Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

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Bill Bryson is the author of several bestsellers including The Lost Continent, Neither Here Nor There, Notes from a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods, Notes from a Big Country, Down Under, A Short History of Nearly Everything, One Summer: America 1927 and his memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. Old English was a rich literary language as well, leaving behind a trove of letters, charters, religious works, and legal texts. Originally published in 1884, the OED set out not only to list and define every word used in the English language since the 12th century, but also to trace their etymologies and evolving meanings and spellings throughout history. Americans, Britons, Australians, Canadians, South Africans, Jamaicans, and all other English-speaking nations will understand one another better, creating stronger conditions for political, social, and economic cooperation.

Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson eBook | Perlego [PDF] The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson eBook | Perlego

You take some big sticks and drive the deer out of the woods and we’ll stand by the riverbank with our spears and kill them as they come down towards us. If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should not be that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. Likewise, the ubiquitous American yeah was, until the mid-20th century, an obscure local word used only in certain regions of southeast England. A tramp in Britain is a bum in America, while a bum in Britain is a fanny in America, while a fanny in Britain is—well, we’ve covered that.These trends are reinforced by the influences of mass media, which expose us to dialects of speech that we would never have otherwise heard. The aborigines of Tasmania have a word for every type of tree, but no word that just means “tree,” while the Araucanian Indians of Chile rather more poignantly have a variety of words to distinguish between different degrees of hunger.

Mother Tongue Quotes by Bill Bryson - Goodreads The Mother Tongue Quotes by Bill Bryson - Goodreads

As Jones studied these texts, he began to recognize unmistakable similarities between Sanskrit and the European languages. The Spanish cannot differentiate a chairman from a president, and the Italians have no equivalent of wishful thinking. And that's a real shame, because it covers such fascinating topics, and it's so very entertainingly written. The existence in German of a word like schadenfreude (taking delight in the misfortune of others) perhaps tells us as much about Teutonic sensitivity as it does about their neologistic versatility. Unlike those languages whose grammatical structures derived more from Latin, English mostly lacks hard and fast rules governing tense, split infinitives, or any number of thorny grammatical or syntactic issues.Around this time, some well-educated young people in American cities led a fad of creating acronyms for deliberately misspelled phrases—thus, “ok” came from “oll korrect,” meaning “all correct. This pronunciation survived in parts of the United States well into the 19th century, hundreds of years after its virtual extinction in England.