Bryson eventually disagrees with Burchfield for many of the same reasons, though he was unable to cite the internet as a factor. Bryson's love for his native English is clear enough; so is his painfully obvious lack of knowledge of any other languages. Inventiveness, originality and pleasure run through every page… the recipes are consistently inviting, and more than occasionally wow-out-loud thrilling… book of the month.

The Mother Tongue - English And How It Got That Way The Mother Tongue - English And How It Got That Way

If you had to learn English as a second language (and more power to you), then bless your heart for taking on the task. Of course, Bill Bryson couldn't have foreseen how the Internet would change English (it would be interesting to know). It's true that there are a thousand interesting things to encounter in the history of the English language, replete as it is with situations of language contact.His discussion of pronunciation and particularly the shifts in vowel sounds was fascinating, For example house was once pronounced hoose.

The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way - Goodreads The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way - Goodreads

For example claiming that the German preposition/suffix "auf" is unusual among foreign words in that it has more than one meaning. Loyal recognises food can be “such an emotive and emotional facet to identity”, but says: “That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go out and be adventurous and curious. To them there is crunchy snow, soft snow, fresh snow, and old snow, but no word that just means snow. 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. 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.

November 2021: Went ahead and removed my 4 star rating for this book, which I read and reviewed in 2006.

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He surveys the history of language, the world's language families and where English is situated in the Indo-European stream, and all the other offshoots, some which are no longer living languages. I found Bryson's book a delightful diversion that better helped me understand both the joy of using this language and the frustrations of rendering the conceptions of mind into words that communicate. In this respect, if the parable ‘ Feathers from a Thousand Li Away’ acts as preface to the novel, ‘Mother Tongue’, in effect, acts as a kind of postscript. On the dying of Irish (as a language), he says: "we naturally lament the decline of these languages, but it's not an altogether undiluted tragedy. 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'm looking forward to reading A Brief History of Everything next before moving onto his well-liked travel stories.