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Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages Paperback – Illustrated, August 30, 2011
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A New York Times Editor's Choice
An Economist Best Book of 2010
A Financial Times Best Book of 2010
A Library Journal Best Book of 2010
The debate is ages old: Where does language come from? Is it an artifact of our culture or written in our very DNA? In recent years, the leading linguists have seemingly settled the issue: all languages are fundamentally the same and the particular language we speak does not shape our thinking in any significant way. Guy Deutscher says they're wrong. From Homer to Darwin, from Yale to the Amazon, and through a strange and dazzling history of the color blue, Deutscher argues that our mother tongues do indeed shape our experiences of the world. Audacious, delightful, and provocative, Through the Language Glass is destined to become a classic of intellectual discovery.
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPicador
- Publication dateAugust 30, 2011
- Dimensions6.1 x 0.85 x 9.1 inches
- ISBN-100312610491
- ISBN-13978-0312610494
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“Fascinating reading.… Deutscher does not merely weave little-known facts into an absorbing story. He also takes account of the vast changes in our perceptions of other races and cultures over the past two centuries.” ―Derek Bickerton, The New York Times Book Review
“An informative, pleasurable read… A gifted writer, Deutscher picks his way nimbly past overblown arguments to a sensible compromise.” ―Amanda Katz, The Boston Globe
“A thrilling and challenging ride.” ―Christopher Schoppa, The Washington Post
“Brilliantly surveys the differences words and grammar make between cultures.” ―Carlin Romano, The Chronicle of Higher Education
“A most entertaining book, easy to read but packed with fascinating detail.” ―Michael Quinion, World Wide Words
“Through The Language Glass is so robustly researched and wonderfully told that it is hard to put down... Deutscher brings together more than a century's worth of captivating characters, incidents, and experiments that illuminate the relationship between words and mind... He makes a convincing case for the influence of language on thought, and in doing so he reveals as much about the way color words shape our perception as about the way that scientific dogma and fashion can blind us.” ―Christine Kenneally, New Scientist
“Entertainingly written and thought-provoking… Deutscher has a talent for making scientific history read like an engrossing adventure… I recommend this intelligent and engaging book to anyone seeking an introduction to the relationship between language, thought, and culture.” ―Margery Lucas, PsycCritiques
“This fabulously interesting book describes an area of intellectual history replete with brilliant leaps of intuition and crazy dead-ends. Guy Deutscher, who combines enthusiasm with scholarly pugnacity, is a vigorous and engaging guide to it… A remarkably rich, provocative, and intelligent work.” ―Sam Leith, The Sunday Times (UK)
“A brilliant account of linguistic research over two centuries… As befits a book about language, this inspiring amalgam of cultural history and science is beautifully written.” ―Clive Cookson, Financial Times (UK)
“A delight to read.” ―Christopher Howse, The Spectator (UK)
“Fascinating and well written… Deutscher's scholarly and eloquent prose made the book an enjoyable read and I learnt lots of great anecdotes along the way.” ―Alex Bellos, The Guardian (UK)
“Deutscher writes as clearly and engagingly as can be… Will this study of language make you giddy? Oh, absolutely.” ―Craig Brown, The Mail on Sunday (UK)
“Jaw-droppingly wonderful… A marvelous and surprising book. The ironic, playful tone at the beginning gradates into something serious that is never pompous, something intellectually and historically complex and yet always pellucidly laid out. It left me breathless and dizzy with delight.” ―Stephen Fry, presenter of Stephen Fry in America, host of QI, and author of Moab Is My Washpot
“At once highly readable and thoroughly learned... Here is an important and original new history of the struggle to understand how language, culture, and thought are connected.” ―Joan Bybee, Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, University of New Mexico
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PROLOGUE
Language, Culture, and Thought
"There are four tongues worthy of the world's use," says the Talmud: "Greek for song, Latin for war, Syriac for lamentation, and Hebrew for ordinary speech." Other authorities have been no less decided in their judgment on what different languages are good for. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, king of Spain, archduke of Austria, and master of several Europe an tongues, professed to speaking "Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse."
A nation's language, so we are often told, reflects its culture, psyche, and modes of thought. Peoples in tropical climes are so laid-back it's no wonder they let most of their consonants fall by the wayside. And one need only compare the mellow sounds of Portuguese with the harshness of Spanish to understand the quintessential difference between these two neighboring cultures. The grammar of some languages is simply not logical enough to express complex ideas. German, on the other hand, is an ideal vehicle for formulating the most precise philosophical profundities, as it is a particularly orderly language, which is why the Germans have such orderly minds. (But can one not hear the goose step in its gauche, humorless sounds?) Some languages don't even have a future tense, so their speakers naturally have no grasp of the future. The Babylonians would have been hard-pressed to understandCrime and Punishment, because their language used one and the same word to describe both of these concepts. The craggy fjords are audible in the precipitous intonation of Norwegian, and you can hear the darkl's of Russian in Tchaikovsky's lugubrious tunes. French is not only a Romance language but the language of romance par excellence. English is an adaptable, even promiscuous language, and Italian—ah, Italian!
