The Mother of All Tongues

I've just finished Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue, a book he wrote about a two decades ago that is a collection of all sorts of information about the English language. It took me almost a month to plow through it; I thought it would be a quick read because I'm such a fan of English. However, Bryson has compiled so much information, I just couldn't rip through it. A lot of it was thought-provoking and led me on little time-consuming side trips to the internet to find out more. Bryson covered one topic that I have been wondering about for some time and it gave me an appreciation of how things work in the linguistics world. I have long wished we had tape recordings of people like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson etc. so we could hear how they spoke. Bryson points out that we can get a pretty good idea of how they spoke by looking a pronunciation guides in dictionaries of the day and by looking at how words were rhymed in poetry. Brilliant. An approach I never thought of because I was focusing so much on the spoken word, without considering that the written word could offer us clues. Of course, I thoroughly enjoyed the various discussions involving differences in British English and American English (as well as Australian English). Interestingly, many "sins" of American English users were simply forms that fell out of favor in England but lived on across the pond beyond the point where the Brits could remember that they once favored the very words they ridiculed the Americans for using. I'll probably buy myself a copy because this is one of those books that can be picked up on a rainy day and turned to any page for a captivating read.