The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

by Bill Bryson

the lingua franca of business, science, education, politics, and pop music.

Vermicelli means “little worms”

In German, if you wish to say you, you must choose between seven words: du, dich, dir, Sie, Ihnen, ihr, and euch.

As native speakers, we seldom stop to think just how complicated

and illogical English is.

descended larynx explains why you can speak and your dog cannot.

children everywhere go through a phase in which they become oddly fascinated with the idea of “gone” and “all gone.”

like you” and not “I am liking you.”

only relatively recently have two languages, Albanian and Armenian, been identified as being Indo-European.

Of all the Indo-European languages, Lithuanian is the one that has changed the least—so

Old English is a much simpler and more reliable language, with every letter distinctly and invariably related to a single sound.

old English was phonetic

a line running roughly between London and Chester,

check

A great many Scandinavian terms were adopted, without which English would clearly be the poorer:

freckle, leg, skull, meek, rotten, clasp, crawl, dazzle, scream, trust, lift, take, husband, sky.

The pronouns they, them, and their, for instance, are Scandinavian.

No king of England spoke English for the next 300 years.

the more humble trades tended to have

Anglo-Saxon names (baker, miller, shoemaker),

the more skilled trades adopted French names (mason, ...

there was never any campaign to suppress it.

“a cat with nine lives lives next door.”

Old English system lurking in the language in plurals such as men, women, feet, geese, and teeth.

velleity, which describes a mild desire, a wish or urge too slight to lead to action.

This is of course one of the glories of English—its willingness to take in words from abroad,

bicho (insect) in Portugal

In Armenian, only 23 percent of the words are of native origin,

we have borrowed fewer words than German.

not sure about this finger hand

St. Paul’s Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial,

in Bleak House, where Dickens writes that

“Sir Leicester leans back in his chair, and breathlessly ejaculates.”

Gaelic

Gaelic or Celtic?

If there is one thing certain about English pronunciation it is that there is almost nothing certain about it.

scholars can get a good idea of what English must have sounded like by looking at the rhymes and rhythms of historic verse

Words adopted from France before the seventeenth century have almost invariably been anglicized,

champagne, chevron, chivalry, and chaperone.

Language, never forget, is more fashion than science,

we each have our own dialect.

nong for an idiot,

Two women means quarrel and three women means gossip.

aisle, bread, eight, and enough.

In Latin, the verb has up to 120 inflections. In English it never has more than five (e.g., see, sees, saw, seeing, seen)

the fatal waste of our fortune is by small expenses, by the profusion of sums too little singly to alarm our caution,

archaisms such as gotten.

labour and labourer but laborious. There is no logic to it,

In common speech, some 4,000 words are used differently

British American cot baby’s crib

in any language vocabulary is not the hardest part of learning. Morphology, syntax, and

idiom are far more difficult,

The study of names is onomastics.

China Zhonghua Renmin Gonghe Guo