Through the Language Glass

This seems to be worth 4.99 stars for content and I would round up to 6.0 (if possible) for Deutscher's style and humor, even if the content were not as good. This is an excellent introduction to the current state of investigation of the relationship between thought and language. While there are no in-line references, the Notes section in the back of the book provides references to the 19 page Bibliography ( 300 entries). I do have a few minor gripes that I want to get off my chest. 1) I feel that Deutscher presents Whorf's most extreme position -almost a caricature. Whorf was an M.I.T. graduate in Chemical Engineering whose entire career was as a safety engineer for The Hartford Fire Insurance Company. Linguistics was his avocation. Whorf died at the age of 44 and many of his papers were published by his friends and colleagues after his death. We cannot know what changes he might have made prior to publication had he lived. His defenders point out that his written statements include many more moderate statements of position; indeed it is difficult to discern the exact limits of his position. In fairness to Deutscher, personifying the extreme position seems to be an effective pedagogical technique, and Whorf did take extreme positions at times. I consider myself a moderate Whorfian; I find the most succinct expression of my position is an adaptation of the astrologer's formulation concerning the stars: "Languages impel, they do not compel." Perhaps one attribute of genius is the ability to overcome the impulses and promptings of language. This leads to an expansion of the language that permits non-geniuses to share in the genius' insight. And, this provides the mechanism by which we all augment our cognitive toolboxes and "stand on the shoulders of giants". 2) Deutscher gives an excellent explanation of "factive vs. non-factive verbs" (P-150). He uses this to support his claim that people can learn new concepts that were not previously present in their individual languages and to argue that therefore language does not constrain thought. HOWEVER, before Deutscher explained the concept I would not have realized verbs could be categorized in that manner. Now I do. Previously, I would never have thought of that characteristic when analyzing a verb; in the future I shall. Now that Deutscher has expanded my language by adding the concept of factive, my language is different and I think differently. Deutscher's argument has actually confirmed Whorf! -moderately! 3) Although Deutscher writes excellent English, it is not his native language and in a couple of cases he seems to lack a native speaker's feel for the Whorfian underpinnings and nuances of English. Deutscher asks "Or think about it another way, when you ask someone ...something like `are you coming tomorrow?' do you feel your grasp of futurity is slipping?" (PP. 145 -6) When I compare "Are you coming tomorrow?" with "Will you come tomorrow?" I feel, in the first case the query asks: "Is it your current intention to come tomorrow?" and in the second "Do you believe your plans and external circumstances will result in your coming tomorrow?" The first one is rooted in the present, the second in the future. I will accept that this has elements of connotation vs. denotation, but the language still impels me to address either the present state of affairs or the future. I will also grant that the answer to the first might be "I intend to come, but it looks like the creek's going to rise and I may not be able to get across the ford with my old car.", but that is a different matter -providing as much information as is necessary for the purposes of the exchange. (H.P. Grice's Maxim of Quantity). Language does not compel me to ignore the future, it merely nudges me. Perhaps being a native English-speaker leads me to see nuances second-language speakers do not. (And, by the way, I used futurity will twice, when I was really speaking about the present, to indicate a concession -"I will accept.") I just heard a Yale Economist speculating that the reason the Germans save for the future is that they habitually use the present tense for future events: Es regnet am Morgen (literally "It rains tomorrow" for English "It's going to rain tomorrow." Or "It will raan tomorrow." As Hebrew has gender (Masc. Fem. Neu.) for all nouns, Deutscher finds the use of he or she to be "poetic" and even "arch" for English nouns that are normally neuter. He has not met the farmer, miner or assembly line worker whose favorite rifle or tool is a she, or tried calling someone's household pet or favorite horse "it". I have heard computer programmers describe the operation of a piece of software as "he wants to ...". I have a 24-year old sports car that has acquired personhood over the years, as have some of the quirkier computers I've worked on. I also must wonder whether a native speaker of a language with two genders (e.g. Spanish) would find this natural or "arch"? -or a native speaker of two languages with contradictory genders? However, when everything is considered this book has my highest recommendation for style, content and humor -every star amazon will allow!

