Through the Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages [Paperback]

This book takes a couple of old ideas about language that seem ludicrous and discredited, and shows that there is something in them. If you have read Deutscher's "Unfolding of Language", the first thing to know about this book is that it's much easier to understand - I read it all in one sitting, which I can't imagine doing with the earlier book because of the fairly hard going when discussing technicalities of grammar.

One issue seems rather dry and academic, but turns out to be anything but - names for colours and their development over time, starting with a book about Homer, by Gladstone (yes, the Victorian PM), which drew conclusions about colour perception by the Ancient Greeks from descriptions like "wine-dark sea". Similar discredited notions are ideas like speakers of languages with complex sets of tenses having a more highly-developed notion of time than those who use fewer tenses or none at all. Deutscher shows how the desire to get rid of silly nonsense has resulted in some equally silly nonsense, like the tenet that all languages are "equally complex" whether they belong to an 'advanced' Western civilisation or a 'primitive' aboriginal group. Far more acceptable of course than the notion that the 'primitive' language reflects racial inferiority, but still nonsense, because we have no way of measuring how complex a language is - we may as well say that all languages are equally green.

The other dodgy old notion is that your mother tongue affects the way you think. Deutscher shows that in a few ways, it actually does. Along the way you get entertaining coverage of things like gender conundrums, including the fact that Mark Twain's joke about female turnips applied to Old English just as much as modern German, and that like "she" for ships, this turnip gender lasted way past the death of Old English as a language - Deustscher quotes an example from a medicinal manual published in 1561.

It's all presented far more clearly than my hasty summary of the ideas can show you, and there's much incidental interest along the way, illustrating the fine line between thought-provoking but carefully stated suggestions and false statements (possibly based on a desire to 'prove' those suggestions) that lead generations of academics down the wrong path. Deutscher is good at seeing this process and as fair to the various participants as he can be. He's also good at getting you to see that aspects of foreign languages that seem absurd to English-speakers may actually indicate what's strange about English. His mother tongue is Hebrew, which has the same "irrational gender system" as most European languages, and he tells us that "If I knew more about (feminine) ornothology, I could tell by looking at each bird what biological sex she was. I would point at her and explain to the less initiated: 'You can tell she is a male because of that red spot on her chest and also because she is larger than the females.' And I would not feel there was anything remotely strange about that."

The biggest recommendations: the fact that I read the whole book again within a week, and Deutscher taking over from Steven Pinker as my favourite author of language-related books.

In some cultures, there is a single word that denotes both blue and green. The people in these cultures can see the difference between the colors as well as anyone else, but they don't consider blue and green different colors, just different shades of the same color. In Russian, there is a word for dark blue and another word for sky blue. We who did not grow up speaking Russian do not confuse dark blue and light blue any more than Russians do, even if we call them both "blue."

How a language deals with colors is just one of the ways that linguist Guy Deutscher examines the interplay between language and thought. For many years, it was THE controversy in linguistic circles. But even if the phrases "Sapir-Whorf" and "Chomskian grammar" do not make you see red or any other color, you will find Deutscher's investigations into how language affects thought and vice versa, fascinating and enlightening.

He discusses why, in the Iliad, Homer described both the sea and oxen as being "wine-colored." He describes a society in which the people use points of the compass to describe locations rather than "left" and "right," and how that affects their sense of place.

Through the Language Glass had me seriously questioning what I thought I knew about language. Deutscher challenges conventional linguistic theories and seems to have a great time doing it. Through the Language Glass is the kind of book that you want to share with everyone and find out what they think about it, too. Is Deutscher crazy? Is he brilliant? Both, probably.

Also recommended -- When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge by K. David Harrison, and Harrison's documentary, The Linguists.

Through the Language Glass Guy Deutscher 2010

The author has an elegant classical writing style and I bought the book at his Wandsworth Arts Festival presentation last autumn.

Deutscher gives a fascinating introductory tour d'horizon of linguistics and its history. He shows how views have veered from stressing the commonality of languages to Whorf's ideas on different languages defining radically different perceptions of reality in different tribes and peoples.

But the author's style is more that of a populariser rather than a scientist, and the book alludes to studies and evidence rather than originating anything new. In my view, his conclusions are rather tame and (as he would no doubt admit) need further evidential backing.

Deutscher's bold hypothesis is that in important ways language can affect not just how we describe the world, but how we actually perceive it (although he rejects Whorf's extreme views.) If this were the case in terms of eg major intellectual and cognitive concepts then it would be revolutionary. However his conclusions in three areas seem rather more marginal and perhaps disappointing given the build-up:-

- Colour perception Gladstone (yes the 19th c. P.M.) made a study in which he claimed the classical Greeks described the sea or sky as black or wine coloured. Deutscher claims modern studies show differences in colour perception in different nationalities, but the quoted examples merely show subtle differences in analysing shades of green, blue and grey ie. close neighbours on the colour spectrum . But this is hardly the same as someone describing a red apple as green and it could be pointed out that there are sometimes arguments within a language as to how to describe a colour in say, a specific picture.

- Directions While most Western developed cultures primarily use personal orientation (left, right etc.), some tribes use absolute geographical concepts (North, South,..). While Deutscher proposes that their language implants these ideas in these peoples, might this not just be an environmental result of say a hunting culture where absolute directions may be of overriding survival importance.

- Gender Deutscher points out there are major gender differences in languages, inflections and word endings and that in English inanimate objects tend to be described by the impersonal pronoun `it' with certain notable exceptions eg. a ship is `she'. Other languages differ wildly. No doubt there is a strong sentimental attachment to this in one's native language (groups are quoted who get upset if ships are no longer seen as feminine) but this does in a sense seem trivial. For anyone learning another language soon adapts to different gender descriptions and presumably adopts this mindset while speaking the language. How deep seated in the psyche are these ideas?

While Deutscher's book is descriptively lively, I don't see that it is likely to ruffle many feathers among what might be called the Chomsky based consensus. I learnt at university of Chomsky's radical ideas on the common aspects of human languages, and the remarkable fact that any healthy infant if displaced can adopt any language as his native tongue. Indeed Deutscher acknowledges that all human concepts are potentially graspable by all peoples. The tribal boy may count "1,2,3 many", but given education he will soon be grasping calculus. In rejecting Whorf's extreme ideas Deutscher appears to be somewhere in the middle of the scale.

It would be interesting to learn more of Deutscher's ideas in a possible future book on the impact of the global economy on language and perceptions, with so much of the world's population speaking (even if not natively) one of a few languages - in particular English or Chinese. How does this affect their perceptions of the world?

Have learnt of a must read just published book on English and its history The Language Wars: A History of Proper English The author Henry Hitchings apparently disapproves of those who over emphasise the prescriptive elements of language rules and grammar and describes the evolving nature of language.

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