Chapter 1: The World's Language - Part 4: My Edition

The Mother Tongue: A Fact Check

This is a continuation of my series on The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way. You can find the first post here.

I’ve realized that I’ve neglected to introduce myself; after all, why should you trust my research over Bryson’s?

As I mentioned in part one, I’ve been interested in linguistics since reading Bryson’s book almost fifteen years ago. I graduated with a BA in linguistics in 2016, and I’m currently working on an MA in corpus linguistics at Lancaster University.

More importantly, I’m extremely good at finding information.¹ While I was always decent at tracking things down, my time writing for the 100 Hour Board at BYU refined those skills. I chased down decades-old research papers and consistently found answers to questions on obscure topics. Even now, a casual “I’ve been looking for X” from a friend sends me down rabbit holes of research from which I emerge with a few new sources for them. I’m also good at knowing which sources can be trusted.

Most importantly, I cite my information—from the primary source. Many of these facts from Bryson come from a secondary source, but I’ve traced back to primary sources, ensuring that I’m not participating in a game of factual telephone. I give footnotes—not just a bibliography—so that you can see for yourself whether or not I came to the right conclusion.

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So. How would I rewrite this first chapter? I’m going to try stay consistent to facts as they were true in the 1990s. Bryson’s original text will be in brackets, with my own additions outside of them. There are some places where I’ve paraphrased his claims.

I’m not going to provide a significant number of examples that would normally be used to fill out a chapter, but I’ll provide enough to get a sense of things. Sources will be provided for factual statements, even if they’re claims I’ve addressed before.

This, obviously, is a draft chapter—not something that I would actually publish in a book—but it will give a good sense of what the chapter could have been. That is, if Bryson had bothered to fact check anything.

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Chapter 1: The World’s Language

[More than 300 million people in the world speak English] as a first language, and many more are learning it as a second language.² English words are being borrowed across the world: Filipino has borrowed kudeta,³ Italians have microfilme,⁴ and Russian has bul’dózer.⁵ And these are only a few morsels of the English language buffet from which others have sampled.⁶

[For better or worse, English has become the most global of languages, the lingua franca of business, science, education, politics, and pop music.]⁷ At least one international company reported using English as their working language despite not being founded in English-speaking countries.⁸ [In early 1989, the Pasteur Institute] in France [announced that henceforth it would publish its famed international medical review only in English because too few people were] submitting papers in French.⁹

The number of English language learners has skyrocketed.¹⁰

English has an incredibly rich vocabulary, enabling shades of distinction across a wide variety of topics. The 1985 Roget’s Thesaurus lists 43 synonyms for good: 31 nouns, 12 adjectives. The entry for deception lists 71 nouns, and the entry for habitat lists over 100 noun synonyms.¹¹

We posess words with incredible specificity,¹² like petrichor (“a pleasant, distinctive smell that frequently accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather”),¹³ and serendipitous (“having the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident”).¹⁴

If we don’t manage to find the precision in our own language, we’ll borrow from our neighbors. We’ve borrowed hygge for a particular sense of coziness, macho for a particular kind of masculinity, and schadenfreude for a particular type of happiness. English is estimated to be 75% loan words.¹⁵

Unlike other languages that rely on affixes to denote formality, English relies solely on vocabulary to do so.¹⁶

English speakers can change the tone of sentences by shifting from active to passive voicing: [we can say “I kicked the dog,” but also “The dog was kicked by me”]. English also has the [capacity to extract maximum work from a word by making it do double duty as both noun and verb. The list of such versatile words is practically endless: drink, fight, fire, sleep, run, fund, look, act, view, ape, silence, worship, copy, blame, comfort, bend, cut, reach, like, dislike, and so on. ]

[At the same time, the endless versatility of English] leads to unwieldy spellings and heaps of irregular verbs. English spelling and pronunciation can be particularly unwieldy for native and non-native speakers alike. American-English spelling reform can be traced back to Benjamin Franklin in 1768, and countless others have attempted to expanded on the project.¹⁷ English is the only language with a spelling bee.¹⁸ There are around 250 irregular verbs in English, many of them in frequent use.¹⁹

[As native speakers, we seldom stop to think just how complicated and illogical English is. Every day we use countless words and expressions without thinking about them—often without having the faintest idea what they really describe or signify. What, for instance, is the hem in hem and haw, the shrift in short shrift, the fell in one fell swoop? When you are overwhelmed, where is the whelm that you are over, and what exactly does it look like? And why, come to that, can we be overwhelmed or underwhelmed, but not semiwhelmed or—if our feelings are less pronounced—just whelmed?]

[Answering these and other such questions is the main purpose of this book. But we start with perhaps the most enduring and mysterious question of all: Where does language come from in the first place?]

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Conclusion

I don’t begrudge the existence of this book—it is, after all, what put me on my current path—but I begrudge the quality of this book. There are more than enough fascinating facts about the English language without dragging factoids from other languages and cultures into the discussion.

I’ll be taking a break for a few weeks, but I’ll be back soon with Chapter 2: The Dawn of Language!

(And if you haven’t by now, check out footnote 12—I think you’ll like it.)

