Compares brilliantly the various idiosyncracies of languages including English. There are fun trivia galore, like every one of Bill Bryson’s books. (For some earlier books we have reviewed of this author, see two samples At Home and A Walk In The Woods)
He talks about the annoying features of English. Fly is an insect, the act of soaring through air and also a zipper closing a private part! He lists some advantages: French cannot differentiate (in words) between house and home, mind and brain. Italian has no equivalent of ‘wishful thinking’. He also talks of some words in other languages ‘schadenfreude’ of German or an unpronounceable looking Scottish word that means ‘the habit of dropping in at meal times’!
Some words, translated are unappetizing so we use the original. Strozzapreti, an Italian pasta, literally translates to ‘strangled priests’. Even the better known vermicelli means ‘Little worms’. Muscatel, an Italian wine translates to ‘wine with flies in it’. Go figure. Makes you think what they were making these out of, in olden times!
British have gruesome food names too, as Bill is quick to point out : toad-in-the-hole, spotted dick and faggots in gravy.
Other languages have some oddities for English speakers : In Cantonese, hae means ‘yes’ but with a fractional change of pitch, the same word may mean the female pudenda.
Xenophobia is embedded into some languages (I am not talking here of fair and dark in English but of foreign languages). The word for foreigner in Japanese translates to ‘stinking of foreign hair’. To Czechs, a Hungarian is a ‘pimple’. Germans call cockroaches ‘Frenchmen’ while the French call lice ‘Spaniards’. Italians call syphilis ‘the French disease’ while both Italians and French call con games ‘American swindle’.
To be utterly bored in French translates to ‘to be from Birmingham’. Belgian taxi drivers call poor tippers ‘un Anglais’.
Some English terms also border on the racist and some are cruel: an Irish beauty is a woman with two black eyes; a Mexican carwash is leaving your car out in the rain.
English can baffle newbies – what, for instance is hem in hem and haw, shrift in short shrift, ‘the fell’ in one fell swoop? Where is the whelm that you need to be over to be overwhelmed? Why are we overwhelmed or underwhelmed but never just whelmed?
And pronunciation! Why do we pronounce colonel as if there is an ‘r’ in it? And forty as if there is no ‘r’ in it?
He also points out how all Indo European languages have common roots. Yes, we already know some, but as codified here, it still impresses. When an English judge called Sir William Jones came to colonial India, he spent time learning Sanskrit and was astounded to see similarities with other languages he knew (He was a polyglot already).
Brother in English is bruder in German; brathair in Gaelic; bhrata in Sanskrit and biradar in Persian. King is rex in Latin and Raja in Sanskrit. Even Albanian and Armenian have recently identified as belonging to the Indo European group, all descended from one common language of yore. So the Romans would have been astounded to hear that the ‘barbarians’ were speaking a language that descended from the same one that theirs did!
And they say that, even though all languages changed over time, Lithuanian changed the least. It is said that simple sentences in Sanskrit are very intelligible to a Lithuanian! (I will have to take Bill’s word for it, as I know – poorly – only Sanskrit).
Modern tongue has borrowed a lot from the ‘street Latin’. There are many examples given – please read the book if you are into etymology – but one stands out. Our word salary comes from Latin salarium, or “salt money” – the ironic term Roman soldiers used for what it would buy!
You learn that Spanish and Portuguese are so alike that a Spaniard can easily read a Portuguese newspaper. (Spoken language is harder for them to understand between each other). Finns and Estonians freely understand each other. Danes, Swedes and Norwegians have very similar languages and can easily learn each other’s languages. Romanian and Moldovian are the same language with different names! So is Serbian and Croatian, except for the alphabet (Serbian uses Cyrillic and Croatian uses Roman, like English. (I thought rather like Hindi and Urdu where the spoken language is much closer to each other but the alphabet is very different).
Other countries have linguistic idiosyncrasies : In Luxemburg, they ‘generally’ use French in School, German to read newspapers and Luxemburgian (a local German version) at home in conversation. In Paraguay, Spanish is used for official work and Guarani, a local Indian tongue, to tell jokes.
More linguistic trivia awaits those language lovers : Romans had no word for gray. Irish Gaelic has no term for ‘yes’ and ‘no’ – you employ longer sentences to affirm or deny. Italian language cannot distinguish between a niece and granddaughter (and likewise between a nephew and a grandson). The Japanese have no plural words and you have to infer the plural by context! (In English too some words don’t : deer, fish etc). Japanese also have no future tense! ‘I go to Osaka’ and ‘I will go to Osaka’ both have the same phrase.
In German, the word for police is considered feminine but while girl is neuter gender!
Viking invasion and occupation of the Northern part England gave some Scandinavian words into English. It sounds, in hindsight, it makes sense that the words skull, clasp and dazzle came from Norse, but surprisingly the words leg, rotten, lift and husband also came from there!
