Rating: 
Summary: Felt Like a Fireside Chat
Review: Bill Bryson's book was a cozy, easy, enjoyable read. It felt like the author was just chatting away in my living room, sharing a slew of amusing anecdotes about the crazy, mixed up language we call English. The chapter about the use (and misuse) of English around the world was hysterical. I shared that section with a fellow math teacher and she roared.Not only amusing, the facts presented were actually quite absorbing. Particulary interesting were the parts about the early history and development of the English langauge, beginning with the Anglos(and the Saxons)and the concept of a (possible) universal mother tongue out there somewhere in history. Hearing just a tidbit about the Celts and the Basques only whet my appetite for more. I enjoyed the sections on slang and dialects as well. After reading the section on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary, I read The Professor and the Madman,by Simon Winchester, which outlines that same story a bit more fully (but with a very unusual twist). For someone who has just a slightly better than average understanding of the topic, the book was a delight. I found it to be an enlightening and entertaining read.
Rating: 
Summary: Attention: Trivia Buffs and Logophiles
Review: I'm an inveterate word lover, so learning some interesting background on English made The Mother Tongue an obvious reading choice. Add to that, my devotion to Bill Bryson books, and it was a match made in book heaven. Still, like all assumed things, it wasn't a perfect arrangement - the first chapter began with some references that instantly dated the work - namely, the former Soviet Union, which was still very much in existence when this was written. It sort of put a damper on my enthusiasm. Still, I found plenty to keep me engrossed and the book never left my side once I began it. Bryson does his research - this is clear in all his other works as well - but something that is as scholarly as the English language, needs a steadier hand with things that are open to interpretation. Personally, I enjoyed the random trivia and digressions, but that style may not appeal to all. If you like Bryson, like languages, and have a good sense of humor, The Mother Tongue is a worthwhile read. I recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: A fascinating book, which you will treasure!
Review: This book is a history of the English language, with particularly interesting chapters on the beginnings of language, wordplay, pronunciation, swearing, spelling, varieties, and just about everything you would ever want to know about our mother tongue. The only question I still have that Bryson was not able to answer was why was the language of the Angles adopted in England, rather than the language of the dominant group, the Saxons? Bryson says that we just don't know why. I never thought a book on English (and languages, in general) would get me to laugh out loud, but this one did many times. For example, Bryson writes that "some languages have words that we may be pleased to do without," such as the German word "schadenfreude" (which means "taking delight in the misfortune of others") or how about "sgiomlaireachd" (meaning "dropping in at mealtimes" in Scottish Gaelic)? The delight that Bryson takes in languages is, well, simply wonderful: He writes that strozzapreti is a pasta in Italy and means "strangled priests" and that vermicelli means "little worms." Or how about that "A ydycg wedi talu a dodi eich tocyn yn y golwg?" is Welsh for "Did you remember to pay?" Bryson is also quick to give opinions, such as: "There is no logical reason not to split an infinitive" and "Sentences [can] end with a preposition." Then he tell us the sources of these "dubious" strictures. Bryson is intrigued about where English words come from, and they come from many other languages: Scandinavian (skull, leg, husband, rotten, their), Norman French (jury, traitor, marriage, govern), native American ("hoochinoo" became hooch!), Mexican-Spanish (rancher), German (dollar), etc. In fact, only about 1% of our words are Old English ones (but they include man, wife, and love) we discover. Where do our words come from? Well, about 1,700 were invented by Shakespeare alone, including the following words: critical, monumental, castigate, majestic, obscene, excellent, and lonely. Also quite interesting is how English words have changed in the last millennium: For example, to Chaucer a "girl" meant any young person, "brave" implied cowardice (which "bravado" still does), and that "knight" was pronounced something like "kuh-nee-guh-tuh.". And new words keep coming ("apolitical" is only 50 years old)! And, of course, we learn that English has influenced other languages greatly: in China, conversations occur on the "te le fung," a Ukrainian goes to the barber for a "herkot," and a Japanese commuter is crammed into a subway car during "rushawa" (rush hour)! And where else would I have discovered such facts as these?: that there are 176 names for dust balls under the bed; that there are 17 different pronunciations for the word "house" in Northern England; that there are no Chinese crossword puzzles (because there is no alphabet); that Kennedy means "ugly head" in Gaelic; that the Japanese, Malayans, and American Indians do not have have any swear words in their native languages; that an anagram for "The Morse Code" is "Here come dots"; that a couple of centuries ago, many words could be spelled two or more ways, but today there are only three such words in North America (ax/axe, gray/grey, and inquire/enquire); that the Pilgrims were among the first generation in England who said "has" rather than "hath" and "runs" instead of "runneth"; and that "O.K." is "arguably America's single greatest gift to international discourse, able to serve as an adjective, verb, noun, interjection, and adverb," with obscure origins that may be someone's initials (Martin Van Buren's nickname, "Old Kinderhook"), a popular snack (Orrins-Kendall crackers), or words in Finnish ("oikea"), Haitian ("Aux Cayes," a source of rum), or Choctaw ("okeh"), or perhaps a contraction of "oll korrect" (which is how Andrew Jackson spelled this expression)! This is a book to treasure!
