Mother Tongue [Paperback]

Bill Bryson (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 014014305X | ISBN-13: 978-0140143058 | Publication Date: September 26, 1991

How did English, 'treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants' become the undisputed global language? How did words like shampoo, sofa and rowdy (and others drawn from over fifty languages) find their way into our dictionary? In this revealing and often hilarious book, Bill Bryson examines the mother tongue and explores the countless varieties of English and the perils of marketing brands with names like Pschitt and Super Piss. With entertaining sections on the oddities of swearing and spelling, spoonerisms and Scrabble, and a consideration of what we mean by 'good English', "Mother Tongue" is one of the most stimulating books yet written on this endlessly engrossing subject.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Who would have thought that a book about English would be so entertaining? Certainly not this grammar-allergic reviewer, but The Mother Tongue pulls it off admirably. Bill Bryson--a zealot--is the right man for the job. Who else could rhapsodize about "the colorless murmur of the schwa" with a straight face? It is his unflagging enthusiasm, seeping from between every sentence, that carries the book.

Bryson displays an encyclopedic knowledge of his topic, and this inevitably encourages a light tone; the more you know about a subject, the more absurd it becomes. No jokes are necessary, the facts do well enough by themselves, and Bryson supplies tens per page. As well as tossing off gems of fractured English (from a Japanese eraser: "This product will self-destruct in Mother Earth."), Bryson frequently takes time to compare the idiosyncratic tongue with other languages. Not only does this give a laugh (one word: Welsh), and always shed considerable light, it also makes the reader feel fortunate to speak English. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Bryson's blend of linguistic anecdotes and Anglo-Saxon cultural history proves entertaining but superficial. "While his historical review is thorough. . . he mostly reiterates conventional views about English's structural superiority," said PW. "He retells old tales with fresh verve . . . but becomes sloppy when matters of rhetoric and grammar arise."
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books (September 26, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 014014305X
• ISBN-13: 978-0140143058
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (168 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,276,249 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa. For twenty years he lived in England, where he worked for the Times and the Independent, and wrote for most major British and American publications. His books include travel memoirs (Neither Here Nor There; The Lost Continent; Notes from a Small Island) and books on language (The Mother Tongue; Made in America). His account of his attempts to walk the Appalachian Trail, A Walk in the Woods, was a huge New York Times bestseller. He lives in Hanover, New Hampshire, with his wife and his four children.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

285 of 321 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A multitude of errors, August 17, 2005

By 

Whimemsz - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Mother Tongue - English And How It Got That Way (Paperback)

This book is certainly amusing. It's very enjoyable for a novice to read.

But, as many others have pointed out, every page is just error after factual error. Bryson simply does not understand how languages work, and whatever his sources are are frequently wrong. My favorite mistake is when he claims that in Finnish, there is only one swear word, ravintolassa, meaning "in the restaurant" (page 214). Now, ravintolassa DOES mean "in the restaurant," but that's ALL it means. Finnish has plenty of native swear words (saatana, perkele, vittu, jumalauta, and more), and I still cannot imagine how Bryson came to the conclusion that, not only did it have only one, but that it was the word for "in the restaurant." It's truly mind-boggling.

Among my other favorite errors are when he says that "Estimates of the number of languages in the world usually fix on a figure of about 2,700" (page 37; all estimates I've ever seen generally give between 5,000 and 6,000). Or when he completely misunderstands the concept of case affixes when discussing Finnish (page 35; he seems to think that the various words created are utterly unanalyzable to the speakers. By analogy, then, English speakers would need to learn the plural word "cats" separately from the singular "cat," rather than simply extending their knowledge of the plural suffix -s to the word "cat." Bryson fails to make the rather important distinction between "word" and "root").

He also buys the extremely controversial arguments of people like Merritt Ruhlen and presents them as complete fact ("Recent studies of cognates...have found possible links between some of those must unlikely language parteners: for instance, between Basque and Na-Dene...and between Finnish and Eskimo-Aleut. No one has come up with a remotely plausible explanation of how a language spoken only in a remote corner of the Pyrenees could have come to influence Indian languages of the New World, but the links between many cognates are too numerous to explain in terms of simple coincidence" -- page 24). There hardly exists a serious linguist in the world who would agree with that statement.

And of course there is the famous "Eskimo" Words for Snow Myth, which results in large part from a total misunderstanding of the nature of polysynthetic languages (page 14).

Unfortunately, many of the errors Bryson makes are much harder to catch, in that they involve concepts (such as his apparent conviction that English is somehow unique among languages in its expressiveness and form...he also ironically says on page 17 that "most books on English imply in one way or another that our language is superior to all others"), rather than factual claims, since incorrect facts are easier to refute.

