The Mother Tongue (original 1990; edition 1991)

I checked this book out of my local library expecting to find it as funny as most of the other Bill Bryson books I've read. It wasn't funny at all.

It's exactly what the title says it is, a book about "English and how it got that way." Bryson's wit would flare up occasionally, but mostly it was buried under a lot of dry trivia about the evolution, spread, and adaptation of the English language. The only things I really retained were the fact that the longest word in the English language is a chemical name that contains something like 1300 letters, and that the highest score officially recorded in a Scrabble game was about 1500. Oh, and the fact that British crossword puzzles sound impossibly hard. (Example: The clue is something like H2098N32O. The answer? Water. That's right, water. Because if you look at the clue in the right frame of mind, it's H2O. I won't be attempting one of those anytime soon.)

If this sounds like your kind of book, go for it. But I'm not really a non-fiction reader unless it tells a good story, and this book was not for me. ( )

Recently I read ‘Made In America’ by Bill Bryson, so I thought it would be appropriate to read ‘Mother Tongue’ as well. Though there was a fair chunk of similar information in both books, ‘Mother Tongue’ is just more relevant. While ‘Made in America’ focused on the history of English in America; ’Mother Tongue’ focuses mainly on the history of English in general. Trying to cover questions like, “Why is there a ‘u’ in four and not in forty?” or “Why do we tell a lie and tell the truth?”

Bill Bryson does a great job of teaching and keeps the book interesting and sometimes humorous. Though the format and the style of the books are similar, I would recommend ‘Mother Tongue’ over ‘Made in America’ simply because the information is more relevant and covers all aspects of the English language.

Recommended for all English geeks, this book will give you a deeper understanding of the language as well as grammatical structures like amphibology. My wife might also be happy to hear that the book covers the topic of onomatopoeia. ( )

Very sloppily researched. I couldn't finish this book. There are so many inaccuracies regarding things I know that I can't trust anything it says about things I don't know. ( )

Abandoned on page 83.

I enjoyed the first section that described the history of the English language. But at approximately one third into the book, long lists of words increasingly kept cropping up as an example of this or that. I became a bit bored. Do I really care whether angry and hungry are the only English words that end in -gry?

I think that reading some negative reviews before I started on this book, was a mistake. A niggling doubt grew and stuck in my mind: Does Bryson know any other languages? I haven't bothered to try and find out.

This is my second attempt at Bryson. My previous attempt was [b:Notes from a Small Island|28|Notes from a Small Island|Bill Bryson|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1313220025s/28.jpg|940892] which was a delight at first and then started to bore me about a third through the book as well. With so many fans of Bryson, the fault must lie with me and not with him. ( )

So interesting. I finished this, and then read it again. Very easy to read, but FASCINATING, history of all sorts of linguistic issues, from the word games we play to cursing. Who knew the word "tits" dates back to old english? ( )