Rating:
Summary: A fun and informative read
Review: Two points. First, those reviewers who have focused on errors in the book may be missing the bigger picture, which is: The book does a fine job of surveying the development of language generally, and the English language in particular. There are probably tens of thousands of factual assertions in a book like this. Who among us can possibly expect an error-free work of this kind? A person who is not already an expert on this subject will learn much from this enjoyable work, and the circumstance that there are some minor errors will hardly send readers down the wrong path. Second: At least one reviewer suggests that the author adopts an ethnocentric bias in favor of English. That was not my read. I found the work to be quite objective.
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Summary: Reveals the Power and the Glory (of the Internet)
Review: The critiques of "The Mother Tongue" on Amazon.com illustrate the Internet's great value. Left-wing carping that the Net has been coopted for commercial purposes is wrong. It misses the point that the Internet is the greatest research tool ever devised, and not just for commercial ends. On page 46, the author of "The Mother Tongue" writes that Frisian, a close linguistic relative of English and Dutch, "has been so little altered by time that many [Frisians] can, according to [a] linguistic historian . . . , still read the medieval epic _Beowulf_ 'almost at sight.' " Knowing that old English, in which _Beowulf_ was written, is essentially foreign to modern English, I was skeptical that it could be that accessible to modern Frisian speakers. So I checked the Internet. Here, according to Catherine N. Ball of the Georgetown University linguistics department, is the Lord's Prayer in three versions: old English, apparently modern Frisian, and the 1611 King James version. (It seems that in old English the characters ð and þ were pronounced similarly to modern "th," both as in "thin" and in "that," and the digraph æ was pronounced like "a" as in "hat." I hope your computer shows these characters.) [Old English]
Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum;
Si þin nama gehalgod
to becume þin rice
gewurþe ðin willa
on eorðan swa swa on heofonum.
urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg
and forgyf us ure gyltas
swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum
and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge
ac alys us of yfele soþlice. [Frisian]
Us Heit yn 'e himel,
lit jo namme hillige wurde,
lit jo keninkryk komme,
Lit jo wil dien wurde
op ierde likegoed as yn 'e himel.
Jou ús hjoed ús deistich brea
en ferjou ús ús skulden
sa't wy ús skuldners ek ferjûn hawwe;
en lit ús net yn fersiking komme,
mar ferlos ús fan 'e kweade;
[want jowes is it keninkryk
en de krêft
en de hearlikheid
oant yn ivichheid. Amen.] [The King James Bible, 1611]
Our father which art in heauen, hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdome come. Thy will be done, in earth, as it is in heauen.
Giue vs this day our daily bread.
And forgiue vs our debts, as we forgiue our debters.
And lead vs not into temptation, but deliuer vs from euill: For thine is the kingdome, and the power, and the glory, for euer, Amen. You can see they're all quite different, and only the third is readable to a modern English speaker. I doubt today's Frisian speakers would be able to read the old English text. Of course to wonder about such a minor point may seem pedantic if not obsessive, but if you write a book on the history of English you're going to attract the attention of language nuts like me. To return to my initial point: Before the Internet's advent I would have been left with my doubts. The Web provides a means both to resolve them and to comment on, as well as to see others' criticisms of, "The Mother Tongue." Frankly, after reading the 55 comments posted before mine, I stopped reading the book because I felt I could no longer trust it sufficiently, entertaining though it is. I must say that part of me regrets putting it aside, and I don't want to urge others not to read it, for it is delightfully engaging, no matter what flaws it may contain.
Rating:
Summary: The Joys of English
Review: English is a tough language to master. There are so many exceptions to the rules that it is a wonder so many people can ever become fluent in it. But the complexities of the language almost make it so wonderful: it is a language of incredible diversity that is able to evolve and adapt to changing situations. It is great for wordplay and it is great for literature. Bryson's book illustrates the wonders of this language and discusses English's history and the quirks it developed along the way. Why do we pronounce colonel with an "r"? Or use a "w" in one? Such items are discussed within? This is a language appreciation book. It is filled with fun facts. If I rate it at four stars, it is not because of the material, but because of how it is presented. There is some redunancy in the book, almost as if each chapter was written independently and then tied together later; there are also times when he refers to an upcoming chapter when really he means a previous one. Finally, although this is a matter of personal taste, I prefer my citations in footnotes, not in the text itself. Despite these problems, I do recommend this book to almost anyone who can read English. It is a great way to make any English reader appreciate his or her language.