We learn about the Norman conquest of Britain. Normans, I was surprised to learn, were Vikings who had settled in Northern France two hundred years before they invaded England! (Which is why there is a French province called Normandy in France). They brought in the French influence to English words.
Even more fascinating changes to English over time are described. For instance, words beginning (earlier) with n had undergone interesting changes : a napron became an apron, a nauger became an auger, and in the reverse process, an ekename became a nickname. In personal names, Ned, Nell and Nan are considered to be corruptions of ‘mine Edward’, ‘mine Ellen’ and ‘mine Ann’ respectively!
Some words are formed due to mishearing and then get entrenched! Button-hole came from mishearing ‘Button hold’. Sweetheart was originally sweetard, as in dullard or dotard. Asparagus was previously called ‘sparrow grass’. Pea has an interesting origin: originally it was ‘pease’ as it lives today in the nursery rhyme ‘pease porridge hot pease porridge cold’. But ‘pease’ was mistakenly considered to be a plural (‘peas’ and so shortened to ‘pea’ for singular).
Borrowed words are interesting too ‘Catamaran’ and ‘Mulligatawny’ are more famous examples from Tamil but I did not know that Shampoo originated from Hindi ‘champna’ or ‘pound, knead’. Boondocks comes from the (Filipino) Tagalog ‘bundak’ which means ‘mountain’. The transformations can be interesting too. Mayday comes from French m’aidez (“Help me”). Bankrupt comes from Italian ‘banca rotta’ or broken bench. When a banker (who was in stalls) became bankrupt, his bench (which he used for transactions) was broken customarily.
When experiments were done on monkeys, scientists proved that they do recognize kinship – which baby belongs to which mother etc and picked the right ones out of a ‘parade’.
Sometimes a word is borrowed and ‘beaten out of shape’ before it is adopted. Thus Gaelic sionnachuighim was ‘knocked into’ shenanigan and American Native word rougroughcan became raccoon. (Yes, these can be learned from any etymological dictionary but it takes the fabulous pen of Bill Bryson to put it all together with such enthusiasm and with humour and wit. A pleasure to read!)
The military tank got its name because during its (secret) design phase, people were told that they were designing a storage unit (‘tank’) and the name stuck. Its parts like hatch, hull and deck got their names because it was designed by navy, not the army!
Sometimes words over time come to mean the opposite of what was originally meant – counterfeit originally meant a legitimate copy! Brave meant cowardice and originated from the root word depraved! (Bravado retains some of the meaning still). Zeal has lost its pejorative sense but zealot has not! A girl in old English was any young person – a boy or… er… a girl of today. A harlot was once a boy! Awful was awe-inspiring. Egregious once meant eminent and admirable. The word ‘nice’ went through several transformations in meaning – initially stupid or foolish, then lascivious and wanton and dozens of other meanings before it settled on the current one.
Once ‘tell’ meant ‘to count’ and that meaning still survives only in the profession of a ‘bank teller’. Neck used to mean ‘a parcel of land’ and that meaning survives in the expression ‘neck of the woods’.
Another quaint survivor is the term ‘the exception proves the rule’. Here ‘prove’ takes the older meaning of ‘test’.
Meanings morph and become specific. Starve meant ‘to die’ not ‘to die of hunger’ as it does today. Meat meant any food (hence mincemeat, which is made up of fruits only!)
Worm was any crawling creature and included snakes!
And there are exceptions that will confuse a newbie. Anything with the prefix ‘in’ is a negative, like ‘invalid’, ‘injustice’ etc but not ‘invaluable’! Usually less is a negative suffix like cheerless but not with ‘priceless’!
Some words, abbreviated, became legit. (There is one! ‘legit’). Mob stood for mobile vulgus (‘fickle mob’). Exam, gym and lab are obviously words with the remainder cut out. New words are ‘formed’ through fusion too: airport, footwear, landmark, sidewalk are examples. And the order of fusion matters : houseboat is different from boathouse; basketwork from workbasket and casebook from bookcase!
Daisy was once ‘day’s eye’. We all know the most famous example ‘goodbye’ was ‘god be with you’ but did you know that hello was probably ‘whole be thou’? Also Bill Bryson informs us that even lord was loafward; fortnight was ‘fourteen night’. Incidentally, in North America, it draws puzzled frowns if you use that word.
He goes on to examine local dialects of English.
Alphabets came to Europe through the Middle East. A came from Aliph and B from Bah – both of Semitic origin.
Bill then describes the Simplified Spelling project on both sides of the Atlantic, its very influential group of patrons and donors and how it died an eventual death with complete failure. The examples of suggested spelling ‘improvements’ are funny to read.
The oddity of spelling, the few reforms attempted, all make good reading. We learn that Gutenberg who started the moveable type press in England, did not get rich through the invention. We also learn that this too was not his invention but copied from another man outside England. It took a Belgian who moved to England to make printing press a success and get rich.
