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| Language, never forget, is more fashion than science. |
Things Bill Bryson’s book The Mother Tongue is:
- Wry
- Amusing
- Fun to read
Things it certainly ain’t:
- Accurate
- Scholarly
- Researched properly
If we are to believe his detractors, and I am inclined so to
do, for reasons which follow, then he makes several serious factual errors
through what is alleged to be his rather sketchy journalistic practice. He just
doesn’t check his sources and follow up on hearsay. A cardinal sin, then, for a
seasoned journalist.
The book is, however, serendipitous in one respect. I
stumbled on an archived Reddit
thread in which someone asked if it was worth reading, from the point of
view of an amateur linguist, and for the most part the replies slated the book
for Bryson’s sloppy practice of repeating commonly held misconceptions about
word origins and so on. The big example is the oft-repeated ‘myth’ that Eskimos
have 50 words for snow. However, this is a busted myth that actually needs the
myth-busting busted.
Ahem.
Celebrated anthropologist Franz Boas was the man who
kick-started this long debate because of his study of the Inuit peoples of
Baffin Island. He recorded in his seminal work, The
Handbook of American Indian Languages that the people with whom he was
living had a remarkable vocabulary related to the frozen landscape, making
distinctions between the different types of snow to an astoundingly complex
level of meaningful differentiation. Quite why this became accepted as an urban
legend and quoted as an example of exaggeration or poor scholarship is the
mystery. His findings are borne out by several subsequent studies of Inuit and
Yupik languages. Igor Krupnik published works including an article in May 2011
on sea-ice terminology in the polar year 2007-2008, and a chapter addressing
this very misconception in his 2010 book jauntily titled Knowing Our Ice: Documenting Inuit Sea Ice Knowledge and Use*.
The serendipity, then, is that Bryson appears not to have
read of the general distrust of Boas’s claims which would have been circulating
in 1990 when this was first published (and seems to have been ignored in
subsequent later revised editions). Or, perhaps, he had read Boas’s work and therefore defended his right to include
the claim, sailing against the prevailing wind of public opinion at the time. I
don’t know for sure but have never quite come to terms with the popularity of
Bryson amongst the book-buying public, and worse, among those who never buy
books to read but pick up every new Bryson that pops up to give as Christmas or
Fathers’ Day gifts, so I’m inclined to come down hard on any suspicion.
I just don’t seem to like the guy.
Yes, he does like to rumble on in his gently entertaining, avuncular,
anecdotal manner, and the style causes no offense. However, the book lays claim
to some authority on the development of the English language and for that
reason his sloppiness is shameful.
Some of the Redditors proposed the wholesale removal of this
book from their shelves. I’m not going to go that far, but I am planning to
check out some of their suggested reading, including but not limited to John
McWhorter, Stephen Pinker and Kate Burridge. I suggest you try the same.
*Check out his research here: https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/78037447_Igor_Krupnik
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