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

by Guy Deutscher

“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.

Intro

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.

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.

Some languages don’t even have a future tense, so their speakers naturally have no grasp of the future.

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.

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.

Philosophers of all persuasions and nationalities have lined up to proclaim that each language reflects the qualities of the nation that speaks it.

Closure

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.”

younger contemporary, the German Johann Gottfried Herder, concurred that “the intellect and the character of every na...

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 s...

“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.”

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.

Ferdinand Brunetière

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.

“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.

can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts and perceptions?

contemporary linguists is that language is primarily an instinct, in other words, that the fundaments of language are coded in our genes and are the same across the human race. Noam Chomsky has famously argued that a Martian scientist would conclude that all earthlings speak dialects of the same language.

all languages share the same universal grammar, the same underlying concepts, the same degree of systemic complexity.

our mother tongue influences the way we think at all, any such influence is negligible, even trivial—and that fundamentally we all think in the same way.

however, I will try to convince you, probably against your initial intuition, and certainly against the fashionable academic view of today, that the answer to the questions above is—yes.

Argument

I will argue that cultural differences are reflected in language in profound ways, and that a growing body of reliable scientific research provides solid evidence that our mother tongue can affect how we think and how we perceive the world. But