Many a dinner table conversation is embellished by such vignettes, for few subjects lend themselves more readily to disquisition than the character of different languages and their speakers. And yet should these lofty observations be carried away from the conviviality of the dining room to the chill of the study, they would quickly collapse like a soufflé of airy anecdote— at best amusing and meaningless, at worst bigoted and absurd. Most foreigners cannot hear the difference between rugged Norwegian and the endless plains of Swedish. The industrious Protestant Danes have dropped more consonants onto their icy windswept soil than any indolent tropical tribe. And if Germans do have systematic minds, this is just as likely to be because their exceedingly erratic mother tongue has exhausted their brains' capacity to cope with any further irregularity. English speakers can hold lengthy conversations about forthcoming events wholly in the present tense (I'm flying to Vancouver next week . . . ) without any detectable loosening in their grip on the concepts of futurity. No language—not even that of the most "primitive" tribes—is inherently unsuitable for expressing the most complex ideas. Any shortcomings in a language's ability to philosophize simply boil down to the lack of some specialized abstract vocabulary and perhaps a few syntactic constructions, but these can easily be borrowed, just as all Europe an languages pinched their verbal philosophical tool kit from Latin, which in turn lifted it wholesale from Greek. If speakers of any tribal tongue were so minded, they could easily do the same today, and it would be eminently possible to deliberate in Zulu about the respective merits of empiricism and rationalism or to hold forth about existentialist phenomenology in West Greenlandic.
If musings on nations and languages were merely aired over aperitifs, they could be indulged as harmless, if nonsensical, diversions. But as it happens, the subject has also exercised high and learned minds throughout the ages. Philosophers of all persuasions and nationalities have lined up to proclaim that each language reflects the qualities of the nation that speaks it. In the seventeenth century, the Englishman Francis Bacon explained that one can infer "significant marks of the genius and manners of people and nations from their languages." "Everything confirms," agreed the Frenchman étienne de Condillac a century later, "that each language expresses the character of the people who speak it." His younger contemporary, the German Johann Gottfried Herder, concurred that "the intellect and the character of every nation are stamped in its language." Industrious nations, he said, "have an abundance of moods in their verbs, while more refined nations have a large amount of nouns that have been exalted to abstract notions." In short, "the genius of a nation is nowhere better revealed than in the physiognomy of its speech." The American Ralph Waldo Emerson summed it all up in 1844: "We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone."
The only problem with this impressive international unanimity is that it breaks down as soon as thinkers move on from the general principles to reflect on the particular qualities (or otherwise) of particular languages, and about what these linguistic qualities can tell about the qualities (or otherwise) of particular nations. In 1889, Emerson's words were assigned as an essay topic to the seventeen-year-old Bertrand Russell, when he was at a crammer in London preparing for the scholarship entrance exam to Trinity College, Cambridge. Russell responded with these pearls: "We may study the character of a people by the ideas which its language best expresses. French, for instance, contains such words as 'spirituel,' or 'l'esprit,' which in English can scarcely be expressed at all; whence we naturally draw the inference, which may be confirmed by actual observation, that the French have more 'esprit,' and are more 'spirituel' than the English."
Cicero, on the other hand, drew exactly the opposite inference from the lack of a word in a language. In hisDe oratore of 55 bc, he embarked on a lengthy sermon about the lack of a Greek equivalent for the Latin wordineptus (meaning "impertinent" or "tactless"). Russell would have concluded that the Greeks had such impeccable manners that they simply did not need a word to describe a nonexistent flaw. Not so Cicero: for him, the absence of the word was a proof that the fault was so widespread among the Greeks that they didn't even notice it.
The language of the Romans was itself not always immune to censure. Some twelve centuries after Cicero, Dante Alighieri surveyed the dialects of Italy in hisDe vulgari eloquentia and declared that "what the Romans speak is not so much a vernacular as a vile jargon . . . and this should come as no surprise, for they also stand out among all Italians for the ugliness of their manners and their outward appearance."
