The Unfolding of Language Quotes

“Really, it is unfair to say that English spelling is not an accurate rendering of speech. It is – it's only that it renders the speech of the 16th century.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

“Tale of the Fishwife and its Sad Fate’, purportedly translated literally from the German: It is a bleak day. Hear the rain, how he pours, and the hail, how he rattles; and see the snow, how he drifts along, and of the mud, how deep he is! Ah the poor fishwife, it is stuck fast in the mire; it has dropped its basket of fishes; and its hands have been cut by the scales as it seized some of the falling creatures; and one scale has even got into its eye. And it cannot get her out. It opens its mouth to cry for help; but if any sound comes out of him, alas he is drowned by the raging of the storm. And now a tomcat has got one of the fishes and she will surely escape with him. No, she bites off a fin, she holds her in her mouth – will she swallow her? No, the fishwife’s brave mother-dog deserts his puppies and rescues the fin – which he eats, himself, as his reward …”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention

“The teacher claimed it was so plain, I only had to use my brain. She said the past of throw was threw, The past of grow – of course – was grew, So flew must be the past of fly, And now, my boy, your turn to try. But when I trew, I had no clue, If mow was mew Like know and knew (Or is it knowed Like snow and snowed?) The teacher frowned at me and said The past of feed was – plainly – fed. Fed up, I knew then what I ned: I took a break, and out I snoke, She shook and quook (or quaked? or quoke?) With raging anger out she broke: Your ignorance you want to hide? Tell me the past form of collide! But how on earth should I decide If it’s collid (Like hide and hid), Or else – from all that I surmose, The past of rise was simply rose, And that of ride was surely rode, So of collide must be collode? Oh damn these English verbs, I thought The whole thing absolutely stought! Of English I have had enough, These verbs of yours are far too tough. Bolt upright in my chair I sat, And said to her ‘that’s that’ – I quat.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention

“Language is mankind’s greatest invention – except, of course, that it was never invented.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention

“To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention

“the names we use for things bear no inherent relation to the things themselves.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention

“The mind cannot just manufacture words for abstract concepts out of thin air – all it can do is adapt what is already available.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention

“keeping order is a crutch for those who are too lazy to search for things …)”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

“Words may be the bricks in the language edifice, but when we want to
convey subtle thoughts, involving intricate relations between different
concepts, we need to combine words into proper sentences. The structure of
language is what can turn a pile of word-bricks into a palace of expressions
– a castle in the air.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher

“I had childish visions of the elders of ancient Rome, sitting in assembly one
hot summer day and debating what the case endings should be. They first
decide by vote that -orum is to be the plural ending of the ‘genitive’ case
(‘of the cactuses’), and then they start arguing about the plural ending for
the ‘dative’ case (‘to the cactuses’). One party opts for -is, but another
passionately advocates -ibus. After heated debate, they finally agree to
reach an amicable compromise. They decree that the nouns in the language
will be divided into different groups, and that some nouns will have the
ending -is, while others will take -ibus instead.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher

“the Madame from Versailles, who was overheard by Voltaire as saying: ‘What a dreadful pity that the bother at the Tower of Babel should have got language all mixed up; but for that, everyone would always have spoken French.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

“For just like the rainforests and the coral reefs, the languages of the world are vanishing. At an estimated death-rate of one language every two weeks, it seems that before this century is out, between half and three-quarters of the world’s six thousand or so languages will have disappeared, and among them almost all the languages of small preliterate societies.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

“Maybe, but such cycles are not just a Gallic idiosyncracy. Take an English phrase like ‘up above’, and you’ll discover a no less hyperbolic history. Old English ufan meant ‘on up’ – it was the locative case of the preposition uf ‘up’. But this little ufan was not considered nearly sturdy enough, so it was reinforced by another preposition, be ‘by’, to give a beefier be-ufan ‘by on up’. But before long, be-ufan was assaulted by the forces of erosion, and ended up as a mere bufan. Naturally, the syllabically-challenged bufan had to be pumped up again, this time by the preposition an ‘on’, to give an-bufan ‘on by on up’. Later on, anbufan was ground down by erosion, and – to cut a long story short – ended up as the modest above. But it seems that a mere above doesn’t soar nearly high enough nowadays, so we sometimes feel the need to reinforce it with ‘up’, to give up above – literally ‘up on by on up’.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

“The simple truth is that ll languages change, all the time - the only static languages are dead ones.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

“The wheels of language run so smoothly that one rarely bothers to stop and think about all the resourcefulness and expertise that must have gone into making it tick. Language conceals its art.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