Rating:
Summary: entertaining introduction to etymology
Review: Bill Bryson, better known for his travelogues, writes a fascinating (and not-quite-correct) introduction to English etymology. Besides exploring the origins of the language, it also traces the varieties of English. His explorations of American and British slang are the most complete and correct. When straying further than those, however, he misses the mark. His grasp of Australian grammar and slang shows that he's been there (which is certainly better than others who have commented on it), but only as a tourist. Live there, and you'll find a very different linguistic Australia. Like Bryson's travel writing, this book isn't so much a cohesive piece of writing as it is a series of well-written anecdotes. There are some places where the continuity is somewhat lacking. However, this didn't particularly annoy me. This is a great light-hearted read. It's certainly not a scholarly work, and doesn't attempt to be. I won't nit-pick its accuracy, since I don't think that's fair here. It's a good jumping-off point for learning more about this muddled language.
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Summary: The English language and its absurdities
Review: Before I read this book I thought it would be informative and perhaps even slightly amusing since authors of these sort of books usually devote at least a little time to exploring the many baffling and absurd elements of the English language. I have to admit that I was weak with laughter many times while reading this book and even kept my poor husband awake reading the funniest parts between fits of hysteria. The section on Last Names alone is worth the price of this book (see the part on British last names including one description of a gentleman named "Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraduati Tollemache-Tollemache-de Orellana-Plantagenet-Tollemache-Tollemache." The author suggests that some British names can be a tad repetitive...) Really, this book has a little bit of everything; history, linguistics, descriptions of fascinating figures of speech, and explanations of absurd grammatical constructions. It won't help you write your term paper, but it will put a stitch in your side. If you love reading about a language that can be simultaneouly expressive, beautiful, bumbling, and downright hard to spell, you'll love this book.
Rating:
Summary: Humorously academic
Review: If you just read "A Walk In the Woods" and you're wanting to read more Bill Bryson, this one may throw you for a bit of a loop. Yes, it has some of his characteristic wit and even a bit of hilarity, but it also goes into thorough detail of English usage and origin. After some introductory chapters, the book begins to read more like a college text. Not that I wouldn't wish more textbooks would be written with the skill and clarity that Bryson brings to a subject obviously close to his heart. Don't expect "The Mother Tongue" to read like a travelogue.
Rating: 
Summary: Superficially Entertaining but Disastrously Flawed
Review: It is unfortunate that Bill Bryson writes so entertainingly, because the book's content is disastrously bad. The book is replete with elementary errors of fact. Many of these can be detected with nothing more than a good dictionary: 'law' and 'order' are not synonyms, 'swarthy' is not from Latin 'sordere', and 'bumf' is not from a non-existent German 'bumfodden' but from the self-explanatory British 'bum-fodder' (toilet paper). Others are equally elementary: for instance, the High German sound shift took place in the south of Germany, not the north. He fares no better when he deals with more technical matters. He loves to count inflectional forms of words in different languages, but most of his counts are wrong. His history of the alphabet from Old to Present-Day English is riddled with errors of fact. His treatment of the sounds of English is hopelessly confused because he fails completely to distinguish phones from phonemes; indeed, he seems to confuse at least one of these with the graphs used to represent them. His discussion of the Great Vowel Shift, a fundamental change that explains many of the apparent oddities of modern English spelling, is partly wrong and wholly confusing. Hard as it is to excuse such cavalier treatment of the facts, it is even harder to excuse his logical inconsistencies and muddy thinking. On the one hand, 'To a baby no language is easier or more difficult than any other'; on the other, Old English was so complicated that '[i]t is a wonder that anyone ever learned to speak it'. At one point he lists 'Celtic' as a European language that disappeared over time, and in the very next sentence he avers that 'Celtic ... is not dead'. (He appears to have confused languages with language families.) In comparing modern English spelling to that of Old English he applies a double standard in order to make modern spelling seem more arbitrary than it really is. And one wonders what distinction between 'hair' and 'hairs' made in Shakespeare's 'Shee hath more haire than wit, and more faults than hairs' is 'effectively lost to us today'. But the errors are not the book's worst feature. Bryson returns again and again to three themes: (1) English is in most respects superior to all other languages, partly because (2) complex inflectional systems are BAD, and (3) English spelling is almost completely chaotic. He has moments of moderation in which he qualifies these assertions, even at one point denying the first altogether, but they are far less memorable than the polemics supporting them, and it is noteworthy that many of his errors and misleading statements reinforce these same themes. Bryson's linguistic chauvinism is appalling. The English range of sounds is 'pleasingly' diverse, but Anglo-French was 'harsh, clacking, guttural'. 'Italians cannot distinguish between a niece and a granddaughter'? Of course they can. And to say that the meaning of German 'Schadenfreude' 'perhaps tells us as much about Teutonic sensitivity as it does about their neologistic versatility' is simply insulting. One is not greatly surprised to find that the index has an entry for 'English, advantages of' but none for 'English, disadvantages of'. One can also discover that while foreign words and phrases are 'adopted' into English, English words and phrases are 'expropriated' into other tongues. A reader searching for a readable elementary introduction to the history of the English language would be much better off with Charles Barber's _The English Language: A Historical Introduction_.
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