Ross A. Baker reviewed The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson
Somewhere between antiquated and incorrect
2 stars
This book is ominpresent on the shelves at the secondhand store near me. I had a chuckle at every page I sampled, and it was Bryson's humor that got me through 245 pages. The book did not seem well researched, and I was left wondering whether it was a product of its time or just a poor product.
One of the first signs of trouble is the cliché that "The Eskimos, as is well known, have fifty words for types of snow." It's so well known, and disputed, it has a lengthy wiki article. Furthermore, the dated term "Eskimo" reminds us we're in the early 1990s.
Later, Bryson claims the residents of Indianapolis refer to it as "Naplus." I have lived here more than two decades. I can mumble "Indinaplis" like a native, and watched "Naptown" yield to "Indy" as the preferred short form. I can't recall once hearing …
This book is ominpresent on the shelves at the secondhand store near me. I had a chuckle at every page I sampled, and it was Bryson's humor that got me through 245 pages. The book did not seem well researched, and I was left wondering whether it was a product of its time or just a poor product.
One of the first signs of trouble is the cliché that "The Eskimos, as is well known, have fifty words for types of snow." It's so well known, and disputed, it has a lengthy wiki article. Furthermore, the dated term "Eskimo" reminds us we're in the early 1990s.
Later, Bryson claims the residents of Indianapolis refer to it as "Naplus." I have lived here more than two decades. I can mumble "Indinaplis" like a native, and watched "Naptown" yield to "Indy" as the preferred short form. I can't recall once hearing "Naplus." Was that the Indy of the 1980s, or is Bryson just wrong? My wife, who's been here twice as long, suggests the latter.
I studied Esperanto a bit in college, where it presented as a "bridge language" for machine translation. It was fun to be reminded of the idea here, presented hopefully for both the future of machine translation and Esperanto. But it's /vektoroj de nombroj/ dominating the 2020s.
A final jarring reference was a funny line from "New York developer Donald Trump." For as much English as we can appreciate across centuries, a lot has changed just since 1990.
