Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages in Science and Inquiry

Jul 25, 2014 David Rubenstein rated it really liked it

Shelves: linguistics, psychology

This is a fascinating book about how culture shapes language, and how language shapes our view of reality. Guy Deutscher is a linguist, and he separates out in some detail, the facts of this subject from fiction.

Because, there is a lot of "fiction". Much of what we have heard about how language shapes our world-view is false. Nietzsche's line that "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world" is absolutely false. A true statement would be "Languages differ in what they must convey, not This is a fascinating book about how culture shapes language, and how language shapes our view of reality. Guy Deutscher is a linguist, and he separates out in some detail, the facts of this subject from fiction.

Because, there is a lot of "fiction". Much of what we have heard about how language shapes our world-view is false. Nietzsche's line that "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world" is absolutely false. A true statement would be "Languages differ in what they must convey, not in what they may convey." In other words, languages force their speakers to use certain words in describing concepts, but languages do not constrain their speakers from discussing concepts.

The fact that a language lacks a word that describes some concept, does not mean that its speakers are unaware of that concept. It just means, probably, that the concept is either not too important in that culture, or that it is so all-encompassing that it does not require a special word.

The first half of the book discusses the language mirror--that is, how language mirrors its culture. The second part discusses the language lens--how language shapes the world-view of its speakers.

The book starts out with a description of a big study by the prime minister of England, William Gladstone, of the works of Homer. in one chapter, he shows that the ancient Greeks did not use words that describe most colors. They used words for "black" and "white", and rarely "red" or other colors. He concluded that the ancient Greeks were color-blind, and that over the course of millennia, evolution changed human vision.

Gladstone was originally criticized for his outrageous theory--but in a sense, he was right on the mark. The ancient Greeks did not have words for all the colors, and it was evolution--cultural evolution--that gradually brought more color words into the Greek vocabulary. And it wasn't just the ancient Greeks. Many contemporary languages in remote corners of the globe also have few words for colors.

It used to be thought that the complexity of a language mirrors the complexity of its society. It is virtually impossible to objectively measure the overall complexity of a language. But the complexity of certain aspects of a language are measurable. For example, the morphological complexity of a language (the complexity of individual words) is inversely correlated with the size of population that speaks it. This is rather surprising, and the author can only speculate on the reasons. One amazing example is given, in the language of the Matses, a small tribe on the Amazon. Their verbs are incredibly complex. They have four past-tense forms of verbs that describe how far back in time an action took place. But in addition, verbs must also describe "evidentiality". The verb must describe how the speaker learned of the action. Does the verb express a direct experience (something the speaker saw with his own eyes), or something inferred, something conjectured, or hearsay? Each and every verb must describe all this detail, in a single word!

I found the language lens to be absolutely fascinating. It is very difficult for linguists or psychologists to isolate some aspect of a person's world-view, and to say that it is not only correlated with, but caused by some aspect of his language. But, this has been done definitively in three areas; spatial concepts, gender, and color. For example, in English (and most European languages, I think), there are both ego-centric (up, down, in front, behind, left, right) and geo-centric (North, South, East, West) descriptors. But, some languages only have ego-centric desriptors, while others have only geo-centric words. Ego-centric descriptors are mostly useful in urban areas, such as when you need to give someone directions (go up the elevator to the 5th floor, turn right, pass two doors and take the corridor on the left). In the countryside, geo-centric descriptions might sometimes be more useful (the river running to the south of the lake). The tribes that speak languages that only have geo-centric descriptions learn from a very early age to set up an internal compass. This compass works regardless of visibility conditions; it works in a dense forest, in swamps, sand dunes, and in caves. Only if your transport the speaker of such a language by airplane does he lose his sense of direction. It's hard to imagine, that such a person will never say "the cow to my left" but instead would say "the cow to the north of me".

Occasionally this book seems a bit repetitive. But it is a fine example of scientific digging for subtle answers to important questions. ...more

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Jan 02, 2023 Petra X added it

I added this book to my shelves on 14 April 2020 and began to read it same day, it is on an Export file. It and the review has since disappeared from my shelves? How could this happen? How many times has this happened, or the book has turned up as a Kindle or audio when i added the hardback? How many times do I find that the review has disappeared or the whole review has been hidden from everyone except my friends? Bugs? Bad librarianship combining and deleting? Censorship by any other name by G ...more

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Oct 14, 2017 bup rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science, favorites, linguistics, 2017

An absolutely fascinating book.

He writes, extremely convincingly, that language does affect thinking, but also argues convincingly against the sweeping, often jingoistic and even racist conclusions drawn by bad science of yore.

The biggest insight the book makes is that it's not that one's first language can prevent one from understanding certain concepts. For instance, not having a word for schadenfreude in English doesn't prevent one from immediately grasping the concept of enjoying someone els An absolutely fascinating book.

He writes, extremely convincingly, that language does affect thinking, but also argues convincingly against the sweeping, often jingoistic and even racist conclusions drawn by bad science of yore.

