If you're a literary or linguistics nerd like I am, then you'll probably appreciate The Mother Tongue as much as I did. I found if fascinating and hilarious at the same time. English as a language, written and spoken, comes from a variety of sources, some legitimate and others, less so. But it's all come together to make the complex rules and pronunciations we love and love to hate today.

It seems that scholars have been predicting a split in British and American English for decades and as yet, the two cultures miraculously can still understand one another. Seems like some predictions just never come true.

The book was published in 1990 and it could use some updating. Why not a whole chapter on how texting has further influenced our Anglophone penchant for shortening words and phrases. Otherwise I loved learning where some of our more familiar idioms and phrases came from.

3,5 stars

This book took me much longer to finish than I would have expected based on the page count; thankfully, my slower reading doesn't say anything about my enjoyment of the book.

I'll be honest, I am not one who quickly picks up non-fiction, I like it when my books involve people who I follow on a journey (so I guess biographies would still work), and so a book on the evolution of the English language is not much like my usual reading. That being said as a reader and someone who likes to write, I think the topic was incredibly interesting.

Bryson has a funny writing style and sense of humor which were right up my alley. The way he presents information made me laugh at multiple occasions, which I think is quite a feat when presenting an abundance of facts on a topic which could easily be explained dully. Thankfully Bryson knows how to write, and has found many funny examples and anecdotes to present his book, including a chapter on the development of Swearing in English, which I found really funny.

This book is full to the brim with facts and information, something which is probably partly to blame for the slower read, because I need more time to process it, but it also means that I learned an awful lot from this book; and not just about Language Development. I learned some facts about History, I learned about crazy American town names, English words I had never heard of and many other things.

As someone for whom English is not my first Language, this book made me wonder why it is I find writing in English easier than my first Language, and also confused me at times with the terms describing words; I know Adjective, adverbs etc. but many others I never learned or have since forgotten since my English classes, which made certain passages slightly harder to read.

But overall, this book was funny and informative, and although I do not think I will read this book again, I enjoyed it a lot, and can recommend it to anyone who loves writing, reading and language.

I picked this up thinking that Bryson had, in my experience, always been entertaining, witty and informative and that this was a topic of much interest to me, so how could I go wrong?

Well, a sample of two is not enough to go on, apparently because this turned out disappointing, for two primary reasons:

1. It was first published in 1990 and it has not aged well. Some statistics are well out of date, Bryson using a figure of 56 million for the population of Britain, with 60 million more accurate at the time I write, for example. The political position has moved on, too.

2. Errors and inconsistencies. Some statements are just plain wrong. At one point Bryson says that the Irish Prime Minister's title sounds like "tea-sack" when rendered into phonetic English spelling. This is just incoorect; it is more like "tea-shock" even "tea-shop" if one was not listening attentively. Bryson says that the six Celtic languages arose from one predecessor called Celtic. Every other source I've read uses the term Brythonic for this extinct predecessor. It's possible that philologists have changed their terminology and don't use the term "Brythonic" any more (just as they don't call themselves philologists anymore) but even if that is so, later Bryson suggests that Welsh is a Gaelic language, which no authority is going to agree with.

As far as inconsistencies go, two stick with me: First Bryson tacitly identifies himself with Britain in the early part of the book, then later on as American...perhaps not surprising considering his Pond hoping tendencies. The second is worse; in the chapter on American accents and dialects he starts by agreeing that the USA shows less regional variation than britain and ends suggesting that there is, in fact, one dialect per person....

The effect of these two problems is to, one way or another, call into question the validity of just about everything expressed as a statement of fact, unless one already knows of an independent authority who agrees. This is most unfortunate, as the topic is fascinating and the writing is witty, though sometimes angry; English is also emotive!

Bill Bryson has a laid back, whimsical writing style. He is a good observer of people, and likes to point out the silliness of men and women, himself included, as they confront the absurdities of customs and cultures. His humor is never sarcastic or cruel, and at his best he can be very funny. He is known for books where he is a stranger in a strange land, an outsider observing the day to day lives of people who are at once similar to and different from the reader and himself.

I was surprised that he had ventured into amateur linguistics for two of his books, this one and Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States, but since I too have an interest in words, their origins, associations, and changes in meaning over time, this book seemed like a good fit for me.

It is possible to combine linguistics and humor, and books like Howard Rheingold’s They Have a Word for It and Adam Jacot de Boinod’s The Meaning of Tingo are great fun to read, with their humor coming from the oddness of the words themselves, and what they reveal about the cultures they are part of. For instance, the Malay language has the word geragas, meaning ‘to comb one’s hair in anger,” and Indonesians have neko-neko, ‘to have a creative idea that only makes things worse.’ (I have worked on plenty of projects that have been neko-nekoed to death.) Kiriwana, in Papua New Guinea, has mokita, 'the truth that all know but no one talks about,' and German has a wonderful word that should be added to English, Backpfeifengesicht, meaning a face that is just asking to be punched.

