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The Mother Tongue

The Mother Tongue

English and How It Got That Way

by Bill Bryson
Paperback
Publication Date: 23/10/2001

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  $36.40

"Vastly informative and vastly entertaining...A scholarly and fascinating book." --Los Angeles Times

With dazzling wit and astonishing insight, Bill Bryson explores the remarkable history, eccentricities, resilience and sheer fun of the English language.

From the first descent of the larynx into the throat (why you can talk but your dog can't), to the fine lost art of swearing, Bryson tells the fascinating, often uproarious story of an inadequate, second-rate tongue of peasants that developed into one of the world's largest growth industries.

ISBN:
9780380715435
9780380715435
Category:
Historical & comparative linguistics
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
23-10-2001
Language:
English
Publisher:
HarperCollins Publishers
Country of origin:
United States
Dimensions (mm):
203.2x134.87x18.29mm
Weight:
0.24kg
Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson's bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent and Notes from a Small Island, which in a national poll was voted the book that best represents Britain. Another travel book, A Walk in the Woods, has become a major film starring Robert Redford, Nick Nolte and Emma Thompson. His new number one Sunday Times bestseller is The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island.

His acclaimed book on the history of science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, won the Royal Society's Aventis Prize as well as the Descartes Prize, the European Union's highest literary award. He has written books on language, on Shakespeare, on history, and on his own childhood in the hilarious memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. His last critically lauded bestsellers were At Home: a Short History of Private Life, and One Summer: America 1927

Bill Bryson was born in the American Midwest, and now lives in the UK. A former Chancellor of Durham University, he was President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England for five years, and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society.

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