No one would dream of entertaining such sentiments about the French language, which is not only romantic andspirituel but also, of course, the paragon of logic and clarity. We have this on no lesser authority than the French themselves. In 1894, the distinguished critic Ferdinand Brunetière informed the members of the Académie française, on the occasion of his election to this illustrious institution, that French was "the most logical, the clearest, and the most transparent language that has ever been spoken by man." Brunetière, in turn, had this on the authority of a long line of savants, including Voltaire in the eighteenth century, who affirmed that the unique genius of the French language was its clearness and order. And Voltaire himself owed this insight to an astonishing discovery made a whole century earlier, in 1669, to be precise. The French grammarians of the seventeenth century had spent decades trying to understand why it was that French possessed clarity beyond all other languages in the world and why, as one member of the Académie put it, French was endowed with such clarity and precision that simply translating into it had the effect of a real commentary. In the end, after years of travail, it was Louis Le Laboureur who discovered in 1669 that the answer was simplicity itself. His painstaking grammatical researches revealed that, in contrast to speakers of other languages, "we French follow in all our utterances exactly the order of thought, which is the order of Nature." No wonder, then, that French can never be obscure. As the later thinker Antoine de Rivarol put it: "What is not clear may be English, Italian, Greek, or Latin" but "ce qui n'est pas clair n'est pas français."
Not all intellectuals of the world unite, however, in concurring with this analysis. Equally distinguished thinkers— strangely enough, mostly from outside France—have expressed different opinions. The renowned Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, for example, believed that English was superior to French in a whole range of attributes, including logic, for as opposed to French, English is a "methodical, energetic, business-like and sober language, that does not care much for finery and elegance, but does care for logical consistency." Jespersen concludes: "As the language is, so also is the nation."
Product details
- Publisher : Picador; First Edition (August 30, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0312610491
- ISBN-13 : 978-0312610494
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.1 x 0.85 x 9.1 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #112,041 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #111 in Linguistics Reference
- #246 in Evolution (Books)
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Through The Language Glass
5/5 stars
9 chapters+ Intro
233 pages of prose
≈22 pps/chapter
Bibliography≈280 sources (≈1.26/page)
At first, I was tempted to write this book off as *yet another* book written by a linguist that uses maximum verbiage to bring across minimum content. (Think of John McWhorter or Noam Chomsky.)
But, by the time I got to the 40th page (I have a 50 page limit for books) I was hooked.
This author is EXTREMELY bright:
1. He only learned to speak English later in life (and yet his prose is almost on the level of somebody like David Berlinski or Eric Hoffer)
2. He completed a PhD in linguistics after an undergraduate degree in Mathematics from Cambridge.
3. He has managed to take us into many debates between linguists (such as: whether or not language is an issue of nature or culture, etc).
And he's managed to make it interesting. (Ordinarily, if somebody even started talking to me about this it would be the world's most powerful sedative.)
4. Who has ever heard of a non-native speaker using words like "lucubration"? (p.219) and "peregrinations"? The author even sneaks in paraphrases of the New Testament (chas v'shalom, p.239): "forgive us our ignorances as we forgive those who were ignorant before us."
Even the book's title ("Through The Language Glass") is a riff on the obscure verse "through a glass, darkly" (1 Corinthians 13:12).
And if he is an Israeli Jew, how would he even have *heard* sentences like these?
*******
Has a book like this ever been written before? One that unifies the topics of: Anthropology, Homer, Lamarckism, the Geiger sequence, and writings from the Tanakh (Kohelet, etc.) and Guugu Yimithirr?
******
Content by chapter:
1. Gladstone's three volume, 1700 page of studies on Homer and the Homeric age opens questions of why colors were such as they were for Homer. Why the sky is "black" and the sea is "wine dark." Did the Greeks have a different sense of color?
2. A bright man (Lazarus Geiger) notices interesting features in the way that languages construct colors. (He spoke many different languages.)
Why do we call orange juice "orange," when it's yellow? Why do Italians call the yolk of an egg "red"?
What is the relationship between what the eye can see and what language can describe?
A brief detour into the folly of Lamarckism by way of rebutting the notion that color is due to recent evolution and the different colors in different languages are because of subspecies evolutionary differences.
3. Even just a century back, people did not realize that other human beings in other places were merely different races and not different species of people. (Some people had found Sudanese Africans and put them in a zoo in Germany and charged admission to see them. 62,000 people on a busy day).
As it happens, a lot of anthropologists had done fieldwork with native people in their own lands and languages and found that they were perfectly able to distinguish between colors.
It's just that they didn't have words for them.
4. The acquisition of color vocabulary and languages is something like: black/white-->red-->yellow-->green-->blue. (No language will use color vocabulary to distinguish between yellow and green before black/white. It's called the Geiger sequence.)