Samuel Johnson, perhaps the best known figure behind the compilation of dictionaries in the English language, had these “qualifications” when he was asked by a London publisher to compile a dictionary : he was blind in one eye, corpulent, incompletely educated, coarse in manner and had a provincial background.
We also learn that Webster the brain behind the famous American dictionary was a vain, humourless schoolteacher whom nobody liked. He was a loner and a failed lawyer. He also plagiarized from earlier works – whole passages, as described by H L Mencken.
He lied too, claiming to have invented some words (‘expenditure’ for instance) which had been in the English language for years, and also lied about his achievements. (He claimed he had mastered twenty three languages – but could not demonstrate it to fellow experts).
American English borrowed liberally from native words – for new things for which they needed a new name – but conveniently shortened. We talked about racoon earlier. Another words was hooch, which was borrowed and shortened from the tribe name Hoochinoo, who were famous for its homemade liquor.
Some words came from Spanish but reached Spanish by native words! Examples are rodeo, buffalo, and avocado.
Mexican Spanish gave hoosegow (from juzgado for jail, which was pronounced ‘hoosgow’ by Mexicans). Rancher was borrowed from Mexican Spanish ‘rancho’. The word ‘dollar’ came from Joachimsthaler, a mining town in Germany!
Even the differences between American and British English, covered in so many other books, is made entertaining here. For instance, English people bathe wounds but bath their babies; A tramp in England is a bum in America while a bum in England is a fanny in America; a fanny in England is the female pudenda in America. Royal Mail in Britain delivers Post not mail; in America the Postal Service delivers mail not post!
With Bill Bryson on the subject of languages, you would soon expect translation jokes and you surely get them! When an American movie was dubbed in Italian, the words ‘Can you pull over please?’ uttered by a cop was translated into the cop asking for a sweater (‘pullover’). In another, a person asking if he can bring a date to the function was translated as asking whether he can bring a fig (date) to the function. A Brainiff airlines ad in Spanish told customers that they could fly without any clothes on (while the intention was to tell them that they can recline on leather seats).
In 1977, President Carter said ‘I wish to learn your opinions and understand your desires for the future”. The interpreter rendered it as “I desire the Poles sexually” The interpreter also told the Poles that the President had “abandoned” the USA for a day (instead of left). Talking of hubris in the US with respect of learning another language, a US senator very seriously was quoted as saying ‘If English is good enough for Jesus Christ, it is good enough for me’.
Also surnames is a fascinating topic. We all know that Carpenter, Bowman, Archer, Shepherd, Forrester all came from occupations. But others are obscure today. Fuller came from occupation too – a cleanser of clothes; Fletcher too – maker of bows (they fletch to fit the string). Bateman is a corruption of Boatman. Smith, the most common name in Anglo Saxon territory is also an occupation but it is surprising that the same profession is the most common surname in many other countries (Schmidt in German, Ferrier in French, Ferraro in Italian, Herrero in Spanish, Kovacs in Hungarian and Kusnetzov in Russian all mean ‘Smith’ as a profession!)
The surnames French, Fleming, Welsh and Walsh (corruption of Welsh) meant that the person was an immigrant from another area.
Why do people have surnames like Bishop, Monk or Prior when the priests were supposed to be celibate? The answer is that it was originally something like ‘Bishop’s man’ who worked for a Bishop and then it got shortened.
Some surnames had foreign origins. Russell came from old French roussell, which meant ‘red haired’. More hilariously, Kennedy means ‘ugly head’ in Gaelic! Boyd means ‘sickly’ and Campbell means ‘crooked mouth’. Foreign names had strange origins too : Gorky meant ‘bitter’, Tolstoy means ‘fat’, Machiavelli means ‘bad nails’. Cicero literally means ‘chickpea’ and was a slang for a wart on the nose.
Americans adopted Anglicized surnames for what was originally foreign names – being an immigrant melting pot, people came from all over. So ‘Jonsson’ and ‘Johansson’ from Scandinavia became Johnson and Muller and German Millers became Miller.
We learn a lot more trivia. We learn that for Chinese, being called turtle is highly insulting. In French, it is insulting to be called a cow or a camel and worse insult if you called someone ‘a kind of a cow’!
In wordplay, he discusses crosswords. The first crossword was created by an expat Englishman and published in NYT in 1913. It was thought of as a space filler. In 1924 when Simon and Schuster published a book of crossword puzzles, it started a craze; Baltimore and Ohio railroad was induced to place a dictionary in each of its cars for the use of the travelers absorbed in crosswords!
We also learn that Reverend William Spooner, who gave us the name spoonerism for mangled syllables was an albino.
And he then talks extensively about word play. Palindromes, Rebus puzzles – all are fair game and extensively well researched.
Definitely a fun and informative read.
9/10
— Krishna
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