did it have only one, but that it was the word for "in the restaurant." It's truly mind-boggling.
Among my other favorite errors are when he says that "Estimates of the number of languages in the world usually fix on a figure of about 2,700" (page 37; all estimates I've ever seen generally give between 5,000 and 6,000). Or when he completely misunderstands the concept of case affixes when discussing Finnish (page 35; he seems to think that the various words created are utterly unanalyzable to the speakers. By analogy, then, English speakers would need to learn the plural word "cats" separately from the singular "cat," rather than simply extending their knowledge of the plural suffix -s to the word "cat." Bryson fails to make the rather important distinction between "word" and "root").
He also buys the extremely controversial arguments of people like Merritt Ruhlen and presents them as complete fact ("Recent studies of cognates...have found possible links between some of those must unlikely language parteners: for instance, between Basque and Na-Dene...and between Finnish and Eskimo-Aleut. No one has come up with a remotely plausible explanation of how a language spoken only in a remote corner of the Pyrenees could have come to influence Indian languages of the New World, but the links between many cognates are too numerous to explain in terms of simple coincidence" -- page 24). There hardly exists a serious linguist in the world who would agree with that statement.
And of course there is the famous "Eskimo" Words for Snow Myth, which results in large part from a total misunderstanding of the nature of polysynthetic languages (page 14).
Unfortunately, many of the errors Bryson makes are much harder to catch, in that they involve concepts (such as his apparent conviction that English is somehow unique among languages in its expressiveness and form...he also ironically says on page 17 that "most books on English imply in one way or another that our language is superior to all others"), rather than factual claims, since incorrect facts are easier to refute.
Throughout the book, Bryson repeatedly makes these types of inexcusable factual and conceptual errors, and as a result paints an inaccurate and deceptive picture of languages and linguistics in general. For this reason, I take issue with the reviewers who say that what matters is that the book is entertaining negates its errors. On the contrary, the entire point of the book is to tell the story of the English language, and Bryson, as a good writer who knows how to inject good humor into his work, makes it funny. But a the true purpose remains to educate people, and it fails miserably in this respect, and as a result, it fails as a whole. Adding humor cannot make a bad book into a good one.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
VERY POOR AUDIO QUALITY!
By Beulah
While I almost always enjoy the content and anecdotal style of Bill Bryson's books, the Bxxxxstxne Axdio audiobook version was quite disappointing due to it's mediocre audio quality. Frankly, I have (very venerable) audiobooks on audiocassettes that sound better. The tracks on these CDs simply lack dynamic range and "crispness" as if the narrator was speaking through a cardboard tube, and the quality of the sound is, after all, the whole point of buying a CD product instead of downloading some low bitrate MP3 version. Perhaps this is due in part to the use of cheap CDs - the CDs are - quite seriously - translucent. I can actually read text on my computer monitor THROUGH the CDs! I've never encountered THAT before!
So, high marks for the author (and narrator), but very low marks for Bxxxxstxne Axdio.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Second reading it is just as good
By Chris Thatcher
Not a travel book (except in a way it is a journey through the English language).
Easy to read but still challenging and fascinating.
I love this book and if you are in any way interested in how the English language developed (with some laughs along the way) then you will be too.
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