Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling
By David Wolman
3.5/5
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About this ebook
“A funny and fact-filled look at our astoundingly inconsistent written language, from Shakespeare to spell-check.”
—St. Petersburg Times
David Wolman explores seven hundred years of trial, error, and reform that have made the history of English spelling a jumbled and fascinating mess. In Righting the Mother Tongue, the author of A Left-Hand Turn Around the World brings us the tangled story of English Spelling, from Olde English to email. Utterly captivating, deliciously edifying, and extremely witty, Righting the Mother Tongue is a treat for the language lover—a book that belongs in every personal library, right next to Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, and the works of Bill Bryson and Simon Winchester.
David Wolman
DAVID WOLMAN is a Contributing Editor at Outside. He has written for the Wired, the New York Times, New Yorker, Nature, and many other publications, and his work has been anthologized in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series. He is the author of The End of Money, Righting the Mother Tongue, and A Left-Hand Turn Around the World. David lives in Portland, Oregon, with his family.
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Reviews for Righting the Mother Tongue
41 ratings8 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This book was somewhat disappointing. It started out okay and then fizzled. It never gave me quite the information that I was hoping for.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For language lovers and orthographists, this is undoubtedly a good introductory read. It's the story of English spelling as told from the slant of spelling reform through the ages. Wolman is writing from the perspective of a bad speller and laments that English is so complicated, with so many exceptions to standardisation. Why must it be so hard to spell? While I was never at risk of winning any spelling bees, I've never found spelling particularly challenging, but I enjoyed the history (80-90% of all English words aren't English in origins; we are the supreme linguistic magpies), and the debates, efforts and arguments to simplify spelling were ... interesting. I didn't agree with most of them, but I admired their tenacity and passion. I found some of Wolman's assertions over simplified; for example, that the 'd' in words like sledge, wedge, edge, judge, and fudge is silent, so why is it there? An unscientific and ad hoc survey of friends shows that the 'd' is subtle, but not silent; it hardens that g sound just a tiny bit, enough that sledge sounds different that slege. The 'd's' absence becomes even more pronounced in wedge (wege) and edge (ege). There are better examples of his argument about extraneous silent letters, but even those can be argued to be useful. Not/knot for example - that 'k' is definitely silent - but handy when reading sentences like: Better not tie the knot too tight. I guess what I'm trying to say is that this is a good book, but its strict focus on just orthography limits its scope and its argument. A conversation about spelling that doesn't take into account reading comprehension is really only half a conversation. I am, admittedly, a prescriptivist; I feel strongly that there are correct spellings and incorrect spellings, and that there's a time and place for 'text-speak', but it should not be on school exams. I think this puts me dangerously on the edge of 'fuddy-duddy', but I'm still rebel enough to drop all those u's the Brits are fond of, and I still insist on swapping my 're' for 'er' (meter/metre, etc.) so I'm not quite ready for the cane-waving just yet. ;-) I have several of David Crystal's works (whom Wolman cites frequently), and I think this book will have served as a terrific jumping-off point for Crystal's titles.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a great little book about English spelling, how it got so weird and what people think of it. Wolman presents an easily digestible look at the path written English has taken to arrive at its current state. It's certainly not comprehensive and the linguistics stay pretty light, but I think it's just right for the layperson. Even more praise worthy is his handling of the subject of spelling reform. Both historical and contemporary movements are discussed and Wolman covers all sorts of angles. Good cases are made on both sides and I am pleased to report that the book gives a nuanced and fair look at a complicated and often controversial subject. Wolman's apparent stance at the end gives an optimistic nod to future linguistic developments in a manner I hadn't considered before but find fascinating.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The book necessarily starts in Olde Englande because that's where our modern English spellings don't start from, that comes next, but was the foundation of the language. It is therefore very jarring to have the author intersperse this history of orthography with modern American cultural references, 'they didn't drink the Kool-Aid', a long chapter on Spelling Bees (did any of the popular kids in school actually go in for that, or was it reserved for teacher's best little kiddies?) and slang, 'cool' for one. A history of spelling should become a reference book, it's certainly exhausive enough, but the effect of the writing is, despite the widespread use of English and its common roots, to parochialise it to the US and also, which is worse, to date the book immediately.