Geiger made his observations and weighed in on color acquisition as genetic, and the political climate by the 1960s was such that all of his work was ignored because the scientific community was determined that color acquisition was 100% culture. (The crystal structure of DNA had just been solved and human genome had not been sequenced at that point.)
5. Professional linguists have erred on the side of assuming that all languages are equally complex. Joe Everyman has the idea that all tribal languages are primitive and with no vocabulary. (Neither of them can find a single cited paper to prove this one way or the other, and professional linguists just treat their belief as axiomatic.)
And in that way, the debate went from Scylla to Charybdis.
Believe it or not: The "complexity" of language (either with morphological, syntactic, or lexical-size arguments) is a red herring.
Interesting discussion of the way that the number of speakers of a language can change its morphology / syntax/ number of sounds/subordination/
6. Everyone thought that European/Latin grammar was universal. Until W. vonHumboldt "found" the European language isolate, Basque.
Benjamin Lee Whorf would observe some grammatical quirk of some language and stretch it out to conclude anything and everything. (It's ironic that he was an engineer, the most empirical of jobs.)
Roman Jacobson creates a pithy maxim to upgrade the silliness of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: "Languages differ essentially in what they *must* convey and not in what they *may* convey." (p.151)
Also, an introduction to the unusual Matses language. (Amazon tribe.)
7. Introduction to the Papuan Language (Guugu Yimithirr).
Introduction to egocentric versus geocentric coordinates. (We have very few of the latter in English.) Also, experiments done with people who have an extremely strong sense of direction because their language (Guugu Yimithirr) demands it.
The author takes this chance to do more cautious speculation about the relationship between language and thought: it's not that language constrains what you can say, but the fact that what you need to say constrains the words that you use which can feed back into constraining thought. In a limited way. (But, there is no reason that you cannot express what you need to in a different language. Which people do all the time when they speak more than one.)
8. Interesting observations about gender in language. (This is off on some plane of uselessness to Modern English speakers--even though Old English did have three genders.)
9. Concluding intellectual peregrinations about the way in which language can limit/influence perception.
*******
Parting thoughts:
1. The mean Jewish verbal IQ is thought to be 126. (The average Ashkenazi Jewish IQ is higher than everybody else's, but it is uneven. It's merely average with respect to spatial relations, but even higher with respect to verbal matters.)
It is amazing how many of these pioneers of linguistics are Ashkenazi Jews.
Franz Boas.
Roman Jakobson.
Edward Sapier.
Lazarus Geiger.
The author of the book is, himself, an Ashkenazi Jew and has sired at least one child prodigy. (Alma Deutscher.)
2. We all knew this, but this book recapitulates just how out of touch academics are with the real world.
Idiots in the Ivory Tower are arguing about whether or not languages can be used to express abstract ideas; getting around to settling these things with empirical evidence is something that may happen belatedly, or never at all.
Meanwhile, missionaries are matter-of-factly translating the New Testament into indigenous languages to win converts.
3. How do you know who is the best thinker?
Probably the person whose work stands the test of time.
The Gladstone that started off this book has work that is still comparable to the best even a century and a half later. (p.140).
Many papers are published, and lots of ink is spelled but in reality there are VERY FEW thinkers that are at the level of Gladstone and whose work will stand the test of time.
4. Franz Boas has had his work repurposed as a political statement of Cultural Relativism, but I believe that he may have actually been a person with academic interests in his career who was repurposed later.
*******
Verdict: the book was worth the time and worth the money and I highly recommend it.
As it happens, the British edition has a more accurate subtitle "How Words Color Your World." The first half of the book is mostly about color, and the words we use for color. In the nineteenth century, scholars (led by British PM Gladstone) began to address the fact that some very important historical languages, including Greek, Hebrew and Sanskrit, did not use nearly as many color words as do modern European languages. Later researchers showed that many non-European languages shared this trait. The book describes how this study proceeded, what conclusions it reached, and what seems to Deutscher the best explanation. This part of the book, about 120 pages long, is almost as interesting and just as well written as "Unfolding", though it clearly is a work on a smaller canvas. I would give this section five stars.
The second half of the book examines other areas in which language and culture have interacted -- complexity, gender, and physical orientation. The discussion of complexity is interesting, but very brief. The section on physical orientation strikes me more as a curiosity than something with real importance in the innate/cultural debate. And the section on gender reports a series of complex experiments that, it seems to me, yield very thin results. I would have to give the second half of the book three stars.
Adding it up, this book is well worth the time and attention of anyone interested in linguistics -- and, for the benefit of non- professionals, gracefully written. It's not as satisfying as the earlier work, but I still look forward to the next.
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É uma boa experiência para leigos.








