Mother Tongue: Flavours of a Second Generation

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Tan acknowledges that, whilst she did well in maths and science, subjects with a single correct answer, she was less adept at English. For all the little anecdotes and copious bits of trivia it contains, I really want to like the book more than I do. Nuttall also tells the story of words like womb and breast, whose meanings have changed over time, as well as how anatomical words such as hysteria and hysterical came to have such loaded legacies. So he's very much a bicultural American-Brit who can see different aspects of both societies from the inside and outside, and also has a wide-ranging intellect and deft sense of humor. In this book, he discusses the history of the English language, but also the history of languages in general, the history of dictionaries, and many of the odd pronunciations and spellings that are so peculiar to English.

Mother Tongue, The Story of the English Language by Bill Mother Tongue, The Story of the English Language by Bill

The fact that I learned them in one week, and remember them decades later, should be some indication of how easy they are. Unfortunately it's also a world where the Harry Potter books are "translated" for American readers, lest we be too confused by the lingo: "What's this?

The title of Amy Tan’s essay is a pun on the expression ‘mother tongue’, referring to one’s first language. I did not care to keep count of the times he falsely asserts some feature in English cannot be found in any other language or blatantly moves the goalposts to prove how infinitely richer English is compared to anything. For example claiming that the German preposition/suffix "auf" is unusual among foreign words in that it has more than one meaning. I know and I do even realise that Bill Bryson is considered an entertaining author and that he also seems to be much loved and appreciated by many. And Tan drew on all the Englishes, plural, that she knew: the ‘broken’ English her mother used, the ‘simple’ English Tan used when talking to her mother, the ‘watered-down’ Chinese her mother used, and her mother’s ‘internal’ language which conveyed her passion, intent, imagery, and the nature of her thoughts.

Gurdeep Loyal

Food is a living form of culture that evolves: its boundaries are fluid, blurred, porous and dynamic. The class tests at school which reduced English proficiency to an ability to recognise a ‘correct’ answer are thus contrasted with Tan’s resounding final words of ‘Mother Tongue’, which see her seeking to capture the passion of her mother, the ‘nature of her thoughts’, and the imagery she uses: all things which her daughter has clearly inherited a respect for, and which school tests fail to capture or observe. Bryson repeatedly shows that he doesn’t understand what he’s talking about when it comes to the English language. No place in the English-speaking world is more breathtakingly replete with dialects than Great Britain. The Finns, lacking the sort of words you need to describe your feelings when you stub your toe getting up to answer a phone at 2.Many of the terms, such as ‘broken’ or ‘limited’, are too negative and imply her English is imperfect. From curried roast chicken to Punjabi-spiced fishcakes with Chinese smashed cucumber, Gurdeep Loyal isn’t afraid of remixing recipes. Mother Tongue is the first book from Akiko Kurematsu; a project exploring generations of Japanese family and home cooking.