The Mother Tongue
With dazzling wit and astonishing insight, Bill Bryson--the acclaimed author of The Lost Continent--brilliantly explores the remarkable history, eccentricities, resilience and sheer fun of the English language. From the first descent of the larynx into the throat (why you can talk but your dog can't), to the fine lost art of swearing, Bryson tells the fascinating, often uproarious story of an inadequate, second-rate tongue of peasants that developed into one of the world's largest growth industries.
Stats for nerds
12recommend
22mentions
15people
2010–2026years
68% recommend32% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- This was a great read and it reminded me of Bill Bryson's book, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way. Such an awesome overview o how diverse and quirky and globally distributed English has become today. With the web and now the bots herding us into a more homogenized language, I'm a huuuuge fan of what this dude is doing here!!
- English is three languages smashed together with thousand of words borrowed from dozens of other languages (Latin, “Proto-German”, Norman French). There’s no other language that has such a rich vocabulary.
To me, Finnish is the only interesting language in your list, due to not being related to the rest of the Nordic languages or Russian (Finno-Ugric). It’s also purely phonetic, which is nice, but what a shame about all those case endings. I am definitely biased as I learned Finnish as a teenager.
Might as well take this opportunity to plug Bill Bryson’s book The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, it’s a fun read.
- Hmm. As a born Britisher I used to have this attitude until I read 'Mother Tongue' by Bill Bryson. He's an American who moved to the UK and has a good handle on the differences between American and British english.
- And ‘Mother Tongue’ by Bill Bryson.
- In a slightly different direction, there's also The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson, which is more of a humourous explanation of English quirks.
- The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson covers this pretty well. Along with covering many other quirks of the English language.
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