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53 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
Bryson makes me proud to be an Anglophone
While browsing in the linguistics section at a London bookshop, I came across this book. I had never heard of Bryson before, but the description on the back sounded so interesting, I bought it. Having just finished the book, I can only wonder how I managed to miss this guy's stuff all my life. This book is a fascinating journey through the history of English, the...
Published on 3 Aug 2001 by William P. Doyle, III
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32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
Truth or Not?
I found, for the most part of reading, this book to be very entertaining and informative. I read a few other Bryson books in the past, about travelling etc... but as an English teacher, well TEFL teacher, I thought this would be a great book to use quotes from for anecdotes during my lessons.
The problem occurred near the start of chapter 14 (out of 16)...
Published 20 months ago by Deman
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32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
Truth or Not?, 29 Mar 2008
I found, for the most part of reading, this book to be very entertaining and informative. I read a few other Bryson books in the past, about travelling etc... but as an English teacher, well TEFL teacher, I thought this would be a great book to use quotes from for anecdotes during my lessons.
The problem occurred near the start of chapter 14 (out of 16).
Quote:
"Some cultures don't swear at all..... The Finns, lacking the sort of words you need to describe your feeling when you stub your toe getting up to answer a wrong number at 2.00 a.m., rather oddly adopted the word ravintolassa. It means 'in the restaurant'."
This is utter, for lack of a better word, hevosenpaska (literal translation "Horse S**t"). I have NEVER in my 10 years living in Finland heard anyone shout out RAVINTOLASSA, unless of course there were too many people in the restaurant and the guy was shouting into his mobile saying where he is. The Finns have quite a few swear words in their vocabulary that can be heard way too often.
So this led me to thinking, "if this is so way off track when it comes to Finland, what about the rest of the book when he writes about cultures I'm not familiar with?"
This has taken the shine off what I thought was an excellent piece of writing and that's why I'm giving it 2/5.
Sorry
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53 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
Bryson makes me proud to be an Anglophone, 3 Aug 2001
While browsing in the linguistics section at a London bookshop, I came across this book. I had never heard of Bryson before, but the description on the back sounded so interesting, I bought it. Having just finished the book, I can only wonder how I managed to miss this guy's stuff all my life. This book is a fascinating journey through the history of English, the varieties of English in the world, spelling, pronunciation, and more. Bryson's style is fresh, funny, irreverent, and absorbing. I feel like I have found someone who loves nuance in language as much as I do, and is spot on when it comes to examining exactly the subtleties that get me fired up. Highly recommended to Anglophones interested in learning more about the language we call our own.
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23 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
It's Bryson, but not as you know it, 24 Aug 2003
Having read most of Bill Bryson's travel books I decided to check out how he well he does with this particular one.And I was very well surprised and recommend it. This book is about the English language and how different it is from all other languages. Never short of boasting, Bryson explains that English' influences, early and recent, are responsible for its flexibility, apparent confusion of phonemes and complexity. There's also a quick history about not only English but related languages (i.e. Indo-European), putting it into perspective. There are also comparisons (short and few, in my view) with other languages. For example, do you know that in Portuguese there are two words for corner? "Esquina" means a "convex" corner and "Canto" means a "Concave" corner. Along with a few others - again, not many - you'll have some interesting pieces of useless information for dinner parties... The book is very well written but don't you think you will find the usual quick-wit joke you're used to with Bryson. There's no sarchasm, self-deprecation, encounters with Swedish ticket booth attendants from hell or scottish ladies getting a train to go to Marks and Spencers in Inverness. In fact, it's because of that lack of humour spark that I'm not giving this book the 5 stars. What you'll find is a wealth of information that you'll find interesting at the least (if you're a curious soul like me) or useful at most (if you are an English teacher or student, such as my wife - she's a teacher, not a student). Whether you're a fan, interested in English as a language or just plain curious, I recommend this book. Although it's among his best you could do a lot worse if you want to read about this theme.
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26 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
A Delight, 3 April 1999
By A Customer
This is the first of Bill Bryson's books that I have read and it was a delight. In a completely non-academic way the author traces the origins of the English language and its development up to the present.Mr Bryson is always amusing but does not fall into the trap of levity - most of the humour is inherent in the situations which he describes. The book contains much serious work presented in a light-hearted way supported by numerous anecdotes. Not only is the mainstream of the language and its grammatical rules considered but also pidgin, dialects and private languages. Slang and swear words also come under scrutiny. A constant pleasure.
