The Mother Tongue is all about the English language, but also talks about the linguistic characteristics of other languages too. It's super interesting. I've been reading it for awhile (non-fiction always seems to take longer), and I am constantly telling Mike about all the things I'm learning from it. And now, I present them to you.
- English is the only language that has (or needs) a thesaurus (14).
- There are more people studying English in China than there are people in the United States (13).
- There are approximately 2,700 languages in the world... but that is only a best guess (37).
- All languages evolve, but Icelandic, for some reason hasn't really evolved much. Bryson claims that if Leif Ericson reappeared, he could communicate without too many problems (37).
- Spelling was pretty much anyone's best guess, until the printing press was invented. Perhaps unfortunately, the printing press was invented during a pretty tumultuous time for the English language. That's partially why there are some unusual spellings- a lot of our spellings reflect pronunciation of the 1400s (126).
- Relatedly, silent letters (like the "k" in knight and knees or "g" in gnat) were once pronounced (128).
- If you think texting abbreviations are irritating, you might be surprised to find that in the early 1900s the Simplified Spelling Board (supported by Andrew Carnegie and Theodore Roosevelt, among others) lobbied for the simplified spellings of certain words. They won a few battles, giving dignity to the shorter version of words that have two spellings (ax/axe, judgment/judgement, catalog/catalogue, program/programme, etc.). They also had a lot of support behind words like live, tho, thru, wisht, gard, giv, hav, and ar. But, they pushed their luck on words like tuf, def, yu, and filosophy. That, and the advent of World War I stopped their efforts (130).
4 comments:
That book sounds just the kind of thing I like to read. Maybe I'll pick it up. I sure didn't know English was the ONLY language with a thesaurus. That's pretty neat.
I love it that you cited your information throughout! Nothing like an English teacher. I also really just love this in general.
-Katie
Aubrey, reading this post reminds me of why we're friends. You read books about English in your free time! YES!
Also, I think you should check out a book called "The Tall Book". Creative title, right? Don't let it fool you - it's a surprisingly entertaining read about tall people. I totally did the same thing to Jack as you did to Mike - he was fed useless 'tall' trivia from myself as he studied.
Very intersting. I also love your new layout. Very eye catching!
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