This was our book group selection for February 7, 2016 and was based on my recommendation. I started reading the book months earlier and periodically kept up with it but was glad to have the chance to discuss it with my friends since they always bring aspects to their interpretations that I would have missed otherwise. In general, and this was a shared feeling, Guy does not carry through the argument the tile seems to lead one to expect. I appreciated the history that led to the linguistic relativity theory especially the section on Gladstone and the colors – or lack of colors in the Homeric texts. (It was also interesting that a national leader would also have an interest in scholarly work since it is hard imagining anyone having that sort of time and interest in political leadership today.) The interesting in the Sapir Whorf hypothesis and why it went over board and became a laughing stock was interesting, but then Guy attempts to bring some of the theory back with a catch. The primitive languages which remain we ought to learn as much from as we can while they are still around since they seem to be more in touch with fundamental reality – as one friend pointed out in her own experience the native groups have a real need for communicating close to nature experiences for survival reasons. Urbanites seem to just talk talk talk all the time about very abstract things. (Interesting here is a reference to the Flynn effect.) I also enjoyed the “itiscization” of English and the sort of critique of Mark Twain’s piece on the Awful German Language by pointing out English used to be the same way but perhaps efficiency did a pruning job on it. But the end argument is not that language is so much a glass through which we see the world as that social characterizations or frames force us to view things the way it does even if that is not necessarily going to enable us to ignore something like colors. But if you grow up egocentric you see things that way, if your culture is based more on relations situated in the Australian Outback then the cardinal directions become second nature to you even with regard to how you are situated in a room or a cup on the table is not next to you as much as it is south of you. Or is that west? An interesting book, an interesting read and discussion book, though clearly the topic has much more ground to explore.

What a find! I don't know where I got the recommendation, but I was glad that I followed it. Even though the author covered only a few topics, he dud so in readable, often humorous, way. It was a delightful read. Highly recommended.

A book full of history and examples to support its author theory that our mother tongues do shape the way we think in a way. At first I was skeptical, since the idea that a language could do such thing as mold the way we think appeared to be faulty. But throughout the book, Guy Deutscher convinced me - with evidence to support his thesis - that how and what we speak indeed influences the way we think. I recommend the book to those who have a little knowledge of linguistics or that are not afraid to break conventions and try 'new things'. Well written and well researched, it seems that the author didn't leave anything for chance.

The first foreign language I learned to complete fluency was German - after five years of high school German I spent a year at a German boys' boarding school. At the end of that year I was completely fluent, but noticed an odd phenomenon, that I felt like a slightly different person when I spoke German than when speaking English. Since then I've also learned Spanish to a high degree of fluency, and the same observation holds. In both cases, the main difference that I perceive has to do with humor, and the way the language I'm speaking affects my sense of humor. So I've always been interested in the extent to which language affects thought. The notion that it does is what linguists refer to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Belief in Sapir-Whorf reached its peak in the first half of the 20th century, but since then the notion that language affects cognition has been discredited by almost all mainstream linguists. In "Through the Language Glass" Guy Deutscher mounts a careful, very limited defence of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. He considers three major areas - the link between language and color perception, how different languages deal with spatial orientation, and the phenomenon of differences in noun genders across different languages. His examination of the link between language and color perception is extensive and thought-provoking - he traces the development of linguistic theory on color perception from British prime minister Gladstone's commentary on the relative paucity of color terms in Homer's work, through the Berlin-Kay model (stating essentially that languages all tend to split up the color spectrum in similar ways) through very recent experiments suggesting that the existence of a particular color distinction in a language (e.g. the existence of separate terms in Russian for light and dark blue) affects the brain's ability to perceive that distinction. Deutscher's account of the evolution of linguistic theory about color perception is a tour de force of scientific writing for a general audience - it is both crystal clear and a pleasure to read. Two factors contributed to my eventual disappointment with this book. The first is that, even after Deutscher's careful, eloquent, persuasive analysis, one's final reaction has to be a regretful "So what?" In the end, it all seems to amount to little of practical importance. The second disappointment pertained only to the experience of reading this book on an Amazon Kindle. Reference is made throughout to a "color insert" which evidently contained several color wheels as well as up to a dozen color illustrations. This feature was completely absent from the Kindle edition, which had a severe adverse effect on the overall experience of reading this book. Obviously, this point is relevant only if you are contemplating reading the Kindle version - DON'T! If it hadn't been for the lack of availability of key illustrations on the Kindle, I would have given the book 4 stars, but I feel obliged to deduct one because of the Kindle-related deficiencies.

If you're interested in linguistics, psychology, and the interplay between the two within the human experience, this is the book for you! The author provides a comprehensive overview of historical discoveries in these fields that have led to understanding of how language affects our reality. Some parts of the book, such as the one that discussed object genders in different languages, were really really amusing! Also, I am left greatly impressed by ingenious experiments that psychologists managed to design to uncover mental processes. All in all, an amazing amazing read!

An interesting and well-written book, but one that disappointed me compared to the author's previous work, "The Unfolding of Language". That, for me, was a truly mind- bending book, which changed my beliefs about how language evolved. "Through the Language Glass" sounds equally wide-ranging -- the blurb on the American edition says adds as a subtitle "Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages". 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.

"Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages" and the "Unfolding of Language" by Guy Deutscher are among the very best books I've ever read. My interest in the linguistic originates in the the interest in history and in the attempts to understand the process of the evolution of the apparently so much different modern nations from the common ancestors speaking the same language (read "The New Penguin Atlas of Ancient History" by Colin McEvedy). But while finding history to be a vivid and fascinating subject I was thinking about linguistic as of a rather dry and boring thing. I am glad I was wrong. Guy Deutcher's books are a pleasure to read from the first to the last word and although they may not provide specific answers to all my original questions they open new dimensions that I wasn't even aware of before. And one more thing; these books make you think while reading, not force you to think but encourage in a very effective and enjoyable way. A pure brain stimulator. Highly recommended.

Un traité sur la linguistique qui est très interessant et qui permet d'en apprendre plus sur l'origine de la langue.

Nicht ganz seichtes, aber noch gut lesbares Buch darüber wie Kultur Sprache beeinflusst und umgekehrt. Generell fand ich es auch spannend Konzepte aus der Linguistik kennen zu lernen. Obendrein gibt der historische Abriss einen guten Einblick wie ignorant vor allem die westliche Welt gegenüber anderen Sprachkonzepten sein kann.

「言語は思考を支配するという」考え方がある。言語相対説、サピア・ウォーフの仮説と呼ばれるものである。言語学ではこの考え方は、大まかにいって、否定されているが、最近の研究では、サピア・ウォーフの仮説を見直す動きもある。著者のドイッチャ－（Guy Deutscher）は諸々の学説を踏まえた上で、「なぜ、言語が異なれば世界は違って見えるのか」具体例をあげて解説している。日本語の「青信号」英語のgreen light の比較も身近な問題でおもしろい。英語は少し手強いが得られるものは多い。一読をお勧めする。

This isn't the usual sort of book that I review - Language & Linguistics is a bit more upmarket than the usual romance or vampire novels that I tend to read. However, I was browsing in a bookshop in Berlin and among the `Englische Bücher' I saw this book featured. It had an endorsement on the front by Stephen Fry so I thought I'd give it a go. I'm really glad I did as reading this book opened up a whole new way of looking at things. Guy Deutscher looks in detail at how the language we speak may colour our view of the world - focusing on colour and how we name/see it (from the Greek Iliad and the wine-dark sea to how Russians react to different shades of blue) and how position of objects can be described in different ways depending on how your culture marks out place. There was so much packed into this book that I found myself hooked, reading it until late in the night and going back to read some sections again. The language examples are from a vast array of languages - modern European ones with which we may be familiar to some of the much less well-known tongues from the antipodes and further. Although the author is an academic this book was fun, engaging, warm and in no way dry and dusty. I also think it worth mentioning that the quality of the writing was absolutely excellent. Deutscher's English is lovely, with a great turn of phrase. All the more amazing when you discover that his mother tongue is Hebrew and so English is a second language to him. I was really impressed by the way that he could express himself in English whilst explaining how something may seem to him as someone who sees the world through a Hebrew mind. I heartily recommend this book to anyone with the faintest of interest in language, linguistics, colours and more.

Interessante para quem nunca leu sobre o assunto, mas para quem fez Letras e estudou linguística é bem lugar-comum. É uma boa experiência para leigos.