Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

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If you approach this book hoping for a scholarly analysis of the English language, you are going to be sorely disappointed. The French don’t have the breadth of vocabulary to distinguish between “man” and “gentleman”, the way English speakers do, proclaims Bryson. To them there is crunchy snow, soft snow, fresh snow, and old snow, but no word that just means snow. 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.

My wife was lent this book by a British friend of ours, but I decided to read it as I've heard about Bill Bryson's popular travel books like Notes from a Small Island and book A Brief History of Everything, about his travels through England before moving back to the US after a long time in his adopted home. 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. 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. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. Aluminium at least follows the pattern set by other chemical elements— potassium, radium, and the like.Other travel books include the massive bestseller Notes From a Small Island, which won the 2003 World Book Day National Poll to find the book which best represented modern England, followed by A Walk in the Woods (in which Stephen Katz, his travel companion from Neither Here Nor There, made a welcome reappearance), Notes From a Big Country and Down Under.

His new book The Body: A Guide for Occupants was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize and is an international bestseller.

At one point Bryson says that the Irish Prime Minister's title sounds like "tea-sack" when rendered into phonetic English spelling. 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.

Of course so much of this discussion is the concern of some to promote the good and proper use of the language, and yet what is fascinating is the shifting ideas through history of what this is, according to Bryson. I think I have read at least two of his works previously and he never disappoints in making me chuckled or even roaring with laughter. Unfortunately once it becomes clear that many of these factoids won't stand up to closer scrutiny -- Bryson doesn't even blink as he repeats the age-old and very disputed claim that the Eskimos have 50 words for snow -- it becomes hard to believe anything the book claims. Bryson's book on the English language is a compendium of linguistic trivia interspersed with the author's biased and misinformed musings on the history and features of the language. However, though he does make regular references to other languages, the book is by its nature extremely English-centric so many of the statements about how unique English is are almost certainly inaccurate as he is not so authoritative a linguist so much as a very well-informed enthusiast.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.