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by
Bill Bryson
Read between
October 11 - November 23, 2019
in English one tells a lie but the truth, that a person who says “I could care less” means the same thing as someone who says “I couldn’t care less,”
Altogether, about 200,000 English words are in common use, more than in German (184,000) and far more than in French (a mere 100,000).
Cro-Magnon people were identical to us: They had the same physique, the same brain, the same looks. And, unlike all previous hominids who roamed the earth, they could choke on food. That may seem a trifling point, but the slight evolutionary change that pushed man’s larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well-articulated speech.
Neanderthal man was physiologically precluded from uttering certain basic sounds such as the /ē/ sound of bee or the /oo/ sound of boot. His speech, if it existed at all, would have been nasal-sounding and fairly imprecise—and that would no doubt have greatly impeded his development.
more than an intriguing coincidence, but the area of Cro-Magnon’s cave paintings is also the area containing Europe’s oldest and most mysterious ethnic group, the Basques. Their language, called Euskara by its speakers, may be the last surviving remnant of the Neolithic languages spoken in Stone Age Europe and later displaced by Indo-European tongues. No one can say. What is certain is that Basque was already old by the time the Celts came to the region. Today it is the native tongue of about 600,000 people in Spain and 100,000 in France in an area around the Bay of Biscay stretching roughly
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One of the greatest mysteries of prehistory is how people in widely separated places suddenly and spontaneously developed the capacity for language at roughly the same time.
Japanese itself is a mystery. Although its system of writing and some of its vocabulary have been taken from Chinese, it is otherwise quite unrelated to any other known language. The same is true of Korean.
By the end of the first month of life infants show a clear preference for speechlike sounds over all others. It doesn’t matter what language it is.
Some aspects of language acquisition are puzzling: Children almost always learn to say no before yes and in before on, and all children everywhere go through a phase in which they become oddly fascinated with the idea of “gone” and “all gone.”
although the Saxons continued to flourish on the continent, the Angles and Jutes are heard of there no more. They simply disappeared. Although the Saxons were the dominant group, the new nation gradually came to be known as England and its language as English, after the rather more obscure Angles. Again, no one knows quite why this should be.
Not only were the Anglo-Saxons relatively uncultured, they were also pagan, a fact rather quaintly preserved in the names of four of our weekdays, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, which respectively commemorate the gods Tiw, Woden, and Thor, and Woden’s wife, Frig. (Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, to complete the picture, take their names from Saturn, the sun, and the moon.)
in Beowulf alone there are thirty-six words for hero, twelve for battle, eleven for ship—in
The practice in London of placing -n or -en on the end of present indicative verbs was gradually driven out by the southern practice of using -th, so that loven became loveth, for instance, and this in turn was eventually driven out by the northern -s or -es ending, as in the modern form loves.
Today we have two demonstrative pronouns, this and that, but in Shakespeare’s day there was a third, yon (as in the Milton line “Him that yon soars on golden wing”), which suggested a further distance than that.
We have no word for coolness corresponding to warmth. We are strangely lacking in middling terms—words to describe with some precision the middle ground between hard and soft, near and far, big and little.
Why should we have lost demit (send away) but saved commit? Why should impede have survived while the once equally common and seemingly just as useful expede expired?
Tell once meant to count. This meaning died out but is preserved in the expression bank teller
This inclination to use affixes and infixes provides gratifying flexibility in creating or modifying words to fit new uses, as strikingly demonstrated in the word incomprehensibility, which consists of the root -hen- and eight affixes and infixes: in, -com-, -pre-, -s-, -ib-, -il-, -it-, and -y.
Consider, for example, changes in the stress on many of those words that can function as either nouns or verbs—words like defect, reject, disguise, and so on. Until about the time of Shakespeare all such words were stressed on the second syllable. But then three exceptions arose—outlaw, rebel, and record—in which the stress moved to the first syllable when they were used as nouns (e.g., we re bel′ against a reb′el; we re ject′ a re′ject).
Words adopted from France before the seventeenth century have almost invariably been anglicized, while those coming into the language later usually retain a hint of Frenchness. Thus older ch- words have developed a distinct “tch” sound as in change, charge, and chimney, while the newer words retain the softer “sh” sound of champagne, chevron, chivalry, and chaperone. Chef was borrowed twice into English, originally as chief with a hard ch and later as chef with a soft ch. A similar tendency is seen in -age, the older forms of which have been thoroughly anglicized into an “idge” sound (bandage,
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We can render the sound “sh” in up to fourteen ways (shoe, sugar, passion, ambitious, ocean, champagne, etc.); we can spell “ō” in more than a dozen ways (go, beau, stow, sew, doe, though, escargot, etc.) and “ā” in a dozen more (hey, stay, make, maid, freight, great, etc.).
“I’m hurrying, are I not?” is hopelessly ungrammatical, but “I’m hurrying, aren’t I?”—merely a contraction of the same words—is perfect English. Many is almost always a plural (as in “Many people were there”), but not when it is followed by a, as in “Many a man was there.”
In Massachusetts there was a lake that the Indians called Chargoggagomanchaugagochaubunagungamaug, which is said to translate as “You fish on that side, we’ll fish on this side, and nobody will fish in the middle.”
At the turn of the century, New York had more speakers of German than anywhere in the world except Vienna and Berlin, more Irish than anywhere but Dublin, more Russians than in Kiev, more Italians than in Milan or Naples.
Consider that in Britain the Royal Mail delivers the post, not the mail, while in America the Postal Service delivers the mail, not the post.
there are more people learning English in China than there are people in the United States.
There is evidence to suggest that some members of Congress aren’t fully sympathetic with the necessity for a commercial nation to be multilingual. As one congressman quite seriously told Dr. David Edwards, head of the Joint National Committee on Languages, “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me”
Most people are familiar with the army term snafu (short for “situation normal—all fucked up”), but there were many others in common currency then, among them fubar (“fucked up beyond all recognition”) and fubb (“fucked up beyond belief”).
The ancient Greeks often put “Nispon anomimata mi monan opsin” on fountains. It translates as “Wash the sin as well as the face.” The Romans admired them, too, as demonstrated by “In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni” (“We enter the circle after dark and are consumed by fire”), which was said to describe the action of moths.
