Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

£5.495
FREE Shipping

Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

RRP: £10.99
Price: £5.495
£5.495 FREE Shipping

In stock

We accept the following payment methods

Description

Bill Bryson turns his sharp-eyes to "The Mother Tongue" and takes us all on a fabulous journey through and overview of the intricacies of human language. You know, there are probably better books on the history of the English language, there are probably deeper books on the nature of linguistics, there are probably a million reasons why you might not read this book - but it tackles something that we all ought to be interested in, our mother tongue, with style, flare and humour.

When he becomes enamored on a topic (such as the history of our houses in "At Home" or the history of our universe in "A Short History of Nearly Everything") Bryson digs up all kinds of interesting facts and stories and anecdotes and puts it all together in a delightfully interesting collection of essays. With its in-text references, footnotes, extensive bibliography and index, this book looks almost academic, but Bryson, an American living in England, handles it all with a cheerfully low-key sense of humor -- almost as if Terry Pratchett had turned his eye to grammar -- and even a refreshingly open approach to the word fuck in the chapter on swearing. Some of it just sounded wrong, like the quote from an article that says most speakers of other languages aren’t aware there is such a thing as a thesaurus. At this point, I decided I’d read some reviews to see if anyone who knows more than I do felt the same way. While I found the book informative and mildly amusing, at the end of the day, it's still a book about the history of words.I gave up; there's no point in learning a collection of made up 'facts', however interesting they seem. But even setting issues like that aside, there are so many mistakes here, both in Bryson’s discussion of the English language itself and in his characterisation of the other languages he uses as comparatives.

What he does is to throw out titbits (or tidbits in the US, as they the consider the former spelling risque - so Bryson tells me) of information, some useful, some useless, some bizarre: but all fascinating. He recounts the triumph of Anglo-Saxon language over Celtic (even though many of England's place names preserve their Celtic roots), the impact of the Norman invasion (of 10,000 words, approximately 3/4ths are still in use including much of the language of nobility (duke, baron prince) and much language of jurisprudence (justice, jury, prison among others). That’s some magic trick, to have a land which is both entirely uninhabited when the white folks show up but which also has indigenous people living there to just offer up words for colonisers to “borrow”! The Wubi method, invented in 1986, encodes Chinese characters by the five shapes of strokes and converts them to alphabetic characters on a generic keyboard.However, I think that it is directed primarily to English native speakers, because they will be able to capture and better understand all the issues that the author raises. I'm a longtime fan of Bill Bryson, but I had never read this early nonfiction work of his and was delighted to see that my library had a copy of the audiobook.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
  • Sold by: Fruugo

Delivery & Returns

Fruugo

Address: UK
All products: Visit Fruugo Shop