The Mother Tongue (book)

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The Mother Tongue (ISBN 0380715430) is a book by Bill Bryson which wittily compiles the history and origins of the English language and its various quirks. Its subtitle is English And How It Got That Way. It discusses the Indo-European origins of English, the growing status of English as a global language, the complex etymology of English words, the dialects of English, spelling reform, prescriptive grammar, and more minor topics including swearing. Bryson's account is a popularization of the subject, designed to entertain as well as to inform, and the book is sprinkled with trivia and language lore.

Factual errors

Bryson is a storyteller, not an academic. Moreover, he seeks to entertain as much as to inform, and he relies on some outdated or questionable sources. The Mother Tongue's factual errors have attracted criticism from those looking for a genuine introduction to linguistics pitched at a readable level, as the book's presentation in an authoritative voice leads one to expect. Its erroneous assertions include:

That Chinese documents/dictionaries can't be organized, and that typing Chinese into computer is slow as of 1989. In fact, Chinese documents/dictionary words were very easily organized with Pinyin (initially invented in the Ming Dynasty, romanized sometime after 1949), Chinese could be typed into computer at an extremely fast speed (see Chinese input methods for computers and Wubi method), and Chinese characters could be very efficiently stored in the computer by methods invented in the late 1970s.
That modern Chinese people can easily understand Classical Chinese. (Exaggeration: Classical Chinese can be understood by very few people.)
In Mandarin Chinese there is no rule, as Bryson states on page 86, that "all words end in an 'n' or 'ng' sound." In fact, most words don't end with the "n" or "ng" sound.
The number of Eskimo words for snow. (a popular myth: see Eskimo words for snow)
That Russian has no words for "efficiency", "engagement ring", or "have fun". (effectivnost, obruchal'noe kol'tzo, and veselis respectively.)
That Esperanto has no definite article. (Bryson then goes on to use one himself.) In fact, it has no indefinite article.
That Finnish has no swear words. (This can only be supposed to be a joke.)
That Petroleum is Latin petro + Greek oleum. (It's Latin petra (rock) and Latin oleum (oil).)
That Germans cannot pronounce 'v's. In reality, they often confuse the sounds of 'w' and 'v' while speaking English. German also lacks the hard "j" sound.
That Drive as present tense is found in to drive, would drive, will drive (to drive is an infinitive, and would drive and will drive are auxiliary forms that take the bare infinitive. In the case of to be, a verb for which the infinitive is different from the present tense, the corresponding forms are would be, will be (formed with infinitive), not *would is, *will is (formed with present tense).) (Ambiguity following a statement regarding the lack of elaborate declension of English verbs.)
That Frisian so closely resembles Old English that one fluent in Frisian could read Beowulf almost at sight. (Exaggeration, although Frisian retains some archaic features similar to Old English that are not present in Modern English.)
That swarthy is from Latin sordere. (It's Germanic, cognate with German schwarz [OED])
That bumf is from German bumfodden. (It's plain English bum-fodder, after Latin anitergium [OED])
That no other languages have thesauruses. (Again, exaggeration; it might be fair to say that the role the thesaurus plays in English is perhaps greater than in any other language.)
That coney-catching was an obscene expression. (In fact the primary meaning of coney is "rabbit" and a coney-catcher is simply one who tricks or swindles innocents. [OED])
The transliteration of the ancient Greek palindrome "ΝΙΨΟΝ ΑΝΟΜΗΜΑΤΑ ΜΗ ΜΟΝΑΝ ΟΨΙΝ". (In fact this cannot be transliterated into our alphabet and remain a palindrome because the single letter "Ψ" represents "ps". Bryson does so anyway, and replaces the first instance of "Ψ" by "sp" instead, without comment.)
Bryson claims that "Estimates of the number of languages in the world usually fix on a figure of about 2,700." In reality, virtually all estimates put the number at between around 5,000 and 7,000 (pg. 37). (see for example [Ethnologue], which comes up with the number 6,912).

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