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The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way
The Mother Tongue English and How It Got That Way
Author: Bill Bryson
More than 350 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to. Thus begins New York Times best-selling author, Bill Bryson's, engaging jaunt through the quirks and byways of the world's most important and baffling of languages. No other language has achieved such eminence, overcome such odds, inspired such maje...  more »
ISBN: 289001
Publication Date: 3/2010
Pages: 292
Rating:
  • Currently 4/5 Stars.
 2

4 stars, based on 2 ratings
Publisher: Barnes & Noble
Book Type: Paperback
Other Versions: Hardcover, Audio CD
Members Wishing: 4
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Top Member Book Reviews

bup avatar reviewed The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way on + 166 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 2
A couple of friends of mine recommended Bill Bryson as an author, and this is the first book I got my hands on. While breezy and interesting, I guess I hoped for something more cohesive. Essentially, each chapter is a self-contained essay, some of which are at best tangentially related to how English got the way it is (a chapter on wordplay, for instance, told me nothing I didn't know and seemed like an excuse for Bryson to list some beloved palindromes).

I found chapters that explained how much of our language came from Latin, Norman, German, Gaelic and native tribes of the Americas more interesting, and what fossils of ancient grammar or words we can still find lying in the exposed dirt, as it were (child->children, man->men and woman->women are some of the mere handfuls of words left in our language where pluralization comes in the typical German way. Court martial and attorney general come from the Normans, who learned to place adjectives after nouns, like the French).

Anyhow, worth a quick read, which it is.
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reviewed The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way on + 12 more book reviews
Bill Bryson discusses the history of the English language and explains many of the quirks and oddities (such as why "four" has a "u" but "forty" doesn't). It is not a grammar book, but a book about how English is used and misused.


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