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Summary: The best collection of trivia about the English language.
Review: Written in an engagingly familiar way, but full of informative and interesting facts about the complexities of English. Essential for anyone who has an innate curiosity interest about the origins of the way much of the world's population speaks and writes
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Summary: The (hi)story of the English language
Review: I never read "The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way" till its end. Rather, I started reading it to write a research paper while taking an English course in Boston and came back to Brazil before having read half of it. Yet, no more than a couple of pages were needed to capture my attention in such a way that I would never stop close the book. Bryson manages to give not only an objective description of the historical development of the English language, but he also really tells you the story of it, as if it were a novel that makes you wonder what will come next.His theories and impressions are not imposed as a scientifical work. They are suggested and they arouse the reader's interest in the matter. It makes you start thinking about the language, the same one you use every day, probably without even paying much attention to it. It made me think about it -- and English is not even my Mother Tongue. The word "linguistics" may sound a bit too complicated or abstract for most of the people. Linguistics books may not always be best-sellers. But in "The Mother Tongue: (...)" Bill Bryson makes things differently. He shows you how deep the language lies within you by making you love it, giving you, little by little, small pieces of history disguised as characters of a page-turning novel.
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Summary: Do not trust the facts in this book
Review: This book is a quick read -- entertaining and light -- but no one should trust the facts that are tossed around in it. Bryson's knowledge of languages other than English is shaky at best, and he makes countless mistakes in his various attempts at translation. He also has a very superficial understanding of grammar (as evinced by Chapter 9). On p. 142, he claims that petroleum has both Latin and Greek roots, "(Latin petro + Greek oleum)," but it is the opposite: petra is Greek and oleum is Latin. Not a big deal of course, but this book is literally peppered with inaccuracies such as this one. I wish someone had fact-checked this book, because it could have been a valuable tool. As it is, the information is often imprecise, or just plain wrong.
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Summary: Nit-picking with Mother
Review: Am I the only person who is amazed at the range and gravity of errors that diligent reviewers have discovered in this book? Inuit snow (they don't have fifty words for it); Finnish swearing (they do); Japanese orthography (I didn't get that one) ... the list goes on. I'll tell you a real shocker: I knew a journalist, a graduate in English, who thought that the language he majored in and professed to write descended largely from Welsh (certain Celtic and Latin dialects spoken in Britain at the end of the Roman Empire). If that doesn't strike you as risible, you need to read this book. This is not a work of high scholarship but it isn't dumb (or dumm). It's a popular account by an enthusiastic amateur, written with his usual brio, and if it persuades more people to take an interest in their mother tongue, or, at a pinch, their native language, good on it and about time.
If you want the full story, study Baugh & Cable's 'History of the English Language' and references there. Bryson's book is more fun, though. I recommend it along with Simeon Potter's 'Our Language', which covers much the same ground but without the swear words.
I can pick nits too. In chapter 6 he gets the High German Sound-Shift back to front. In his version, 'water' ought to appear as 'wasser' in Dutch, Frisian and Plattdeutsch (this may be his Wasserloo). Also, he has a tendency to refer to the group in question, including English, as 'north Germanic', which is a big no-no to us nerds. Bottom line: read Potter as well.
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Summary: Like Words? Like Language? You'll like this.
Review: Ever wonder how and why we ended up speaking the way we do? Here are your answers.
Bryson addresses which people and which languages came together to form the basis of the English we speak today. He lays out the types of words that originate with the various groups and examines the process of word creation and the migration of words and pronuciation.
For anyone who likes language and would enjoy knowing more about how and when English came to this point, this is a good - and fun - read.
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Summary: Entertaining but...
Review: As usual, Bryson turns in a thoroughly entertaining book: the man has a positive knack for taking even the most mundane of subjects and unearthing enough intriguing anecdotes and facts that it becomes thoroughly fascinating. But this time we might have too much of a good thing. As others have noted, some of the things Bryson claims in this book are perhaps too fascinating to be true. I don't know that much about linguistics, but even I could recognize some incorrect information in this book -- the "Eskimos have X number of words for snow" myth being the most prominent. Of course, one mistake does not ruin a book, but "Mother Tongue" is riddled with this type of thing. I challenge anyone to read the chapter on American English and tell me that Bryson isn't citing mostly archaic words in his claims about regional differences in the US. I showed the book to an Australian friend, and he said that the section on Australian English is also several generations out of date.
Yet for all that, there is still some good information here. It's a quick and interesting read, in spite of my misgivings about it. So go ahead and read it and have fun, but be warned not to believe everything Bryson claims.
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Summary: I loved it. Best Bryson yet!
Review: This book was simply wonderful. Because my interest in English is more casual than professional, I'm not particularly qualified to critique it from an enlightened perspective. Sure there are probably points to quiblle with, but, if you want to read an excellent and fun book on English read this. This may have been my favorite Bryson book, and I've read them all, save the entirety of his dictionary of difficult words.
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Summary: Making Sense of English
Review: "More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it seems, try to," says Bill Bryson in the first sentence of his book The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way. This may not be that surprising of a fact unless you know that English was once considered an unworthy common tongue of peasants. In his book, Bryson follows the journey of the English language over the centuries. His text is sprinkled with humor and packed with eye-popping facts that are enough to get any English major bouncing with excitement.
Bryson praises English for its abundance of descriptive words and synonyms but is quick to admit that it makes little sense, "any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled," and he sets out to make sense of a senseless language.
He examines why four has a "u" while forty doesn't, and why we pronounce colonel with and "r" when it very obviously lacks one. From silent letters to crazy spellings, everything is covered.
English finally makes sense.
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Summary: Entertaining Fiction
Review: "The Mother Tongue" is entertaining, but--like so many other books about language for the lay reader--it is filled with utter nonsense. For instance, Bill Bryson tells us that Japanese "hiragana" is a syllabic alphabet written above the main text as a guide on how to pronounce the "kanji" (Chinese characters) which form the main body of written Japanese. In fact, hiragana is used in conjunction with kanji, and its primary use is to to show conjugations of verbs and adjectives, as well as other aspects of Japanese grammar. The function which Bryson attributes to hiragana is, in fact, called "furigana" in Japanese. (In his "Acknoweledgments" page, the author thanks a certain "Doctor" from Osaka for his input regarding Japanese. This all leads me to wonder whether this pesonage may have been a doctor of podiatry, or perhaps a dentist!) One more example of the fiction in this book is Bryson's statement that "Pennsylvania Dutch is a kind of institutionalized broken English." He then goes on to quote some amusing examples of this "broken English." Whoever supplied Bryson with these tidbits about Pennsylvania Dutch must have been pulling his leg, as this language is actually a dialect of German--something that I already knew when I was in high school. I could go on, but I think my point is taken. Bryson's fabrications and/or mistakes about other languages undermines this reviewer's confidence that the author knows what he's talking about when he treats English itself.
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Summary: An excellent overview of the history of English.
Review: As the title says, this book is quite informative on the origins and progression of English specifically, and to an extent, language in general. Mr. Bryson's prose ranges from informative exposition of historical facts to a flood of linguistic trivia. Rarely in this book does he linger on the vacuous, but it happens from time to time, but not for a great duration either. Overall, a highly recommended survey linguistic history book that concentrates on English.
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