Bryson’s book looks for humor in anecdotes, and covers the origins of English, pronunciation, spelling, dictionaries, swearing, and the like. Some of this observations are interesting, but many times he seems to be simply repeating long disproved urban legends, such as Inuit having many different words for snow. They have a few words for different kinds, which is understandable considering the climate they live in, but most of the alleged words are not about the snow itself but about living with it, traveling through it, or observing its effects on people and things.

The book also tries to find humor in the fact that because something is different from English, it must be weird. Bryson tries to keep his style light, but sometimes I wanted to say, “No, it’s not weird. They say it that way because that’s their word for it. English too has lots of words that must sound odd to speakers of other languages.”

In the end I was somewhat disappointed with this book. I have certain expectations of learning things even from the light reading I occasionally pick up. This one could have used an editor and a fact checker to weed out the too-good-to-be-true parts, but then, if those were removed it would have been a mighty short book.

I think one of the biggest struggles that I have with Bryson's work is that his books end, and sometimes it seems they take a meander down a lane that has no business being there. The magic tends to get a little lost in the hedgerows as the meander turns into the bulk of the book, and so you eventually emerge muddied, having learnt something about interesting brambles, but nonetheless slightly disgruntled that you missed what you actually came for. I think this is a really good example of it- the influence of other languages on English seems to have been largely missed, and strange developments of certain terms are well and good, but lack a certain base. If you were to pick a series about the English language, Fry's English Delight will always be the absolute pinnacle of linguistic enjoyment, and this, I'm afraid, falls sadly short.

Picked it up on a whim, knowing Bryson was easily digestible and I needed something light between courses of Bleak House. As the top reviews of this book can attest, the book is certainly wrong in a number of ways -- since I'm more familiar with Irish than Cree, I know he was certainly wrong about a number of things as Gaeilge. At first I thought his characterisation of Irish as dying in its native land as an outdated perception -- sure, I'm not fluent, and loathed the language in secondary school, but it's not at all dying, though it might've seemed so in the 90s -- but, continuing, I understood he was simply misinformed.

Since Bryson is the kind of writer that doesn't hold much scrutiny to a Google search, I can't really recommend this book, as most of the trivia I enjoyed could well be wrong. I don't regret reading, as often we can learn more from bad books than good, and this is a great example of a deceptive, entertaining, persuasive, bad book.

Some chapters caught my interest more than others, but this is packed full of interesting linguistics and examples. My favorite was the section on swearing!

Fascinating yes, but way more than I need to know. Too many long unpronounceable Welsh words, exceeded only by long unpronounceable German words. That said, Bryson’s knack for discovering minutiae is nothing short of amazing

Mother Tongue: Essays on the Origins and Usage of English
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. He's an interesting guy who grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, became a popular travel writer, and was even Chancellor of prestigious Durham University in the UK. So he's very much a bicultural American-Brit who can see different aspects of both societies from the inside and outside, and also has a wide-ranging intellect and deft sense of humor.

Mother Tongue is a series of essays on the origins of human language, with plenty of interesting scientific insights, then to the messy origins of English amid the various waves of invasions of the original Celtic peoples of Britain by Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans, Scandinavians (Vikings), and so forth, to its growing status as a global language. I enjoyed this part of the book the most, learning a lot about the origins of the language that was especially useful now that I live in England myself. I also didn't know that Latin evolved into French, Spanish, and Italian among other languages, to my embarrassment. Given the many travels we've had through Europe in the past two years, a lot of the early origins of the Celtic peoples in Europe and the migrations of various peoples across the continent and to the British isles during the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages is really fascinating stuff.

The middle portion of the book gets very involved in examining the evolution of English spellings and pronunciations as it moved from Old English to Modern English, and the further hiving off of American English from British English. Some of this was really illuminating, but the parts discussing the minute details of spelling and grammatical shifts were slow-going unless you are truly a student of the language and I found somewhat less interesting.

The chapter on swearing was quite funny, there's plenty to learn there. And throughout the book Bryson's humor makes the subject matter interesting. 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.

The book's 1990 publication also betrays its age as it is hopelessly out of date when describing how absurdly impractical the computer keyboards are for Chinese and Japanese users and how that has hindered their economic development. Can't blame a book for being out of date, so it's actually somewhat amusing to see how things can change so much in just a few decades.

I'm looking forward to reading A Brief History of Everything next before moving onto his well-liked travel stories.

