Mother Tongue: The English Language

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.

Reader Reviews:

Interesting but not for everyone (2/2 people found this helpful)

I liked this book. It is written with Bryson's usual witty and engaging style. It is a book that is absolutely of the high standard any reader of Bryson's previous books will have come to expect.

Having said that, this book is certainly not for everyone, even if you have thoroughly enjoyed many of Bryson's previous offerings. I have an amateur's interest in language and this book provided me with an informative introduction to its history and quirky nature. If you are not interested in the subject I think you will probably find this book very dull indeed.

There are some downsides to bare in mind, even for those with an avid interest. Firstly, it contains lots of list of words in the text which can be tedious, to the point where I was skipping whole paragraphs to get to the point. The second is that this book was written nearly 20 years ago and those with a background knowledge will realise that it is out of date in parts. This need not be a bad thing, as it stimulated me to consider how the English language has evolved in my lifetime.

Truth or Not? (4/4 people found this helpful)

I found, for the most part of reading, this book to be very entertaining and informative. I read a few other Bryson books in the past, about travelling etc... but as an English teacher, well TEFL teacher, I thought this would be a great book to use quotes from for anecdotes during my lessons.

The problem occurred near the start of chapter 14 (out of 16).

Quote:
"Some cultures don't swear at all..... The Finns, lacking the sort of words you need to describe your feeling when you stub your toe getting up to answer a wrong number at 2.00 a.m., rather oddly adopted the word ravintolassa. It means 'in the restaurant'."

This is utter, for lack of a better word, hevosenpaska (literal translation "Horse S**t"). I have NEVER in my 10 years living in Finland heard anyone shout out RAVINTOLASSA, unless of course there were too many people in the restaurant and the guy was shouting into his mobile saying where he is. The Finns have quite a few swear words in their vocabulary that can be heard way too often.

So this led me to thinking, "if this is so way off track when it comes to Finland, what about the rest of the book when he writes about cultures I'm not familiar with?"

This has taken the shine off what I thought was an excellent piece of writing and that's why I'm giving it 2/5.

Sorry

Nice but not reliable (3/3 people found this helpful)

I agree with those who say that it is a pleasant book. It should learn us something and it does, but I can't accept the enormous mistakes the author wrote. When an author writes this kind of book he is supposed to know its subject thoroughly and assert only proven and reliable facts, not approximations. It is evident that the author doesn't master the French language; otherwise he would not pretend that only the English language makes the difference between house and home while the French has only one word: maison. What about the word foyer? It is one example amongst others I noted. My question is: if I noted mistakes about such simple, evident and basic subjects, what about the author's statements about subjects or facts I don't know of?
My conclusion would be: a nice book but not to rely on.

Good, but not Brysons best (1/1 people found this helpful)

This book is slightly disspointing, given the very high standards that we are used to from BB. Still, it is a probably a worthwhile read.

Some other reviewers have commented on the book being full of mistakes and false claims. There are several, and it was dissappointing that someone of BB's quality should feel the need to embelish his book with these. However, the reader should not treat this as a serious work on linguistics, but rather as a popular and light hearted overview.

BB does provide some good insights into the history of English and the English. For example, he rightly casatigates the public school obsession with applying Latin grammar to a Germanic language as trying to apply the rules of baseball to football.

For anyone who wants a serious read on this topic I can most strongly recomend Melvyn Bragg's "The Adventure of English".

Full of errors and dangerously misinformative (3/17 people found this helpful)

I go along with many reviewers that Bryson makes a lot of errors because he's not a journalist, or a linguist. I'm only curious in one thing, though, from my point of view. He claims that only 8% of Albanian words are of native origin. Just like the other hundreds of languages he pretends to know of, I'm sure he's done his research, but I'd like to know where he got that information from. If I could speak to him 50 Albanian words perhaps he could tell me where 41 of those are borrowed from.This and countless other mistakes concerning other languages may seem irrelevant to the English speaker, but are dangerous when people take them as fact and pretend ,just like Bryson, that that is the truth. A bit rich coming from a guy who can't speak another language. He should have gone and actually tried to learn one instead. Oh, English as well.

Mother Tongue: The English Language

Bill Bryson

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