Mother Tongue: Flavours of a Second Generation

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At this point Bryson notes how many languages have similar words, like bruder in German, biradar in Farsi, bhrata in Sanskrit, bhrathair in Gaelic, all meaning brother in English. He certainly loves English. On the dying of Irish (as a language), he says: "we naturally lament the decline of these languages, but it's not an altogether undiluted tragedy. Consider the loss to English literature, if Joyce, Shaw, Swift, Yeats, Wilde, and Ireland's other literary masters have written in what inescapably a fringe language, their work will be as little known to us as those poets in Iceland or Norway, and that would be a tragedy indeed. No country has given the word incomparable literature per head of population than Ireland, and for that reason alone we might be excused to a small, "selfish" celebration that English was the language of her greatest writers." This is a hindsight bias. Awful. Awful. I’m now retrospectively mad, five years later, that I once attended a talk by this man. Avoid. Mother Tongue is a historical investigation of feminist language and thought, from the dawn of Old English to the present day. Dr. Jenni Nuttall guides readers through the evolution of words that we have used to describe female bodies, menstruation, women’s sexuality, the consequences of male violence, childbirth, women’s paid and unpaid work, and gender. Along the way, she challenges our modern language’s ability to insightfully articulate women’s shared experiences by examining the long-forgotten words once used in English for female sexual and reproductive organs. Nuttall also tells the story of words like womb and breast, whose meanings have changed over time, as well as how anatomical words such as hysteria and hysterical came to have such loaded legacies. I teach English as a foreign language but other than that linguistics and language learning is just a hobby, having said that, I know enough Irish, German, Czech, Russian and Spanish to know that the things he said about these languages are half truths or complete and utter codswallop. For example claiming that the German preposition/suffix "auf" is unusual among foreign words in that it has more than one meaning... anyone who has spent any time learning a language will tell you that all of them have words with dozens of meanings (Except maybe Esperanto?). Furthermore there is no preposition in any language that cannot be translated into at least three or four prepositions in English, nor are there any English prepositions that don't have numerous translations in the other language. That's just how prepositions are! They don't translate!

Mother Tongue: Flavours of a Second Generation Kindle Edition

I thought this would be fun. I love words and languages and have a passing interest in linguistics. I started this with enthusiasm and was enjoying his breezy style until it occurred to me that a lot of what he was saying seemed to be anecdotal. You know, limited or no research. And that's what I will start with. I am not an English native speaker. I have never lived in any English-speaking country. I have been learning English at school. I manage pretty well, I can read books in English without too much difficulty. Which does not change the fact that there are a lot of words that I do not know (and I'm fully aware of that). I am also not particularly sensitive to differences in pronunciation between British and American English. I mean, I'm aware of these differences (I am usually able to recognize an American and a British when I hear them), but I do not think I can pronounce the word first according to one and then according to the other pronunciation. I read this book in English and I must admit that although it is very interesting, as a non-English speaker, I was not able to fully appreciate it and understand it. There’s a wealth of articles about this half-truth (I’m being generous). Here’s one http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca...I'm a writer, and I don't hold with slam-dunking other writers in print, because they can't reply. In a more open medium like this, I am prepared to serve Bryson as he serves others, but with a little less barren pedantry. If we define dialect as a way of speaking that fixes a person geographically, then it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that in England there are as many dialects as there are hills and valleys. Just in the six counties of northern England, an area about the size of Maine, there are seventeen separate pronunciations for the word house.”

Mother Tongue | Jenni Nuttall | 9780593299579 | NetGalley Mother Tongue | Jenni Nuttall | 9780593299579 | NetGalley

No place in the English-speaking world is more breathtakingly replete with dialects than Great Britain. In America, people as far apart as New York State and Oregon speak with largely identical voices. According to some estimates almost two thirds of the American population, living on some 8o percent of the land area, speak with the same accent—a quite remarkable degree of homogeneity.November 2021: Went ahead and removed my 4 star rating for this book, which I read and reviewed in 2006. It has since been pointed out, repeatedly, that Bryson is wrong in a staggering number of places in this book, and as I went on to read more of his work, I also realized exactly how racist he is. I don't read or recommend his books anymore. The Mother Tongue" not only presents a comprehensive account of the history of the English language but also explores its global impact. Bryson delves into how English has become a dominant language worldwide, focusing on its spread during the British Empire and its current prevalence as a lingua franca. Review part I: Bringing science to the people, Bill Bryson style, is always funny and edcuational. However, this book is old, (it was written before the Wall came down, which is evident in the mentioning of the number of citizens of the Soviet Union who don't speak Russian) and a lot has happened in the lingustic field since then. So I'm not sure the information is always correct. Until I find out, I will simply enjoy the book as is :-) I can't go through all the mistakes, I really don't have the time, there are just too many. If it continues in this way then this is a work of complete and utter fiction.

Mother Tongue, The Story of the English Language by Bill Mother Tongue, The Story of the English Language by Bill

Having lived in Britain and the U.S., I have noticed the following for years and couldn’t agree more with Bill Bryson: I know exactly a little bit about English, and a little bit less about linguistics in general. Studied a few foreign languages, took a linguistics class or two in college. I'm what you might call a big fan of language. A dabbler. Certainly not an expert. But boy, did I find this book infuriating. Mother Tongue is a series of essays on the origins of human language, with plenty of interesting scientific insights, then to the messy origins of English amid the various waves of invasions of the original Celtic peoples of Britain by Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans, Scandinavians (Vikings), and so forth, to its growing status as a global language. I enjoyed this part of the book the most, learning a lot about the origins of the language that was especially useful now that I live in England myself. I also didn't know that Latin evolved into French, Spanish, and Italian among other languages, to my embarrassment. Given the many travels we've had through Europe in the past two years, a lot of the early origins of the Celtic peoples in Europe and the migrations of various peoples across the continent and to the British isles during the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages is really fascinating stuff.Amazing, original, boundary breaking. Gurdeep is a genius with flavour and a terrific writer too’ - Diana Henry Mother Tongue: The English Language, by Bill Bryson, London: Penguin Books, 1990 (link is to a different, in-print edition). In this connection, it is noteworthy that Tan chooses to focus on the school tests she undertook before concluding that her mother’s ‘broken’ style of English has been misunderstood – not just literally (by some people who’ve known her), but in terms of the misleading perceptions of her it has led others to formulate. He repeatedly dings Irish (and even more so Welsh) for having spellings that are bizarre, strange, overly convoluted, etc, when what he should mean is that the Irish language attaches sound values to the Latin alphabet that are different from those used by English.