Quicklet on Bill Bryson's the Mother Tongue - English and How It Got That Way by Devon Smith

Author:Devon Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hyperink
Published: 2013-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

Between Fiction and Non-Fiction

Bill Bryson is the best-selling author of a dozen books on language, science, British and American culture, and most famously, travel. His writing is lively and humorous, and he strives to write non-fiction as entertaining as it is informative. In Mother Tongue, however, many readers accused him of falling short.

The problem with Mother Tongue is not that it’s not well-written. It is. The problem is that many believe it not to be well-researched. The book has references and footnotes galore, but there are many claims and assumptions which don’t have sources. Some have called out the authors in the footnotes to be unreliable as well. Although a handful of typographical errors were fixed in later editions, most of the factual problems have not been addressed.

Scholarly-minded readers have taken exception to a number of Bryson’s claims, but the one that really gets their goat is Bryson’s claim that the Eskimos have 50 words for snow. This oft-retold myth is particularly frustrating to linguists, including Geoffrey Pullum from Language Log, who says it has nothing to do with Eskimo words and everything to do with the structure of Eskimo language. Basically, Eskimo languages are polysynthetic. That means that Eskimos can put an entire sentence into a word. Any sentence that you could say about snow—an infinite number—can be made into an Eskimo word about snow.

In general, however, the book was well-received critically, even by reviewers who pointed out that it was not free of errors. Burt Hochberg of The New York Times says, “What an engaging tour guide he is; Mr. Bryson is having so much fun himself that we can't help sharing his pleasure in turning up odd, interesting facts or in pointing out grammatical blunders committed by famous grammarians.”

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