The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

by Bill Bryson

And yet in Britain, despite the constant buffetings of history, English survived. It is a cherishable irony that a language that succeeded almost by stealth, treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants, should one day become the most important and successful language in the world.

this hat, that hat, and yon hat. Today the word survives as a colloquial adjective, yonder, but our speech is fractionally impoverished for its loss.

One of our more inexplicable habits is the tendency to keep the Anglo-Saxon noun but to adopt a foreign form for the adjectival form. Thus fingers are not fingerish; they are digital. Eyes are not eyeish; they are ocular. English is unique in this tendency to marry a native noun to an adopted adjective. Among other such pairs are mouth/oral, book/literary, water/aquatic, house/domestic, moon/lunar, son/filial, sun/solar, town/urban. This is yet another perennial source of puzzlement for anyone learning English. Sometimes, a Latinate adjective was adopted but the native one kept as well, so that we can choose between, say, earthly and terrestrial, motherly and maternal, timely and temporal.

Daisy was once day’s eye, good-bye was God-be-with-you, hello was (possibly) whole-be-thou, shepherd was sheep herd, lord was loafward, every was everich, fortnight (a word curiously neglected in America) was fourteen-night.

For example, the Elizabethans, unlike modern English speakers, continued to pronounce many er words as ar ones, rhyming serve with carve and convert with depart. In England, some of these pronunciations survive, particularly in proper nouns, such as Derby, Berkeley, and Berkshire, though there are many exceptions and inconsistencies, as with the town of Berkamsted, Hertfordshire, in which the first word is pronounced “birk-,” but the second is pronounced “hart-.” It also survives in a very few everyday words in Britain, notably derby, clerk, and—with an obviously modified spelling—heart,

Considerations of what makes for good English or bad English are to an uncomfortably large extent matters of prejudice and conditioning.

Sometimes these differences in meaning take on a kind of bewildering circularity. A tramp in Britain is a bum in America, while a bum in Britain is a fanny in America, while a fanny in Britain is—well, we’ve covered that. To a foreigner it must seem sometimes as if we are being intentionally contrary. 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.