Throughout the book, Bryson repeatedly makes these types of inexcusable factual and conceptual errors, and as a result paints an inaccurate and deceptive picture of languages and linguistics in general. For this reason, I take issue with the reviewers who say that what matters is that the book is entertaining negates its errors. On the contrary, the entire point of the book is to tell the story of the English language, and Bryson, as a good writer who knows how to inject good humor into his work, makes it funny. But a the true purpose remains to educate people, and it fails miserably in this respect, and as a result, it fails as a whole. Adding humor cannot make a bad book into a good one.

355 of 410 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars So many factual errors and urban myths, more harm than good, May 29, 2003

By 

Christopher Culver - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Mother Tongue - English And How It Got That Way (Paperback)

Bill Bryson's book MOTHER TONGUE has an admirable goal, to present the evolution and current state of the English language in a simple and intriguing fashion. However, it is a book full of factual errors. On nearly every page this is an urban myth, folk etymology, or misunderstanding of linguistics.

Bryson writes charming travelogues - The Lost Continent is a book I'd recommend to any foreigner wanting to learn about rural America - but he is an amateur with an interest in wordplay and not a professional linguist. Much of the book appears to have been thrown together from older books on language for the popular reader, especially those of Otto Jespersen, Mario Pei, and Montagu, which themselves have been criticised for errors and oversimplications.

The errors of the book astound from the start any reader with the slighest knowledge of language. Bryson speaks of the Eskimos having a multitude of words for snow, though this urban myth causes linguists to shudder and has been soundly debunked in The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. Bryson goes on to say that Russian has no words for "efficiency", "engagement ring", or "have fun", a preposterous statement that can be proved wrong by any Russian speaker. His knowledge of British history is also shaky, as he asserts that the Saxon invaders eliminated entirely the former Celtic inhabitants, but in reality they merely imposed their language and Britons now remain essentially the same people genetically as 4,000 years ago.

Every reader who speaks another language besides English will find a most annoying mistake in THE MOTHER TONGUE. For me, once a speaker of Esperanto, it was Bryson's ridiculous summary of the language. He begins by misspelling the name of the language's initiator. Then he asserts that the language has no definite articles - it does - but then gives a sample of the language in which this definite article he just denied is used twice (and misspelled once).

These are only a few examples, the book is filled with multitudes more.

While the birth and growth of the English language is a fascinating subject, it's a shame that it is spoiled in MOTHER TONGUE by an abundance of errors. If you are interested about how English got the way it is today, I'd recommend trying another book, one preferably written by someone with a degree in linguistics.

41 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars keep a pinch of salt handy, August 6, 2003

By 

ted maul (London, England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Mother Tongue - English And How It Got That Way (Paperback)

Sadly I must concur with many fellow-reviewers: the numerous important errors that plague an otherwise worthwhile and entertaining book mean you can never be sure when to trust the author's assertions. Bryson's undoubted communicative flair has clearly enthused many lay-readers about language, and that is a heartening sign. His vigorous debunking of bogus so-called language pundits (Safire, Simon, et al.) is also to be welcomed (see Steven Pinker's 'Language Instinct' for an equally enjoyable slaying of the 'language mavens').
All this makes the book's flaws all the more exasperating and disappointing. They range from the trivial to the quite breath-taking - I won't list them all here, as other reviewers have already highlighted many of them (eg. The French can't distinguish between 'mind' and 'brain'... hmm, I hope he's used some of the proceeds from this book to invest in a French dictionary - and an Italian one, and Finnish...)
What I will point out are the gaps in his grammatical understanding: I'm not talking about arcane, abstruse, pedantic points here, but the fundamentals of grammar, what it is, and how we use and describe it. Almost half an entire chapter (where he discusses the categorisation of words into various parts of speech, and verbs into tenses) can and should be junked. He seems to think the terms and concepts we use to categorise English grammar are absurd, constrictive and inappropriate, merely because they are greco-latin in origin. For example, he doesn't see the need for the dual categorisation of -ing words as both 'gerunds' and 'present participles'; but this redounds to his discredit, no-one else's. These terms merely describe a distinction that we all observe whether we're conscious of it or not. When we hear 'My favourite hobby is swimming' we automatically understand that this does not mean 'my favourite hobby is currently doing a length of the pool'. Likewise, we know that 'I am swimming' doesn't mean 'I am the very act of propelling oneself through a body of water'.
The terms we use to describe grammar are precisely that - descriptive, not prescriptive, and have stood the test of time because they are versatile, adaptable, enable clear, precise thought and explanation when analysing linguistic constructions, and facilitate comparative study of different language structures.
But Bryson's heart is in the right place, and if people who read this book are inspired to widen their language/linguistics-related reading, that can only be a good thing.
Allow me to recommend a couple of other books as essential further reading:
'The Language Instinct' Steven Pinker
'The Power of Babel' John McWhorter
Engaging, not to say captivating, works - ideal for the layperson but packed with real linguistic meat and serious scholarly endeavour nonetheless.