Another brilliant work of popular science from linguist Guy Deutscher. "Through the Language Glass" aims to bring the reader up to date on an easy-to-formulate but nearly impossible-to-answer question in linguistics: to what degree does one's language impact one's thought processes?

This exploration centers around a very specific phenomenon, which is that languages differ in their stock of words for colors, and why some languages (like English) have names for all the colors we would commonly place in the rainbow, while Ancient Greek and many languages of isolated tribes don't have much more beyond white, black, and red. Scholars have been aware of this observation for nearly two centuries, and the history of our making sense of it provides a neat stand-in for the history of science in general. Over the years, brilliant minds have conjured a host of unfortunately wrong solutions (Homer's people were less evolved! the savages lack the mental machinery to perceive color! Lamarckian genetics!), confirmed either by prejudice or disproved by increasingly novel experiments.

The upshot of these investigations for twentieth-century linguistics was first the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that one's language of origin so wholly determines one's mental capacities that a speaker of Hopi, in which certain English-speaking linguists lacked the creativity to recognize a structure functioning as "tense", wouldn't be able to comprehend the concept of time... and, as political correctness later took hold, the dogma that "all languages are equally complex." The pleasure of this book is that Deutscher takes none of it at face value, and is able to describe recent achievements in linguistics for what they are -- the first steps in a very nascent body of science.

Overall, the quality of the writing is sparkling, and reading "Through the Language Glass" rarely flags below the level of an extremely engrossing conversation with someone who is enthusiastic about the subject matter and consistently humorous. Of course, what gives the book its value as popular science is that nothing is taken for granted, and assumptions are rejected lest we go down the path of pseudo-science and the quackery that dominates a lot of non-professional speculation about language in the human mind. The sheer honesty, though, renders the final product unsatisfying, as there are practically no answers and we are just beginning to figure out how to ask the questions.