Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language

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You can read this before The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way PDF EPUB full Download at the bottom. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary lists 450,000 words, and the revised Oxford English Dictionary has 615,000, but that is only part of the total. Try pronouncing geimhreadh, Gaelic for “winter,” and you will probably come up with something like “gem-reed-uh. Vestigial features of older forms of the language remain in place to this day, with archaic pronouns like thee and thou still spoken in parts of Yorkshire.

Mother Tongue: The English Language by Bill Bryson | Goodreads Mother Tongue: The English Language by Bill Bryson | Goodreads

Hence the name for the place and the name that has stuck to the indigenous peoples of the New World ever since: Indians. This account popularises the subject and makes it accessible to the lay reader, but it has been criticised for some inaccuracies, such as the perpetuation of several urban myths. Moreover, this same versatility can make English rules of grammar seem maddeningly arbitrary to non-native speakers.The American dialectologist William Labov observed in the 1930s that middle-class New Yorkers were far more likely to pronounce the r sound in words like door, car, and more than were their fellow working-class New Yorkers. The poet Robert Browning caused considerable consternation by including the word twat in one of his poems, thinking it an innocent term.

The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way - Goodreads

Throughout the history of the English language, however, there have been shifting definitions of which words were and weren’t considered offensive. We’ve seen how, even in its earliest stages, English was highly flexible in accepting new words from Norse and Norman French. In that way, this book is showing its age -- the chapter on online language use is, of course, conspicuously absent -- but it's got the history part down.

The common American word peek, as in “to take a peek,” was once confined to a small corner of East Anglia (most other English people would say peep or squint), but because migrants from this region settled in the New World, the word got an unlikely new lease on life. The United States also has colorful names in abundance, from Screamer, Alabama to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. 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. America has exerted a powerful influence over English, especially as the reach of US media and Hollywood films has extended around the world. Browning had apparently somewhere come across the word twat--which meant precisely the same then as it does now--but pronounced it with a flat a and somehow took it to mean a piece of headgear for nuns.