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17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
Brilliantly entertaining stuff, 20 April 2001
By A Customer
Once again, Billy Bryson at his best. This time,he doesn't take the reader on a tour of Europe or America or elsewhere, it's rather a journey through the history and the different aspects of the English language.The book is, I must confess, highly informative even to a former student of English philology like myself. Let's forget about the odd spelling mistake of foreign words or some ill-qualified remarks about other languages which Bryson drops-this book is still one of the most interesting non-fiction works I have ever read, and I can simply recommend it to anyone who loves (or hates) English.
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21 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
A superb book, 23 Sep 2004
This book is possibly one of the best rough guides to language, to borrow a phrase used to describe one of his more recent publications. Bryson seems to have an astonishing capacity for synthesis, evidenced not only by this demonstration but also through his numerous other works. Being a student interested in linguistics, I was naturally drawn to material of this kind and wasn't disappointed. Far from it; much of the information contained within it has stayed with me which I now use at dinner parties to impress camarades with! Indeed, much of the information contained in this book is far more interesting and relevant than many a text on modern linguistics. A fascinating read, highly recommended.
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25 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
A fun read, but sometimes lacking in factual accuracy, 27 Oct 2003
Having read several of Bill's books and enjoying them, I was looking forward to Mother Tongue. It didn't dissapoint - Bill was able to tell the tale of English in an enjoyable and easy to read manner.But, half way through Mother Tongue, I started to remember what it was that made me stop reading his earlier books. Bill either does not take the trouble to verify all of the "facts" that he presents in his books, or he is too eager to let humour and enjoyment be spoiled by something as trifling as factual accuracy (e.g. all of most of his references to Swedish). Some, by no means all, things that Bill has to say are simply not true, or are deliberately taken out of context. So please, keep this in mind when reading Mother Tongue! On the whole, and enjoyable read, and it did get me interested to go on and read other books on language. Though I did find the chapter on American versus English English rather annoying and unecessarily patriotic.
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22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
Packed with facts not only fascinating but also FUNNY, 20 Feb 2001
By A Customer
This book is perfect for anybody who has ever noticed or wondered about how any of the little quirks of our language and spelling came about. A vast array of facts are uncovered. One of my favourites: the rules of English that we all learned at school were more or less born of the whim of one Robert Lowth in the eighteenth century. Bryson points out how unfounded are the perennial favourites such as not ending a sentence with a preposition and not splitting an infinitive (I never knew it is not even technically POSSIBLE to split an infinitive). I was gripped by this book in a way I never have been by another non-fiction book, and will never again sneer at the American "gotten" as a hideous mangling of English since discovering it is in fact an archaic form which lingered in the language by a quirk of usage, far older and purer than our modernised "got". I must add my voice, however, to those reviewers who already reported misinformation with regard to the Irish, Catalan and French words Bryson discusses early in the book. The Japanese word for foreigner does NOT mean "stinking of foreign hair", it means a far less sinister "outside person". Bryson also states that because of the Japanese ideographic writing system, they cannot alphabetize and therefore have no logical system of filing documents. They in fact have a system as logical and simple as our alphabet that organises words by their phonetics. I do feel there are evidently too many examples of Bryson's twisting of the facts to fit the point he wants to make, and that any future editions should be amended. That criticism aside, Mother Tongue is Bryson at his best; he lets the amusing facts speak for themselves and doesn't intrude too much with his own (sometimes-rather-tortured-in-his-travel-books) jokes. I can't recommend it more highly, and let it not go unmentioned how FUNNY this book is.
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28 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
WOW, 30 Oct 2003
This was a recommended book on my A-Level English booklist, so i thought i had better read it, no matter how dry it was. I opened it at around 2:00 on a Saturday, and was engrossed and totally consumed by it until 4:00 the next day, when i had finished it. Since i am quite a slow reader, is quite amazing.
Read this book whether your are a student, or just interested it is simply fantastic. Bill Bryson manages to put dry facts into this book, and make it tremondously interesting. Did you know that the French term for being bored to death is, 'to come form Birmingham' or that out of the five languages spoke in Yugoslavia none of them have a word for 'stop'?
My book is now making it's way around my friends and family, and they are all enjoying. It hooked me on Bryson, i am reading his new book 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' (which is great) and will soon be reading 'Troublesome Words' and 'Made in America', i beg you READ IT!
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Nice but not reliable, 28 Nov 2007
I agree with those who say that it is a pleasant book. It should learn us something and it does, but I can't accept the enormous mistakes the author wrote. When an author writes this kind of book he is supposed to know its subject thoroughly and assert only proven and reliable facts, not approximations. It is evident that the author doesn't master the French language; otherwise he would not pretend that only the English language makes the difference between house and home while the French has only one word: maison. What about the word foyer? It is one example amongst others I noted. My question is: if I noted mistakes about such simple, evident and basic subjects, what about the author's statements about subjects or facts I don't know of?
My conclusion would be: a nice book but not to rely on.
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