Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

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If English is your mother tongue, this book will amaze and amuse you with interesting tidbits about just how our language evolved into the wonder it is. Many of the 'facts' in the book sounded suspicious so I started looking them up elsewhere and found a great many to be wrong. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. 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.

With his boundless enthusiasm and restless eye for the absurd, this is his astonishing tour of English. He’s sneery enough towards the Académie Française to make me eyeroll even though I think the Académie is full of jackasses, and makes bizarre pronouncements about the French language that a quick look at the dictionary would have proved wrong. 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. In The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson's hilarious first travel book, he chronicled a trip in his mother's Chevy around small town America. But even setting issues like that aside, there are so many mistakes here, both in Bryson’s discussion of the English language itself and in his characterisation of the other languages he uses as comparatives.Consider this hearty announcement in a Yugoslavian hotel: 'The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid. His bestselling books include The Road to Little Dribbling, Notes from a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods, One Summer and The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.

The book discusses the Indo-European origins of English, the growing status of English as a global language, the complex etymology of English words, the dialects of English, spelling reform, prescriptive grammar, and other topics including swearing. It is probably not too much to say,” wrote Otto Jespersen, “that there never was an instance in history when so many new names were needed. A Short History of Nearly Everything was lauded with critical acclaim, and became a huge bestseller. His next book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, is a memoir of growing up in 1950s America, featuring another appearance from his old friend Stephen Katz. To focus on the languages I know best out of those he discusses—Irish, Hiberno-English, and French—is to make me sigh heavily.It can be an insect, a means of travel, a verb form of "to flee", something a fisherman ties, one of the results of a batter hitting a baseball, or something no man wants open in public. Consider the loss to English literature, if Joyce, Shaw, Swift, Yeats, Wilde, and Ireland's other literary masters have written in what inescapably a fringe language, their work will be as little known to us as those poets in Iceland or Norway, and that would be a tragedy indeed. It gained popularity before being replaced by the Intelligent Pinyin method, which facilitates the standard phonetic representation of Chinese characters.

I gave up; there's no point in learning a collection of made up 'facts', however interesting they seem. He claims that Irish people pronounce the word “girl” as “gull” (I said “girl” to myself in a variety of Irish accents as I made a cup of tea just now to see if I could figure out where he was coming from, and nope), says that the phonetic rendering of “Taoiseach” in English is “tea-sack”, and more.My one complaint is that, despite being loosely hung on British and American history, for the most part the book lacks a greater structure and ends up reading like a series of interesting facts.