The biggest insight the book makes is that it's not that one's first language can prevent one from understanding certain concepts. For instance, not having a word for schadenfreude in English doesn't prevent one from immediately grasping the concept of enjoying someone else's misery (and while it's tempting to think, "well, duh," Deutscher still caught me off-guard by pointing out that the central premise of 1984 is predicated on the idea that controlling and reducing vocabulary would control and reduce possible thoughts, and I bought it). Rather, it's that what a language forces you to do can pre-color one's thought process.

So while racist scientists and philosophers of the past (who, incidentally, always found their own mother tongue to be the best language for logic, or expression, or for being the touchstone against which other languages should be measured) concluded that because a given language had few distinctions delineating past, present, and future, speakers of those languages couldn't plan, and couldn't really understand time (which, do I need to say it? is garbage), nevertheless having a grammar that forces one to indicate whether a given action already happened, or is going on now or in the future (that second one is one case - I didn't skip the Oxford comma - in English present and future may be combined: "I'm having dinner with my friend" might be present or future) can affect one's thought patterns.

He provides lots of convincing experimental data (not on the already-past-or-not divide, which English enforces, but Mandarin, for instance, does not), but on the fact that most European languages force the speaker to assign a gender to every noun affecting how they think of those things, and having a common name for a color affects how quickly one can distinguish between that color and not-that-color. Hard scientific evidence.

Moreover, it's just cool to learn how many different things go on in different languages. There's a language from South America where the grammar forces you to tell how recently something happened (just now, in the past 'while', or a long time ago), and how recently the speaker came to know that (just now, in the past 'while', or a long time ago). So anything the speaker relates as fact must be cordoned into one of nine spaces regarding the basis of that knowledge. There's a language spoken in a small enough geographic region that all directions are toward, or away from, the sea, and up- or down- hill - it's all on one slope. There's a language without egocentric directions (left, right). All directions are cardinal (east, west, etc). If one is holding a picture, and rotates 180 degrees, the people in that picture are facing a different direction than they did before.*

Depressingly, most languages are dying, but at least as much as can be learned from the languages still spoken by a few are being 'collected.'

Anyway, great read. Made a lot of new synapse connections in my brain.

*There's something in the book about this language not being unique, and perhaps the absence of geocentric terms in languages used to be prevalent. It made me wonder if writing is the thing that forces a language to develop words for egocentric directions. In a cardinal direction language, if one is holding a book, and rotates a quarter turn or a half-turn, any letter that is not X or O becomes a different letter. I am relatively certain that any language that only has cardinal directions must be only oral. Even sign language would fall apart, I would think. ...more

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Dec 04, 2011 Oscar rated it really liked it

Shelves: language

Guy Deutscher examines questions regarding the complicated relationship between culture and language. Does one's language shape their thought process? Does one's cultural values shape the structure of their language? These are, as Deutscher puts it, age old questions, which with the passing of time and generated insight, one can continue asking and attempt to answers. Deutscher centers much of his discussion on the question of color and how different cultures view colors differently. Such a real ...more

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May 30, 2016 Bel rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, language

This was right up my alley. The author sets out to reclaim the unfashionable view that the language we speak affects the way we think. Deutscher's thesis is less sweeping than earlier ones but still fascinating. He directly addresses 19th century frankly racist thinking and makes a laughing stock of any view that "all languages do things this way" based on a sample of half a dozen Indoeuropean tongues.

His conclusion is that languages can affect how we think, but with constraints. However, these This was right up my alley. The author sets out to reclaim the unfashionable view that the language we speak affects the way we think. Deutscher's thesis is less sweeping than earlier ones but still fascinating. He directly addresses 19th century frankly racist thinking and makes a laughing stock of any view that "all languages do things this way" based on a sample of half a dozen Indoeuropean tongues.

His conclusion is that languages can affect how we think, but with constraints. However, these constraints aren't always what we expect, because our view of what is "commonsense" is based on the language we speak. He explores fascinating examples of languages that use other systems of directions than the egocentric (so called because right and left, in front and behind, change when you move) but most interesting of all is his examination of how giving names to colours changes how we perceive them. A titbit as an example: speakers of languages that give different names to 'green' and 'blue' perform differently in cleverly designed tests of colour perception than do speakers of languages, such as Russian, that instead give different names to what we would call 'light blue' and 'dark blue'.

Colour is an interesting one because, of course, our brains do oh so much processing to the "simple" electrical signals coming up our optic nerves. Best of all is that fact that all languages that have been researched have developed words for colours in the same order. Did you know that Homer used the same colour to describe the sea and oxen, and violets and sheep? They weren't different enough to use different words for them. It turns out that as people come to modify their environment they need words for colours and that makes them differentiate colours they just didn't bother with before. Isn't that mind blowing? Do you even believe it? I recommend you read this book for a fantastic and convincing explanation.

It is all told with a lot of good humour, and even had a couple of laugh out loud moments. Fascinating book.
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Jan 04, 2011 Kathleen (itpdx) rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, lwv-suggest

Fascinating! Deutscher's writing is clear and interesting with some humor thrown in. He explains about how culture affects language and how our native language affects memory, perception and associations as well as practical skills such as orientation.
In some languages there is no left, right, behind but everything is described as north, south of you and the speakers of the language develop an unerring sense of geographical direction.
He discusses that in some languages, even words that are abou ...more

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