The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way By Bill Bryson

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Books,Reference,Writing, Research & Publishing Guides The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way Bill Bryson
 4,4


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Best Edition The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way with FREE PDF EDITION Download Now!


“Vastly informative and vastly entertaining…A scholarly and fascinating book.” —Los Angeles Times With dazzling wit and astonishing insight, Bill Bryson explores the remarkable history, eccentricities, resilience and sheer fun of the English language. From the first descent of the larynx into the throat (why you can talk but your dog can’t), to the fine lost art of swearing, Bryson tells the fascinating, often uproarious story of an inadequate, second-rate tongue of peasants that developed into one of the world’s largest growth industries.

At this time of writing, The Ebook The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way has garnered 8 customer reviews with rating of 5 out of 5 stars. Not a bad score at all as if you round it off, it’s actually a perfect TEN already. From the looks of that rating, we can say the Ebook is Good TO READ!


Best Edition The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way with FREE PDF EDITION!



I like Bryson's easy, breezy writing and love languages, so I expected to really enjoy this book and at first I did. I was dazzled by Bryson's erudition. Until I got to the one language that I know something about, Classical Chinese. In one paragraph, he slaughtered the truth. I'll give you just two examples. He said that people today could read the Chinese of 2,500 years ago. Not true. Contemporary and Classical Chinese are far more different than Latin and modern Italian, and that was true even before the Communists simplified the characters in the 60's. He also said that using a Chinese/English dictionary was a joke. After looking up a word by its radical (roughly, root), all of the thousands of entries for characters using that radical were just thrown in at random. Again, flatly untrue. They are entered in the order of the number of strokes used to write them. That still doesn't make it easy to find a word in a Chinese/English dictionary, but they aren't put together by clowns, either. In his bibliography, Bryson cites one work on Chinese, "Chinese for Beginners" by Dianne Wolff. I have been such a fan of Bryson's that I dared to hope that the mistakes were hers, so I ordered the book. Alas, her work is completely accurate. Bryson, either because he couldn't be bothered to actually read her book or just because he thought it was more entertaining his way, is totally responsible for his false statements. I do recognize that Classical Chinese is an obscure language, and who cares, right? But if he could be completely, 100 percent wrong about one language, what's to give us confidence he's right about any of them? I'm not saying he's dishonest, but I am saying I wouldn't set out on a walking tour of England using "The Road to Little Dribbling" as a guide unless I were comfortable with the risk I'd find myself walking through, say, Albania instead.


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