The Mother Tongue - Bill Bryson

   1990; 245 pages.  Full Title: The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Linguistics; Reference; English Language - History; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 10*/10.

 

   When you get right down to it, English is a poor choice for a global language.  Oh, there are worse ones, such as Mandarin Chinese which has thousands upon thousands of ideographs that you pretty much have to just memorize.  Or Basque, which has almost no words in common with any other tongue.

 

    There’s also well-intended things like Esperanto, foremost amongst about a half dozen artificial languages that were created with the intent of convincing the whole world (literally) to use them as a global tongue.  The problem is that they have zero native speakers, so you’re basically asking every person on Earth to learn a second language.

 

    So maybe English is not such a bad choice, despite the British and the Americans having different words for the same thing, different ways to spell words we have in common, different accents, and a different set of idioms to contend with, including the unfathomable Cockney rhyming.

 

    Perhaps it would behoove us to study up on the English language: learn its history, its subtleties, its variances, and its abundant inconsistencies.

 

    In other words, let’s read Bill Bryson’s fantastic book, The Mother Tongue.

 

What’s To Like...

    The Mother Tongue is divided into 16 chapters, namely:

01. The World’s Language

    An overview.  English’s strengths and weaknesses.

02. The Dawn of Language

    Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons.  Pidgins and Creoles.

03. Global Language

    Various “Endangered” Languages.

04. The First Thousand Years

    From 450 AD to Shakespeare.

05. Where Words Come From

    Five different ways that words come into being.

06. Pronunciation

    It changes over time.

07. Varieties of English

    Dialects.

08. Spelling

    Weird spellings in English.  Spelling reform movements.

09. Good English and Bad

    How “proper” grammar is constantly changing.

10. Order Out of Chaos

    The history of dictionaries.

11. Old World, New World

    American vs. British English.  Cross-pollination.

12. English as a World Language

    Global mangling of English.  Esperanto.

13. Names

    Nobles, Streets, Pubs, Surnames, and Places.

14. Swearing

    Including euphemisms and etymology.

15. Wordplay

    Crossword puzzles, and other linguistic pastimes.

16. The Future of English

    Featuring the “English only” movement.

 

    I usually mark my favorite chapters in pink, but here, I loved them all.  Chapters 1-7 are the history of the English language, Chapters 8-10 focus on how grammar evolved, and Chapters 11-16 are an assortment of “fun” linguistic aspects of English.

 

    I was raised in Pennsylvania Dutch country, so I loved seeing that dialect getting some ink, ditto for the nearby town named “Intercourse”.  The section on the Basque language also resonated with me, since I read a Mark Kurlansky book about them earlier this year.  The review is here.

 

    The book is chock full of trivia and obscure facts.  The oldest sentence we have that was written in (early) English is “This she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman” and it's anatomically accurate to say you are capable of speaking because you can choke on food.  Interestingly, the traffic term “roundabout” was coined by an American living in Britain and replaced the clunkier phrase “gyratory circus.”

 

    The grammar sections were fascinating.  The esoteric and unintended word “Dord” was mentioned, and it was fun to see verb options such as dived/dove, sneaked/snuck, strived/strove, and wove/weaved are still a “whichever you want to use” sort of thing.

 

    The “fun” chapters were . . . well . . . lots of fun!  The full gamut of topics there is: crossword puzzles, Scrabble, palindromes, anagrams, lipograms (huh?), acrostics, rebuses, holorimes (what?), clerihews (say again?), spoonerisms, amphibology (oh, come on, now), and Cockney rhyming.

 

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.4/5 based on 3,299 ratings and 1,372 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.91/5 based on 39,484 ratings and 3,026 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    There is an occasional tendency in English, particularly in academic and political circles, to resort to waffle and jargon.  At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as “the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance.”  That is jargon—the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement—and it is one of the great curses of modern English.  (pg. 19)

 

    The combination “ng,” for example, is usually treated as one discrete sound, as in bring and sing.  But in fact we make two sounds with it—employing a soft “g” with singer and a hard “g” with finger.  We also tend to vary its duration, giving it fractionally more resonance in descriptive and onomatopoeic words like zing and bong and rather less in mundane words like something and rang.  We make another unconscious distinction between the hard “th” of those and the soft one of thought.  (pg. 87)

 

Imposing Latin rules on English structure is a little like trying to play baseball on ice skates.  (pg. 16)

    Frankly, I can’t find anything to grouse about in The Mother Tongue.  There are some cusswords, but that’s a given since there’s a whole chapter devoted to swearing, and it was enlightening to learn that the F-bomb is not an acronym of “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge”.

 

    It was therefore somewhat surprising to see its relatively low rating at Goodreads (3.91/5).  Most of the criticism there was about perceived inaccuracies detected about some of the non-English languages Bryson mentions.

 

    For instance, one reviewer was upset by Bryson’s assertion that the Finnish language contains no swear words, and gave several examples to disprove this.  Admittedly, my knowledge of Finnish is zilch, I suspect Bryson’s is close to that level also, so he was most likely relying on some Finnish-speaking expert's “facts”.  But let's get real now; this book isn’t about the Finnish tongue.  The low rating given by this reviewer is unmerited, and, to misquote Hamlet, “methinks he doth protest too much”.

 

    For me, The Mother Tongue was a thoroughly enlightening and educational read.  This was my eighth Bill Bryson book, but others were all either in the Historical or Travel genres.  It’s great to discover he’s just as skilled when it comes to writing a book about Linguistics.

 

    10 Stars.  We’ll close with an old children’s riddle which Bill Bryson says comes close to being an example of a holorime: “How do you prove in three steps that a sheet of paper is a lazy dog?”

      The answer is posted in the comments.