Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

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Thus, a melting pot of English, rather than a polarization of different dialects, looks to be where we’re headed. Few English-speaking natives, however well educated, can confidently elucidate the difference between, say, a complement and a predicate or distinguish a full infinitive from a bare one. For example, before they turn two, most children seem to grasp the difference between stative (“I like bananas”) and non-stative verbs (“I am liking bananas”) and rarely ever make this grammatical mistake again. Place-names in England are often perplexing to outsiders because of the divergence between their spellings and pronunciations: Leicester is pronounced “lester,” Worcester is pronounced “wooster,” and Postwick is pronounced “pozick.

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

Almost any name will do so long as it is at least faintly absurd, unconnected with the name of the owner, and entirely lacking in any suggestion of drinking, conversing, and enjoying oneself.

The fact that I learned them in one week, and remember them decades later, should be some indication of how easy they are. American speech, on the other hand, is comparatively homogenized, to such an extent that speakers on the East and West Coasts (roughly 3,000 miles apart) speak with virtually indistinguishable accents. When the pilgrims arrived in North America, they not only coined new words to describe the New World but also adopted many words used by Native Americans.

Mother Tongue Summary of Key Ideas and Review | Bill The Mother Tongue Summary of Key Ideas and Review | Bill

In another where a character asks if he can bring a date to the funeral, the Spanish subtitle has him asking if he can bring a fig to the funeral.

According to Professor Hubertus Menke, head of the German Department at Kiel University, the language is “very close to the way people spoke in Britain more than 1,000 years ago. In fact, it would appear that one of the beauties of the English language is that with even the most tenuous grasp you can speak volumes if you show enough enthusiasm—a willingness to tootle with vigor, as it were. The transformative nature of English is exemplified in the changes that occurred when the language moved from Britain to North America.