Book Review: The Mother Tongue

The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way by Bill Bryson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Language is somewhat of a miracle. Bryson writes, "...about 30,000 years ago, there burst forth an enormous creative and cooperative effort which led to the cave paintings at Lascaux, the development of improved, lightweight tools, the control of fire, and many other cooperative arrangements. It is unlikely that any of these could have been achieved without a fairly sophisticated system of language."

We can infer much about the development and migration of humans based on language evidence. In the Indo-European language family, there is a common word for snow but no common word for sea. Therefore, humans started developing lanaguage somewhere cold and inland.

Bryson goes on to explore the oddities and interesting tidbits about how English came to be what we know as English.

Much of our history of people in England depends on an account written by a monk named the Venerable Bede, but his history was written 300 years after the events it described which, as Bryson writes, "...is rather like us writing a history of Elizabethan England based on hearsay."

But it's the history we have, so even when it's confusing and incomplete, we go with it.

Which is a metaphorical parallel with English. It's a mess. Boil means to bring water to a certain temperature AND also a gross pimple-like thing on your skin. Which are totally unrelated.

Also, sometimes a word means what it means and also means the opposite. Bryson points out, "Sanction, for instance, can either signify permission to do something or a measure forbidding it to be done. Cleave can mean cut in half or stuck together. A sanguine person is either hotheaded and bloodthirsty or calm and cheerful. Something that is fast is either stuck or moving quickly. A door that is bolted is secure but a horse that has bolted has taken off."

And it's not just our vocabularly. There are endless vagaries in pronunciation; "The combination 'ng' is usually treated as one discrete sound, as in bring and sing. But in fact we make two sounds with it--employing a soft 'g' with singer and a hard 'g' with finger ... We make another unconscious distinction between the hard 'th' of those and the soft one of thought. Some dictionaries fail to note this and yet it makes all the difference between mouth as a noun and mouth as a verb."

Bryson's book is full of little a-ha moments like that. He also has a little fun with the rules of grammar, most of which he thinks were originally quite dubious and originated in the mid-to-late 1700s, "a period of the most resplendent silliness, when grammarians and scholars seemed to be climbing over one another (or each other; it doesn't really matter) in a mad scramble to come up with fresh absurdities. This was the age when, it was gravely insisted, Shakespeare's laughable ought to be changed to laugh-at-able and reliable should be made into relionable."

Bryson doesn't discuss the Internet or Social Media because this book was published in 1990.


"At the time of writing, a television viewer in Britain could in a single evening watch Neighbors, a Australian soap opera, Cheers, an American comedy set in Boston, and EastEnders, a British program set among cockneys in London. All of these bring into people's homes in one evening a variety of vocabulary, accents, and other linguistic influences that they would have been unlikely to experience in a single lifetime just two generations ago."

So imagine what the internet has done since then. Netflix and other on-demand viewing programs. I would love for him to re-release a new edition with a forward that explores what we've done to language in the last 30 years because of these globalizing resources. Also, now that dictionaries live online, they are ever-changeable and updateable. I think Bryson could have a field-day with that.

Other interesting tidbits:
Did you know tidbit used to be titbit, but then the world went through a fit of properness and it was changed to tiDbit?

Did you know that written Icelandic has not changed all that much so modern Icelanders can easily read sagas written thousands of years ago?

Saint Patrick wasn't Irish. He was Welsh. The only reason he ended up in Ireland is that he was kidnapped by Irish pirates when he was 16.

The Domesday book is pronounced "doomsday" because long o sounds used to be pronounced ooo. But it's not about doom. Domesday refers to "domestic"

The word "roundabout" is of American origin. It was invented by an American, Logan Persall Smith, who was living in England and was one of the members of a 1920s panel of the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English. This panel decided how things should be pronounced and used, as well as making rules about vocabulary. Before Smith, traffic circles in Britain were called "gyratory circuses."

So, in Cockney, there's a tradition of playing a rhyming game to come up with new meanins for words. For example, bottle means ass; the rhyming phrase "bottle and glass" was a coy rhyming replacement for "ass" which was eventually just shortened to "bottle." This is where we get our term "bread" meaning "money;" bread and honey.

