4.5 stars (I noticed one innaccuracy, but other than that, great to read, as well as educational.)

A couple of friends of mine recommended Bill Bryson as an author, and this is the first book I got my hands on. While breezy and interesting, I guess I hoped for something more cohesive. Essentially, each chapter is a self-contained essay, some of which are at best tangentially related to how English got the way it is (a chapter on wordplay, for instance, told me nothing I didn't know and seemed like an excuse for Bryson to list some beloved palindromes).

I found chapters that explained how much of our language came from Latin, Norman, German, Gaelic and native tribes of the Americas more interesting, and what fossils of ancient grammar or words we can still find lying in the exposed dirt, as it were (child->children, man->men and woman->women are some of the mere handfuls of words left in our language where pluralization comes in the typical German way. Court martial and attorney general come from the Normans, who learned to place adjectives after nouns, like the French).

Anyhow, worth a quick read, which it is.

I teach English as a foreign language but other than that linguistics and language learning is just a hobby, having said that, I know enough Irish, German, Czech, Russian and Spanish to know that the things he said about these languages are half truths or complete and utter codswallop. For example claiming that the German preposition/suffix "auf" is unusual among foreign words in that it has more than one meaning... anyone who has spent any time learning a language will tell you that all of them have words with dozens of meanings (Except maybe Esperanto?). Furthermore there is no preposition in any language that cannot be translated into at least three or four prepositions in English, nor are there any English prepositions that don't have numerous translations in the other language. That's just how prepositions are! They don't translate!

The first chapter of this book has so many mistakes that I couldn't finish it. Almost every sentence has a mistake.
It is a collage of newspaper clippings. If you read the credits at the back you'll see that he only consulted newspapers and magazines and did no real research.
I can't go through all the mistakes, I really don't have the time, there are just too many. If it continues in this way then this is a work of complete and utter fiction.

I loved "A Short History of Nearly Everything" and now I am frightened that if I knew anything whatsoever about "Everything" I would have found that that book too was filled with amusing but completely made up factoids.

This is a good, concise, erudite, readable over-view of the history, present and future of the English language. Bryson is a funny man and a witty writer and this book ranges from the first recorded sentence in English - "This she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman" - to Cockney rhyming slang, though palindromes, anagrams and the politics of spelling. Recommended to anyone with any interest in our weird, wonderful, ever-evolving mother tongue.

Well done overview of language evolution aimed at the layman, but a bit dated (constant references to West Germany, all statistics 30+ years stale). Worth reading for any language or history wonk.

A fun read, but it goes on more than it needs to in order to make certain points and I found myself thinking I really got most of this in Lederer's books such as Anguished English. I do want to try and do some more reading on language origins at some point, but something that doesn't just dabble around the outlines. Bryson's an entertaining writer, but he's written better books.

Delightfully written with hilarious real-life examples of misunderstandings due to misinterpretation of languages, and anecdotes that complement its chapters. Starts off strong, but sort of loses its momentum as the book nears the end and becomes more disjointed. Still a worthy and rather quick read!

For an entertaing treatment by a well-informed author, see

The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language by Melvyn Bragg. Also a mini-series: imdb.com/title/tt0343228

or

The Stories of English by David Crystal.

I think one of the reasons I love discussions of etymology and language evolution is because they open up the doors to finding similarities (or anachronisms) between and among languages. I remember the first time I learned that ghost and guest and host all have the same root (via the history of English podcast, check it out!) and how mindblowing and also somehow satisfying that was. This book gave the same sense.

I have to say, I think the author did a pretty good job for his time (this book is 32 years old) but I felt there was a LOT of American exceptionalism which is an ideology I don’t subscribe to. I also always like a little more nuance into the type of people who use different dialects - like gender/race/social status/sexual orientation - and how their dialect is used to signify/hide their identity. This book, aside from a few mentions of Black Americans, largely makes it sound like everyone from X place talks roughly the same way. I don’t think that the author actually believes that, though, but would have loved to see that called out more explicitly even if he didn’t have time to explore.

I also do wish he had used the IPA to write out his phonetic pronunciations because I don’t know how he necessarily was thinking of them.

If you like languages or linguistics this is for you! I would definitely read more by this author and of course more on this topic. Very quick and readable.

An entertaining read full of interesting facts. However it did feel a little outdated, which is not really a surprise considering it was published in 1990.

This was an eye opening book about how English has morphed into what it is today. I'm going to use parts of it for mini etymology lessons for my students.

Also see my review on my book blog: http://quirkyreader.livejournal.com/1...

The Mother Tongue is somewhat dated. I did not realize it was published in 1990 until hearing "Soviet Union" mentioned in the present tense. His view about machine translation is way out-of-date. He talks about a giant Chinese keyboard, which in fact never caught on. 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. It gained popularity before being replaced by the Intelligent Pinyin method, which facilitates the standard phonetic representation of Chinese characters. Of course, Bill Bryson couldn't have foreseen how the Internet would change English (it would be interesting to know).

He certainly loves English. 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. 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. No country has given the word incomparable literature per head of population than Ireland, and for that reason alone we might be excused to a small, "selfish" celebration that English was the language of her greatest writers." This is a hindsight bias.

Nevertheless, it's a fun read. I've learned a lot. Maoris of New Zealand have 35 words for dung. The Arabs have 6000 words for camels and camel equipment. The aborigines of Tasmania have a word for every type of trees but no word for the concept of tree. The word "nice" meant "stupid and foolish" in 1290. In the next 700 years, its meaning has changed so many times that it is impossible to tell what sense Jane Austen intended when she wrote to a friend: "You scold me so much in a nice long letter which I have received from you." The differences between American English and British English make me laugh! The history of swear words is fascinating. "Bloody" was worse than the F-word? And those Victorian sensibilities! Who knew the biggest contribution of American English to the language was actually "OK"!

I agree that the many native English speakers don't bother to learn a second language.

After reading this book, I decide to be less harsh on my own accent.