Name: The Mother Tongue
Rating: 4.5 (87 reviews)
Author: Bill Bryson

What’s in it for me? Discover the rich history of the English language.

When we use English in everyday life – while talking to a friend or writing an email or swearing at someone in traffic – we rarely stop to think about where all the words we use come from. But each and every word is part of a detailed and curious history – the history of the English language itself.

These blinks take you back through time and trace the origins of the many words we use every day. Along the way, you’ll learn a great deal about the history of Western civilization, too.

You’ll also find out

what names people came up with for things they’d never seen before;
who invented the most words in the English language; and
which words English speakers share with Scandinavians.

Many of the world’s languages can be traced back to a common ancestral language.

Many people will tell you that today’s world is more connected than ever before. This may well be the case, but that doesn’t mean that connectedness is anything new. One age-old indicator of a near-global connection is language. Take the word “brother.” In German it’s “bruder,” in Sanskrit it’s “bhrata,” and in Persian it’s “biradar.”

Why are these words so similar? An eighteenth-century English judge wondered the same thing – and his attempt to answer that question essentially launched the field of historical linguistics.

Sir William Jones was working in India when he took up the unusual hobby of learning Sanskrit.

The language had already been dead for hundreds of years, yet it managed to survive thanks to the priests who’d memorized certain hymns, called the Vedas. Though the priests were ignorant of the words’ meanings, they managed to pass them down from one generation to the next.

As Jones studied these texts, he began to recognize unmistakable similarities between Sanskrit and the European languages. In Latin, for example, “king” is “rex,” and in Sanskrit it’s “raja.” And Sanskrit for the English word “birch” is “bhurja.”

Once he’d noticed these similarities, Jones began comparing other languages to Sanskrit, and he found more and more evidence for a budding theory: that a wide variety of classical languages – Persian, Latin, Celtic, Sanskrit, Greek – had their roots in a parent language.

Eventually, Jones presented his theory in Calcutta. This presentation gave birth to a whole new field of scholarship. European scholars began conducting research of their own and, in the end, they agreed with Jones. They named the parent language Indo-European.

Deducing the existence of Indo-European is an impressive feat of historical linguistics. The speakers of this language would have only been alive during the Stone Age (around 7000 BC) and there are no traces of Indo-European writing. Nonetheless, scholars have offered convincing hypotheses about these people’s lives, solely based on common words in the descendent languages.

Since the words for “snow” and “cold” are similar, we can deduce that the Indo-Europeans didn’t live in tropical climates.

Likewise, since there is no common word for “sea,” they likely began as inland tribes. And when they migrated to the coast, they invented their own separate words for the ocean.

Repeated conquests of the British Isles changed and expanded the English language.

Nowadays, it’s not uncommon to hear English words pop up in other European languages. But this wasn’t always the case – in fact, historically speaking, English tended to be the main adopter of foreign words.

There are a few major evolutionary points in the development of the English language, and the first came when two Germanic tribes – the Angles and the Saxons – migrated to Britain.

As English evolved, new words were added and old ones took on new meanings.

The word “manufacture” used to mean making something by hand, since it is derived from the Latin word for hand. However, it has since taken on a new meaning and now refers to machine-made products.

This kind of transformation isn’t uncommon. Of all the words in the English language that come from Latin, over half of them have changed with time.

Words were created in the New World through adaptation and “America” came about through a misunderstanding.

As the saying goes, “Necessity is the mother of invention” – and this certainly holds true for the English language. When settlers arrived in the Americas, they encountered a whole world of strange new plants and animals, each of which required immediate naming.

Of course, these animals and plants already had names – Native American names – and the settlers were quick to introduce them to the English language.

Our last names can reveal information about our family’s past.

If you know someone with the surname of Smith, Schmidt, Herrero, Kovacs or Ferraro, then it’s quite likely that their ancestor worked as metalsmiths.

But this is just one way in which our last names can provide insight into our ancestry. Another detail a last name can reveal is where our ancestors lived.

Kernaussagen in The Mother Tongue