What he does is to throw out titbits (or tidbits in the US, as they the consider the former spelling risque - so Bryson tells me) of information, some useful, some useless, some bizarre: but all fascinating. At Books2Door, we believe that reading is a fundamental skill that every child should have to help improve their vocabulary, grammar, and critical thinking skills.

I started this with enthusiasm and was enjoying his breezy style until it occurred to me that a lot of what he was saying seemed to be anecdotal. So if you are looking for an erudite and trustworthy account of the development of the English language I am sure there are many very worthy tomes out there!Bill Bryson turns his sharp-eyes to "The Mother Tongue" and takes us all on a fabulous journey through and overview of the intricacies of human language.

The fact that I learned them in one week, and remember them decades later, should be some indication of how easy they are. Ever since I learned to read, English has been my favourite language - I took to it like a duck takes to water (at least, I guess they take to it willingly, and that baby ducks are not paddled until their feathers fly by Mamma Duck to make them).

anyone who has spent any time learning a language will tell you that all of them have words with dozens of meanings (Except maybe Esperanto? Then again, he seems to think that Pennsylvania Dutch is a form of pidgin English, so perhaps that’s unsurprising! Equally fascinating are our various forms of wordplay, the ultimate of which must be the palindrome where a sentence says the same thing forwards and backwards (an example from the book: "A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.

I mean, I'm aware of these differences (I am usually able to recognize an American and a British when I hear them), but I do not think I can pronounce the word first according to one and then according to the other pronunciation. In this book, he discusses the history of the English language, but also the history of languages in general, the history of dictionaries, and many of the odd pronunciations and spellings that are so peculiar to English. Of course, Bill Bryson couldn't have foreseen how the Internet would change English (it would be interesting to know). I don’t expect Bill Bryson to be clairvoyant, of course, and a book written in 1991 about the history of language can be forgiven for having predicted neither the rise of the internet nor the scientific breakthroughs that proved that modern humans and Neanderthals interbred.

Published in 1990, the book was written before Internet changed the way the world communicates and hence a lot of the content regarding the spread of languages is hopelessly outdated by now. I could go on and demolish his assertions about the Australian accents (he seems to think that any one of us speaks one, only) and if somebody is going to be arch about other people's proofing, page 139, the first page of chapter 10 needs to be looked at HARD. After all, "perkele, saatana, vittu" are the first three words most foreigners learn and particularly the last one (female body part) is sprinkled into conversation as filler, much like the German word "aber". We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. I did not care to keep count of the times he falsely asserts some feature in English cannot be found in any other language or blatantly moves the goalposts to prove how infinitely richer English is compared to anything.