Two reviewers of this book call it a 'linguistic romp'. I like my linguistics to be serious, and my 'romps' (what a word, very tabloid, so National Enquirer or Daily Mirror) to be a great deal more entertaining than this. However, the book is informative and serious at times and if two such words could go together, tediously entertaining in part.
Recommended to fans and partipants of Spelling Bees who will find themselves utterly glorified The rest of us - a dictionary is vastly more interesting. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Why is English spelling so bizarre? Here are some of the answers. Also, lots about various efforts to simplify out spelling and why they fail. Informative and enjoyable.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)I originally picked this up because of a hugely entertaining interview with the author I heard on public radio's "The World in Words;" and blessedly, the book turns out to be just as entertaining, a brisk yet informative look at the various attempts over the millennia to standardize what we know as the English language. Because that of course is an important thing to know about English, for those who don't; that unlike, say, France, there is no official governing board for standard English usage, deciding with legal authority what is "proper" use of the language and what isn't, which is the main reason that English is both one of the most difficult languages on the planet to learn and one of the most expressive. But Lord, as Wolman so eloquently describes, there sure have been a lot of people who have tried their damnedest to impose a sense of official order over the language: from Chaucer and his cohorts in the Middle Ages to Webster and the other proto-linguists of the Enlightenment, to the surprisingly high-profile series of reformers during the Victorian and Edwardian eras (including Theodore Roosevelt, Dale Carnegie and Mark Twain) who spent millions of dollars trying to reduce the language down to a level more akin to modern text-messenging, all the way to the modern crackpots who "picket" the National Spelling Bee each year in order to garner more awareness for their cause. As you can imagine, then, there are a whole series of fascinating side-lanes along this path to modern English, which Wolman puts to very good use in his book, making it not just a dry history but a modern travel guide as well, as he journeys from the birthplace of standardized English (southwest England, that is), to the birthplace of printed text (Germany), to the first global headquarters of printed English books (Antwerp, surprisingly enough), peppering his text throughout with looks at all the various bizarre exceptions found in English spelling and why those exceptions exist. (Why does 'rhubarb' have a silent H? Why is 'color' spelled with an extra U in England but not the US?) It's one of the better nonfiction reads I've come across in a long time, and it comes highly recommended today.Out of 10: 9.4
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5As a non-scholarly book on the subject of English orthography, I found this very readable and very enjoyable. The author interviews historians of spelling and spelling reform. He talks to current movers and shakers in the world of spelling: modern day spelling reform advocates, dictionary editors and computer programmers responsible for spell check and Google's "Did you mean...?" feature. I liked this casual approach to the subject. I found the book entertaining, humorous at times, and I learned something, too.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Righting the Mother Tongue: From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling, is, as the title suggests, the humorous, condensed story of the development of English spelling.The study of English spelling, or orthography, is complicated; our language has influences from many different languages and dialects (apparently 80-90% of our words come from other languages which, as you read, will turn out to be not so surprising). David Wolman, a less-than-stellar speller himself, takes his reader back 1500 years, to Wessex, to the time when Alfred the Great ruled. Jump forward five hundred years, to the invasion of England by the Normans and the infusion of Norman French into upper-class speech... and forward again, to the invention of the printing press... again, to the creation of Webster's dictionary and the invention of modern American spelling... and eventually to the modern inventions of spell-check, Google, e-mail, and text message. Oh, what a long way English spelling has come--and is likely to go. Its also amazing to me how English has gone from being a language of the street, farm, and tavern (as Wolman puts it) to being the language of international commerce--all within 1500 years.Wolman sits down with a number of individuals to talk about this develoment, including the noted scholar David Crystal. His approach is therefore hands-on, and his tone is irreverent, catching on to those subtle ironies of the English language that make it so unique. In all, a concise, hysterically funny layman's guide to this fascinating but tricky subject. In many ways, its a lot like Lynn Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves.