Through the Language Glass

Gave up at 33%.

This topic is simply not the part of languages I'm mostly interested in, so it felt too dry to continue. And I'm sure it's not the author, because I read another one of his language books which was great!

The sciences are without a doubt my weakest reads. Try as I might, I am at times unable to take all the information supplied in as the brain does not sponge the info up as I would like. Be that as it may, popular science books such as this have the occasion to bring some semblance of wow moments to my sieve like mind.

I had never really thought of the language differences between various cultures when looking and talking about colour, for example. The use of language in spatial situations was so interesting that I reread a few passages just to get my head around that concept. The peoples of the Guugu Yimithirr from north Queensland having no concept of Right or Left, but using North/South/East/West in terms of describing direction no matter where they were? The chapter that covered this Where The Sun Doesn't Rise In the East was fascinating. The gender differences in various languages were of particular interest, imagine the wars that have started just because of a misunderstood translation.

One comment I will make on the writing of language is that even the author got it wrong in one little passage. A man of the Guugu Yimithirr when discussing with linguists direction was quoted as saying “But white fellows wouldn't understand that.” Whitefella (or Blackfella) please when quoting indigenous Australians, I have never heard it different and suspect that if the author had known he may have written it that way. Did he miss any others, I asked myself?


Blackfella Whitefella

Recommended to anyone with an interest in language.

I'm not surprised that I found this book fascinating, because I find language fascinating. And I like Deutscher's writing style.
The idea that language influences thought is apparently kind of taboo nowadays in linguistic circles (or at least it was when this book was published), largely because of some dudes named Sapir and Whorf who took it to quite an extreme but didn't really have any good evidence to support their ideas (for example, that someone whose language doesn't contain a future tense wouldn't be able to understand the concept of “the future”). But it's not entirely wrong - Deutscher gives examples of three areas where language has been shown to influence thinking to a measurable extent.

If your language uses cardinal directions only, (north-south-east-west instead of left or right, in front of, or behind), you will always know where north is, and you will perform differently on certain tasks than someone who speaks an egocentric language. Say for example you were standing in front of a table with some objects on it. You're then asked to turn around and place the objects in the same order on a table behind you, on the opposite wall of the room. People who speak these two different types of languages would put the objects in the opposite order! If you speak an egocentric language, you'll place the objects that were to the left of you at table 1 to the left of you on table 2. If you speak a cardinal direction language, you'll put the objects on the north side of table 1 on the north side of table 2. Neither answer is wrong, but if you grew up speaking English which uses egocentric directions (not exclusively, obviously, but mainly for small-scale situations), you'd probably be baffled by someone who placed the objects in the opposite order from you. It wouldn't even occur to me how they were doing this task because when I'm inside a building I almost never know which direction is north.

Language can also have an effect on colour perception - for example, of two pairs of colours that are an equal number of shades apart, we view as further apart the ones that cross a linguistic colour barrier. For example, if you're an English speaker, you'd perceive a shade of green and blue as further apart than two shades of blue, even if the blues were actually further apart on the colour spectrum. If you did the same experiment with a Russian speaker, you'd get a different result because Russian has two separate words for dark blue and light blue.

Lastly, if the language you speak has gendered words in it, that will affect your assumptions and associations with the words. In English, which doesn't have any gendered words, the only gendered assumptions we have are cultural (for example, associating “nurse” with “female” and “doctor” with “male” - these have nothing to do with the actual words but with how we've been socialized). If you speak a language like French or Spanish with gendered nouns, it can have an effect on your memory. For example, it was easier for Spanish speakers to remember a female name associated with an apple than a male one, because the word for apple in Spanish is feminine.

Basically the take-away of this book is that it's less interesting what a language allows you to say than what a language requires you to say. In English, we're forced to tell our listeners when something happens because tense is built in to our verbs. I am, I was, I will be. I can't express the concept of me being without indicating when I am being! There are languages in which these aren't linked though, where I could say that I am and listeners wouldn't automatically know when I was or will be or even if I currently am! Of course you could express that if you wanted, but it's not required.

You should definitely read this book if you finished reading my review. It goes into the history of linguistic relativism, which I found really interesting, and a bunch about colour perception (the less relevant parts to language are relegated to an appendix) which I also think is interesting. Plus different experiments that were designed to help tease language from culture which is really hard to do!

You don't get as many impressive cocktail-party stories as you would hope (“and that's why French-speakers ...!”). But Deutscher writes entertaining, and he is especially thorough. His task is to take the field of linguistic relativity - which has gotten itself into trouble by boasting with too big claims early on - and bring it back to a level of credibility. His careful study of the field's history, its early failures and its more recent small successes (word genders influencing associations, the russian blues, egocentric vs geographic coordinates) show in parallel the difficult history of devising empirical experiments dealing with the human mind that avoid any form of priming or vagueness.

If you haven't studied [much] linguistics, this will be a great book for you. It's playfully written and covers really interesting material, with a healthy dose of scientific intellectual history. If you took Semantics with Pulju at Dartmouth, you will learn nothing new and just be frustrated by that fact.

P.S. It's a little annoyingly Eurocentric.

great work on understanding contemporary linguistic issues and topics. probably not the most academically intensive book on linguistics but still well written and easy enough to understand for the beginning linguist.