The work was Pippa Passes, written in 1841 and now remembered for the line 'God's in His heaven, all's right with the world.' But it also contains this disconcerting passage:īrowning had apparently somewhere come across the word twat-which meant precisely the same then as it does now-but pronounced it with a flat a and somehow took it to mean a piece of headgear for nuns. “The poet Robert Browning caused considerable consternation by including the word twat in one of his poems, thinking it an innocent term. The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way At all events, the descended larynx explains why you can speak and your dog cannot.” It descends sometime between the ages of three and five months - curiously, the precise period when babies are likely to suffer from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In modern humans, the lowered larynx isn't in position from birth. But with Homo sapiens food and drink must pass over the larynx on the way to the gullet and thus there is a constant risk that some will be inadvertently inhaled.

They can breathe and swallow at the same time, and there is no possibility of food going down the wrong way. Other mammals have no contact between their air passages and oesophagi. That may seem a trifling point, but the slight evolutionary change that pushed man's larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well articulated speech. And, unlike all previous hominids who roamed the earth, they could choke on food. Similarly, English grammar has some complexities that allow speakers to make distinctions not.“These Cro-Magnon people were identical to us: they had the same physique, the same brain, the same looks. On one hand, English has a vocabulary that is significantly larger than other languages, allowing speakers to express ideas that are more precise. English language learning, therefore, is a large industry throughout the world.īryson compares and contrasts English to other world languages and discusses the relative merits of the different ways that language is constructed. English is often the neutral language chosen for international businesses that have workers and management that speak different native languages. English words and phrases have entered the vocabularies of many other languages around the world, reflecting the power that English has in the modern world.

Chapter 1 The World's Language Summary and Analysisīryson discusses the place of English in the world, including both successful and unsuccessful use of the language by non-native speakers.

The mother tongue bryson