Mother Tongue: Flavours of a Second Generation

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Something quintessentially British, which is fishcakes, which I’ve inflected with loads of Punjabi spices, which is from my culture, but then I’ve topped that with a Chinese smacked cucumber,” he describes. In that way, this book is showing its age -- the chapter on online language use is, of course, conspicuously absent -- but it's got the history part down.

Mother Tongue by Gurdeep Loyal | Waterstones

I did not realize it was published in 1990 until hearing "Soviet Union" mentioned in the present tense.

I'm looking forward to reading A Brief History of Everything next before moving onto his well-liked travel stories.

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It made me wonder, though, since English is very much a dynamic language co-created together by the whole world depending on the generation, how much it will change in the next 100 years? That’s some magic trick, to have a land which is both entirely uninhabited when the white folks show up but which also has indigenous people living there to just offer up words for colonisers to “borrow”! The middle portion of the book gets very involved in examining the evolution of English spellings and pronunciations as it moved from Old English to Modern English, and the further hiving off of American English from British English.This account popularises the subject and makes it accessible to the lay reader, but it has been criticised for some inaccuracies, such as the perpetuation of several urban myths. Or this warning to motorists in Tokyo: 'When a passenger of the foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. My samosas in the book are harissa, paneer, fennel seed and pistachio – so mixing in Middle Eastern flavours and paneer into my own take on a samosa. I could go on and demolish his assertions about the Australian accents (he seems to think that any one of us speaks one, only) and if somebody is going to be arch about other people's proofing, page 139, the first page of chapter 10 needs to be looked at HARD. That was a theory made back when cell phones still required a battery the size of an unabridged dictionary, long before the internet became such a large part of the way the world communicates, in a time when you couldn't imagine downloading a British Doctor Who or an American Stargate Atlantis to your iPod.

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From its mongrel origins to its status as the world's most-spoken tongue; its apparent simplicity to its deceptive complexity; its vibrant swearing to its uncertain spelling and pronunciation; Bryson covers all this as well as the many curious eccentricities that make it as maddening to learn as it is flexible to use. However, this book is old, (it was written before the Wall came down, which is evident in the mentioning of the number of citizens of the Soviet Union who don't speak Russian) and a lot has happened in the lingustic field since then.

From curried roast chicken to Punjabi-spiced fishcakes with Chinese smashed cucumber, Gurdeep Loyal isn’t afraid of remixing recipes.