Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

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It is not included in promotions available to our main range products, as stated in our terms of service. Well, I am glad I stuck to English over Hindi, because this is one crazy nanny - totally idiosyncratic and eccentric, just like me. I think what bothers me most is the very thinly veiled "linguo"centrism that turns it from a piece of enthusiastic writing about the English language into a poorly-argued case for why English is better than every other language on the planet. I'm a longtime fan of Bill Bryson, but I had never read this early nonfiction work of his and was delighted to see that my library had a copy of the audiobook. All of our books are 100% brand new, unread and purchased directly from the publishers in bulk allowing us to pass the huge savings on to you!

Unfortunately it's also a world where the Harry Potter books are "translated" for American readers, lest we be too confused by the lingo: "What's this? 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. Other travel books include the massive bestseller Notes From a Small Island, which won the 2003 World Book Day National Poll to find the book which best represented modern England, followed by A Walk in the Woods (in which Stephen Katz, his travel companion from Neither Here Nor There, made a welcome reappearance), Notes From a Big Country and Down Under. I mean, I'm aware of these differences (I am usually able to recognize an American and a British when I hear them), but I do not think I can pronounce the word first according to one and then according to the other pronunciation.So that's when the whole book fell apart for me, because if he couldn't get this part right, what other things might he have been wrong about? 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. Also, the pronounciation of a specific language is difficult or easy according to your own mother tongue. It's not at all difficult if you bother to learn the rules, which are far simpler than those of English.

Just in the six counties of northern England, an area about the size of Maine, there are seventeen separate pronunciations for the word house. So if you are looking for an erudite and trustworthy account of the development of the English language I am sure there are many very worthy tomes out there! Bill Bryson's classic Mother Tongue is a highly readable and hilarious tale of how English came to be the world's language. Or these instructions gracing a packet of convenience food from Italy: 'Besmear a backing pan, previously buttered with a good tomato sauce, and, after dispose the cannelloni, lightly distanced between them in a only couch.and Bryson's understanding of (to him) foreign languages like Japanese and German leads to wrong or not quite accurate conclusions.

The fact that I learned them in one week, and remember them decades later, should be some indication of how easy they are.On the other hand, as a foreigner who had to learn English (and I’m native in non-Roman language), Bryson's insight in this area was particularly interesting and accurate for me. In its first pages, Bryson reports OED editor Robert Burchfield's theory that American English and British English are drifting apart so rapidly that within two hundred years we won't be able to understand each other. Lack of structure aside, I really enjoyed reading this and will be reading more books by Bryson in the future. At one point Bryson says that the Irish Prime Minister's title sounds like "tea-sack" when rendered into phonetic English spelling.

This book has also been published in the UK by Penguin Books under the title Mother Tongue: The English Language.I read this years ago, tried to read it to the kids at night, but they were just that bit young, and then listened to the talking book recently. Which does not change the fact that there are a lot of words that I do not know (and I'm fully aware of that). 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 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. To Bryson, Welsh is "as unpronounceable as it looks", and Welsh pronunciations "rarely bear much relation to their spellings.