I am an English teacher. I like grammar. It fascinates me. I like knowing big words and little words and word histories and word games. Being at a computer with access to the online version of the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) can provide me with endless hours of amusement. So, this book was a treat for me. Bill Bryson writes with an exuberance and excitement about what English (and language in general) is capable of that is infectious and uplifting. Though it is not a comprehensive history of the English tongue, it does drop in at key moment and point out some of the really interesting, weird, trivial tidbits. At the same time, he recognizes some of the strange idiosyncrasies of English that make it ridiculously difficult for non-native speakers to learn. Unlike other pieces on English I've read that are uncomfortably superior sounding, this one points out some of the places where other languages can easily express concepts that English speakers don't have precise words for. I also learned that a lot of the rules we hapless grammar teachers try to impart to our students have somewhat dubious origins. For instance, I learned that using a preposition at the end of a sentence, as I have just done a couple of sentences before, is only considered improper because a fellow who wrote an influential book on grammar in England decided HE thought it sounded common and ungraceful. I was also fascinated by all of the words that were once common in Britain that have fallen out of use there, are still in use here, and are now viewed as "Americanisms." In fact, the section on the "drift" between various English speaking countries was very neat. I knew a lot of the Brit-speak already (thank you, year in London and Age of Sail fandom...) but I really liked the argument that British English, Australian English, and American English aren't drifting apart as fast as they might because of the ease of communication and the media shared between the countries. It made a lot of sense to me.

Anyway, I found this to be a useful, witty, fun collection of facts and oddities concerning English.

Mother Tongue: The English Language, by Bill Bryson, London: Penguin Books, 1990 (link is to a different, in-print edition).

Summary: This amusing and informative book surveys the history of the English language and all its vagaries and perplexities of word origins, spellings, and pronunciations and why it has become so successful as a world language.

Has it every occurred to you how many different meanings there are for the word fly? 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. As in so many of Bryson's books, he had me at the opening page as he explored some of the perplexities of our language that native speakers negotiate almost without thought. He had me in the first chapter as he proposed that part of the success of the language is the incredible richness of vocabulary (at the time of publication, the OED had 615,000 words), flexibility of usage, and relative simplicity, particularly in comparison to tonal languages of rendering the language in print.

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. He recounts the triumph of Anglo-Saxon language over Celtic (even though many of England's place names preserve their Celtic roots), the impact of the Norman invasion (of 10,000 words, approximately 3/4ths are still in use including much of the language of nobility (duke, baron prince) and much language of jurisprudence (justice, jury, prison among others). He explores the different ways words are created, sometimes by doing nothing! His discussion of pronunciation and particularly the shifts in vowel sounds was fascinating, For example house was once pronounced hoose. You weren't born in a barn but barn in a born.

Then there is the matter of spelling and the role of printing and dictionaries in bring a greater if not complete uniformity to spelling--is it ax or axe, judgment or judgement (it is fascinating that the spell check in this word processor highlighted the latter of these two, and yet both are accepted with the shortened forms preferred). 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. Similarly, we have the divergences between New World and Old and some wonder whether American English will become a distinct language.

Bryson's concluding chapters explore the origins of proper names, our propensity for wordplay, and the history of what are now considered vulgarities (although I think since Bryson wrote, what was censored in from public media in my youth is becoming more and more common). What is fascinating is that many of these were once in common parlance in Chaucer and Shakespeare. Equally fascinating are our various forms of wordplay, the ultimate of which must be the palindrome where a sentence says the same thing forwards and backwards (an example from the book: "A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.")

Anyone who writes can understand the challenges of finding the right rather than the almost right word, and how easy it is to think you are saying one thing only to be understood by others as saying the opposite. 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.

8/10.

Bryson has written a fun and irreverent book about the English language, its variations, and its history. Linguistics has to be written entertainingly, for no one wants to plow through a dictionary to learn of the transformations of his language. Instead, one needs a pithy exposition of word changes, pronunciation differences, humorous uses of English in foreign lands, proper nouns, and idioms. With these, one can get a better understanding of the speech and writing one uses so often. And that is what Bryson provides. Some various insights:

To "atone" is descended from the word "at-one", e.g. to at-one one's self with God after sinning. It used to be pronounced "at-one" and I think it makes a lot more sense if one still pronounces it that way again.

The derogatory term for a herdlike mass, "mob", is descended from the Latin term mobile vulgus, which means "fickle crowd". A fitting term.

The saying "the exception proves the rule" does not mean that an exception is a proof of the rule. The verb "proves" is used in the sense as it is in "proving ground", i.e. a ground which tests one's abilities. So the saying "the exception proves the rule" actually means: the exception tests whether the rule is actually true.

"Goodbye" used to be "God-be-with-you", "daisy" used to be "day's eye" (an apt description), and "hello" was probably "whole-be-thou".

"Most surnames come . . . from one of four sources: place-names (e.g. Lincoln, Worthington), nicknames (Whitehead, Armstrong), trade names (Smith, Carpenter), and patronymics, that is names indicating a familial relationship (Johnson, Robertson)". Surnames came into being in the 14th and 15th centuries, when England passed laws requiring the government to collect peoples' names, their occupation, and their place of residence. They needed to distinguish between people with the same first name, hence the need for surnames. The reason why place-name surnames from big cities (e.g. London) are so rare is that names must identify a particular person. If there are 400 Johns in London, then the surname "London" will be useless. Therefore, most English place-name surnames came from small localities.