1. As attested by a former editor:

[El is] excellent, both in thoroughness and critical thinking.

a former coworker:

[Her] sleuthing skills are formidable!

and a former teacher/debate coach:

She was one of our top debaters for years and her ability to dissect an argument, find information pertaining to all sides of that argument, and then creating a case for both sides made her one of the best in the state.

2. Crystal, David. “How Many Millions? The Statistics of English Today.” English Today, vol. 1, Jan. 1985, pp. 7–9, www.davidcrystal.com/Files/BooksAndArticles/-3975.pdf. Accessed 11 Aug. 2023.

3. “Language Campaign Controversial in Multilingual Philippines.” The Daily News, 26 May 1988, p. 20, www.newspapers.com/article/the-daily-news-language-campaign-controv/129766553/. Accessed 11 Aug. 2023.

4. Rando, Gaetano. “The Assimilation of English Loan - Words in Italian.” Italica, vol. 47, no. 2, 1970, pp. 129–42. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/478330. Accessed 10 Aug. 2023.

5. Benson, Morton. “English Loanwords in Russian.” The Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 3, no. 3, 1959, pp. 248–67. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/305014. Accessed 10 Aug. 2023.

6. For further reading:

Hanon, Suzanne. “The Study of English Loan-Words in Modern French.” Computers and the Humanities, vol. 7, no. 6, 1973, pp. 389–98. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30199598. Accessed 10 Aug. 2023.

Benson, Morton. “English Loan Words in Russian Sport Terminology.” American Speech, vol. 33, no. 4, 1958, pp. 252–59. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/453864. Accessed 10 Aug. 2023.

Thogmartin, Clyde. “Some ‘English’ Words in French.” The French Review, vol. 57, no. 4, 1984, pp. 447–55. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/393310. Accessed 10 Aug. 2023.

Benson, Morton. “English Loanwords in Serbo-Croatian.” American Speech, vol. 42, no. 3, 1967, pp. 178–89. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/453347. Accessed 10 Aug. 2023.

A JSTOR search for “english loan words” between 1950 and 1990 pulls up over 40,000 results.

7. Smith, Larry E. English for Cross-Cultural Communication. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1981, archive.org/details/englishforcrossc0000unse/. Accessed 11 Aug. 2023.

Kachru, Braj B. The Other Tongue : English across Cultures. Urbana, University Of Illinois Press, 1982, archive.org/details/othertongueengli0000unse/. Accessed 11 Aug. 2023.

Westphal, Michael, and Lisa Jansen. “English in Global Pop Music.” Bloomsbury World Englishes: Volume 1: Paradigms, edited by Britta Schneider et al., Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 190–206, www.google.com/books/edition/Bloomsbury_World_Englishes_Volume_1_Para/cis8EAAAQBAJ?hl=en. Accessed 11 Aug. 2023.

8. Greenhouse, Steven, and Special To the New York Times. “Chip Maker without a Country.” The New York Times, 1 Aug. 1988, www.nytimes.com/1988/08/01/business/chip-maker-without-a-country.html. Accessed 27 July 2023.

Fixman, Carol S. “The Foreign Language Needs of U. S.-Based Corporations.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 511, 1990, pp. 25–46. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1047368. Accessed 10 Aug. 2023.

9. Tempest, Rone. “Furor over Pasteur : Fewer Words of Wisdom Are French.” Los Angeles Times, 12 Apr. 1989, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-04-12-mn-1672-story.html. Accessed 26 July 2023.

10. Lowenberg, Peter H. Language Spread and Language Policy. Georgetown University Press, 1988, repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/555480/GURT_1987.pdf. Accessed 11 Aug. 2023.

11. Carney, Faye, and Maurice Waite. The Penguin English Thesaurus. Penguin, 1985, pp. 47, 113–114, 201, archive.org/details/englishforcrossc0000unse. Accessed 11 Aug. 2023.

12. The best modern day example of an incredibly specific word can be found here.

13. “Petrichor.” The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 754, archive.org/details/compacteditionof0000unse/page/754/mode/2up. Accessed 11 Aug. 2023.

14. “Serendipitous.” The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, p. 1064, archive.org/details/compacteditionof0000unse/page/1064/mode/2up. Accessed 11 Aug. 2023.

15. Finkenstaedt, Thomas, and Dieter Wolff. Ordered Profusion. 1973.

16. Levin, Harry, and Peter Garrett. “Sentence Structure and Formality.” Language in Society, vol. 19, no. 4, 1990, pp. 511–20. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4168176. Accessed 11 Aug. 2023.

17. Hodges, Richard E. “A Short History of Spelling Reform in the United States.” The Phi Delta Kappan, vol. 45, no. 7, 1964, pp. 330–32. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20343148. Accessed 11 Aug. 2023.

18. Wikipedia contributors. “Spelling Bee.” Wikipedia, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia., 8 June 2022, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_bee. Accessed 11 Aug. 2023.

19. Quirk, Randolph, et al. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London ; New York, Longman, 1985, www.academia.edu/44205699/Epdf_pub_a_comprehensive_grammar_of_the_english_language. Accessed 11 Aug. 2023.