Also, in Bryson's list of dead words, I really want to bring back teetotaciously. I think "helliferocious" is already back, with an alternate spelling (hella ferocious)


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Book Review: The Man Who Loved China

The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom by Simon Winchester
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Simon Winchester picks the most fascinating topics, but this book falls short. As have all of his other books for me, save for Pacific. Pacific is a strong book because it is structured as a collected series of articles; it does not need a through-line. It is loosely connected by the similarity in subject but does not really need to lead from point A to point B.

In this book, Winchester sets out to tell the story of Joseph Needham, a fascinating polymath who rehabilitated western thought about Chinese history.

Ostensibly, it's a biography. It needs to lead from point A to point B. But it is poorly edited and poorly structured; things that don't bear repeating are repeated, ad nauseum. Things that need further explanation are cast aside. And the main question posed, throughout the book, the "Needham" question of why China stopped inventing, is never answered. Because it is unanswerable. But, if so, why plant references to it throughout the book if, at the end, you're going to reveal that there is no satisfactory solution to the mystery?

But, regardless of my annoyance with the structure and the pedantic drudgery of the writing, I learned so much from this book.

I knew that many inventions claimed by the West were actually invented in the East; China is now famously given credit for gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press. What I didn't know is that this "discovery" is so recent. Needham visited China in the 1940s and his books that set out to prove it--Science and Civilisation in China--began to be published in 1954 (and are still being published, the latest of the seven volumes in twenty-seven books being released in 2015)

Needham single-handedly changed how the west viewed its history; the list of inventions originating in China is long (there is an 11 page index that lists all of them, including arched bridges, crossbows, vaccination against smallpox, paper, chess, toilet paper, seismoscopes, wheelbarrows, stirrups, powered flight, etc.)

Though Needham did not discover the Diamond Sutra, Winchester discusses it at some length. It is said to be the oldest printed book in the world, having been created with printing blocks a full 600 years before Gutenberg. The date it was created is helpfully written in the text; 868 AD. A British-Hungarian archaeologist named Marc Aurel Stein found the library in Dunhuang in 1907, and bribed the abbot of the monastic group in charge of the cave, allowing Stein to smuggle thousands of documents, including The Diamond Sutra, out of China.

Despite the Diamond Sutra, the printing press never really caught on in China. Chinese uses pictograms, phonograms, and ideograms to represent words or syllables, with over 30,000 characters, which meant that a printer using movable type would have to have over 30,000 precast blocks. In European languages, there are usually 26 to 35 letters that are reused in endless combinations to create language.

Needham explains this in his book. He also explains Chinese philosophy and religion and how it affected science. For example, from Volume II of Science and Civilisation in China;
"Heaven has five elements, first Wood, second Fire, third Earth, fourth Metal, and fifth Water. Wood comes first in the cycle of the five elements and water comes last, earth being in the middle. This is the order which heaven has made. Wood produces fire, fire produces earth (i.e. as ashes), earth produces metal (i.e. as ores), metal produces water (either because molten metal was considered aqueous, or more probably because of the ritual practice of collecting dew on metal mirrors exposed at night-time), and water produces wood (for woody plants require water). Such is the Dao of heaven."

Winchester does not go into detail about the inventions themselves; he instead tells the story of Needham's travels in China in the 1940s, which also requires background in Chinese history during that era, which requires knowledge of Japan's empire ambitions and WWII, none of which I was particularly familiar with. After reading this book there are some big holes in my knowledge of history that are now partially filled; China was fighting a battle with Japan (they had taken over most of the coastal regions) while also dealing with in-fighting between Chiang Kai-shek and the communist forces under the leadership of Mao Zedong.

Needham was in China at a time when the Chinese government had retreated to Chongqing (Chung King to our western ears) and traveled there under the auspices of the "Sino-British Science Co-operation Office" to help Chinese scientists keep the supply lines open to get the supplies they needed to continue their research.

Needham spent most of his time traveling through the country, learning as much as he could, buying as many books as he could, and flirting with as many women as he could. And then he came home, started writing his book, flirted a little too much with communism for comfort, got himself in enormous trouble when he was duped by Soviet spies into believing, and publishing, that the US government had used biological weapons in Korea, climbed back out of trouble again somehow, kept writing his book, kept living with his wife, with his mistress next door (the wife and the mistress were long-time friends; the three spent lots of time together), traveled some more, lectured a lot, became Master at Cambridge, smoked, preached, danced, sang, and lived. Until he died, at the ripe age of 94, working on his book almost literally until the moment of his death.

Fascinating man who deserves a better biographical treatment than this one.


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