Bill Bryson – The Mother Tongue

Here is a book that was recommended to me a long time ago, after I had mentioned getting more and more interested in my studies of linguistics applied to English language. Besides, I confess a weak spot for any book that deals with the evolution of a language.

This is my first time reading Bryson, and I quite liked the humoristic tone he uses. I’m not sure if this book will teach anything to anyone else than a complete layman in terms of linguistics.; in any case, it still taught me, a French reader, quite a few things regarding proper nouns, pronunciation, or the fact that some archaic English verb forms are still used in the USA, but not in the United Kingdom (and the contrary).

However, I managed to find out a few mistakes here and there when it came to comparing a language to another one (mostly I noticed that with French, Alsatian and Japanese languages). For instance, he mentions some words that aren’t supposed to exist anymore in French, while this is not true (I still happen to hear them in everyday conversations); as another example, the use of hiragana in Japanese isn’t only as furigana, but also as grammatical words or verb endings. This does not tell me if there were mistakes regarding English language–I assume it is easier to make some in other languages than one’s own–but it makes some things worth double-checking.

Nevertheless, I liked the book all the same; it is an interesting read for a person who wishes to get an initiation to the subtleties and history of English.