“The intimate relation between obligation and likelihood is nicely illustrated by an anecdote from the Soviet era. The story goes that during his state visit to Moscow,27 Fidel Castro is shown around the capital by Leonid Brezhnev. First of all, Castro is invited for a beer, which he downs in one go, and praises heartily. ‘Yes,’ says Brezhnev, ‘it was provided by our good friends from Czechoslovakia.’ Then Castro is chauffeured around the city, and is rather taken by the limo. ‘Yes,’ says Brezhnev, ‘these cars are provided by our good friends from Czechoslovakia.’ Later on, they visit an exhibition of fine crystal, and Castro duly waxes lyrical. ‘Yes,’ says Brezhnev, ‘the crystal is provided by our good friends from Czechoslovakia.’ ‘They must be very good friends,’ says Castro. ‘Yes,’ says Brezhnev, ‘they must.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

“A Sumerian word like munintuma’a (‘when he had made it suitable for her’) might seem rather trim compared to the Turkish colossus above. What is so impressive about it, however, is not its lengthiness, but rather the reverse: the thrifty compactness of its construction. The word is made up of different ‘slots’ , each corresponding to a particular portion of meaning. This sleek design allows single sounds to convey useful information, and in fact even the absence of a sound has been enlisted to express something specific. If you were to ask which bit in the Sumerian word corresponds to the pronoun ‘it’ in the English translation ‘when he had made it suitable for her’, then the answer would have to be … nothing. Mind you, a very particular kind of nothing: the nothing that stands in the empty slot in the middle. The technology is so fine-tuned, then, that even a non-sound, when carefully placed in a particular position, has been invested with a specific function. Who could possibly have come up with such a nifty contraption?”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

“Often, it is only the estrangement of foreign tongues, with their many exotic and outlandish features, that brings home the wonder of language’s design. One of the showiest stunts that some languages can pull off is an ability to build up words of breath-breaking length, and thus express in one word what English takes a whole sentence to say. The Turkish word şehirlileştiremediklerimizdensiniz, to take one example, means nothing less than ‘you are one of those whom we can’t turn into a town-dweller’. (In case you are wondering, this monstrosity really is one word, not merely many different words squashed together – most of its components cannot even stand up on their own.)”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

“People can cope with the chaos of change over the years (that is, with 'diachronic variation'), simply because they can cope with the even greater chaos of synchronic variation, the diversity at any one point in time.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

“Language is mankind's greatest inventiom… that it was never invented.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

“The German starts by claiming: 'German is off course ze best language. It is ze language off logik and philosophy, and can commuicate viz great clarity and precision even ze most complex ideas.' 'Boeff,' shrugs the Frenchman, 'but French, French, it ees ze language of lurve! In French, we can convey all ze subtletees of romance weez elegance and flair.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

“The parts of the body are the closest and most immediate things in our physical environment, and are thus most deeply imprinted in our cognition, so it is no wonder that body-parts are the sources of terms for all kinds of more abstract concepts in so many languages.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention

“The ability to deal with synchronic variation is an essential part of our knowledge of language. We can cope not only with ‘Thursday’ and ‘Fursday’, but also with ‘eether’ and ‘eyether’, ‘dreamed’ and ‘dreamt’, ‘shedule’ and ‘skedule’, ‘am I not?’ and ‘aren’t I?’ and thousands of other variations in sounds, meanings and structures. When it comes to language, we are all incredibly good drivers – all of us have been trained to race in the streets of Naples, and this is why we don’t crash head-on into one another all the time.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

“One example that can illustrate how deeply such conceptual mappings are engrained in both language and mind is the image ‘more is up, less is down’.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention

“In India there is a sect of Jainist monks called the Shvetambara, who always carry a broom and sweep the ground before them as they walk, lest they accidentally tread on some insects and squash them.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention

“how modern Hebrew has recently coined a rather recherché template, the passive of the reflexive (‘he was made to snog himself’),”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention

“But from a purely linguistic perspective, and as a rule of thumb, when two varieties of what used to be the same language are no longer mutually intelligible, they can be called different languages.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention

“Another area where languages often display erratic behaviour is what linguists call ‘gender’,”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention

“Sarcastic’ comes from Greek ‘flesh tearing’ (sárx – flesh), and is related to the word sarcophagus (literally ‘flesh eating’).”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention

“According to some researchers, hominids prior to Homo sapiens could not, for instance, produce the vowel i {ee}. But ultimately, this does not say very much, since by all accounts, et es perfectle pesseble to have a thoroughle respectable language wethout the vowel i.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention