The Mother Tongue (Paperback)

~ (Author) "MORE THAN 300 MILLION PEOPLE IN the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to..." (more)
Key Phrases: Old English, New York, United States (more...)

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.

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.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (September 1, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380715430
• ISBN-13: 978-0380715435
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (134 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,782 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Should be required reading for High School, January 26, 1999

By A Customer

I'm a junior in high school and picked up this book because I have a huge love for words, writing, and the English language. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and found Bryson to be very witty and entertaining. After reading many of the reviews here, I realized that some of the information may not be exactly correct, but it was still excellent in its context. Maybe Bryson could publish another edition with the corrections mentioned from your reviews. This would be extremely beneficial. Many of my friends stereotyped the book as "a boring history of English" before they ever read it. But after presenting them with a few of the humourous passages, they were delighted and begged me to loan them the book. I decided that if people could be excited about a book just because it was funny and yet learn so much about their mother tongue, it should be required reading. My favorite part was learning how some of the curious idioms of America came about. I had never heard of Cockney rhyming slang, and found it absolutely delightful. Well, as for myself I give it five stars, with or without the mistakes. Are we not all human?

142 of 163 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 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.

289 of 338 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)

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.