The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Bill Bryson (ч. notes)

Notes

1

To take a notable, but little-known example, Saint Patrick, the parton saint of Ireland, was the son of a Roman official and his British wife. Far from being Irish, as is commonly supposed, Saint Patrick was Welsh. The only reason he ended up in Ireland was that he was kidnapped at the age of sixteen and taken there by Irish pirates.

2

It should be noted that Burchfield, in The English Language, calls this distinction between field names and food names “an enduring myth” on the grounds that the French terms were used for living animals as well (he cites Samuel Johnson referring to a cow as “a beef”), but even so I think the statement above is a reasonable generalization

3

However, unlike America, Australia has three layers of social accent: cultivated, used by about 10 percent of people and sounding very like British English; broad, a working-class accent used by a similar number of people (notably Paul Hogan); and general, an accent falling between the two and used by the great mass of people.

4

Further, and possibly conclusive, evidence of this was shown in 1874 when Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, an Englishman, invented an outdoor game that he called sphairistike. It only caught on when his friend Arthur Balfour, the future prime minister, suggested he call it lawn tennis.

5

One of which, incidentally, is said to be the longest word in the English language. It begins methianylglutaminyl and finishes 1,913 letters later as alynalalanylthreonilarginylserase. I don’t know what it is used for, though I daresay it would take some rubbing to get it out of the carpet.

6

“At the time when the United States split off from Britain, for example, there were proposals that independence should be linguistically acknowledged by the use of a different language from that of Britain” [The Use of English, page 3].

7

Smith also wanted traffic lights to be called stop-and-goes and brainwave to be replaced by mindfall, among many other equally fanciful neologisms, but these never caught on.

8

Entirely incidentally, a little-known fact about Shakespeare is that his father moved to Stratford-upon-Avon from a nearby village shortly before his son’s birth. Had he not done so, the Bard of Avon would instead be known as the rather less ringing Bard of Snitterfield.