The Book Depository Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher

Author: Ralph Blumenau

Rating: 5

Review: A book on a difficult and complex subject which is, however, clearly, beautifully and entertainingly written. It tackles the question whether our language reflects what we perceive in nature or whether it imposes on us ways of perceiving nature. The answer is not at all straightforward: every language has a distinct and separate word for "rose" or "bird" - there is never a word which embraces them both because the objects are so utterly different. But when it comes to colours in nature (to which a good third of the main text is devoted), we find that some societies do not have a different word for blue and black (for example), but use the same word for both: although experiments have shown that such societies are perfectly capable of telling them visually apart, they treat them as simply variants of one dark colour - and Deutscher gives us a helpful analogy: we lump together as "sweet" as whole variety of taste sensations (say of a peach and of a strawberry) which we can certainly tell apart but for which we have no separate words. The suggestion is that societies which use the same word for different manifestations do so because they feel no cultural need for keeping them apart. The history of the debate about how we might account for the different colour vocabulary was actually started off by W.E.Gladstone in 1858 (who was struck by Homer describing the sea as "wine-red" and honey as "green"), and has not been completely settled yet, though in the penultimate chapter some advanced experiments, involving brain scans, are adduced to show that identification of small variations of colours are swifter if there is a word associated with them. Then there is a section exploring the debate on what relationship, if any, there is between the complexity of a language on the one hand and, on the other, the complexity or size of the society. Then we get to the most interesting question: does the language we use force us to think in a specific way, different from the way speakers of some other languages are forced to think? Here, too, Deutscher takes us through many theories, from linguists like Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956) who affirmed that it did (a theory now debunked) to Deutscher's own, that occasionally it may do. On the way we learn some fascinating things: that some languages - Turkish is one example - make no distinction between masculine and feminine pronouns (without that culture practising gender-equality!); that Chinese verbs have only one tense (though that culture does of course know the difference between past, present and future); that a small Amazon tribe called the Matses have different forms of verbs to denote whether an event happened in the recent, the distant or the remote past AND whether a statement is reporting direct experience, inferred, conjectured or based on hearsay. As Deutscher comments, "The Matses have to be master epistemologists". They have to think epistemologically, as we do not, in the very act of everyday speaking. Even so, whether we speak the Matse language or not, we are all capable of distinguishing conceptually, if not in the form of individual words, between recent and long ago or between direct experience or hearsay. But there are some languages which do alter the nature of our perceptions. Guugu Yimithir is the language of a small aboriginal Australian tribe. Today it is on the point of extinction; the younger generation has been influenced by English; but when spoken by the old people of the tribe, it never, when denoting directions, uses left, right, in front of or behind - terms relative to the position of the observer -, but only the geographic absolutes of east, west, south and north, which has some of the oddest practical consequences in experiments which Deutscher describes. The gender of nouns, in most of the languages which recognize gender at all (we have already seen that some languages do not) is entirely arbitrary, and nouns which are masculine in one language may be feminine in another. Tests have shown that this affects the associations people have with the nouns (leastways when asked to make associations); and it often deprives translations of poetry from one language into another of the resonances of the original. Apart from gender, there are other vibes, especially onomatopaic or cultural ones, which are untranslateable and which fascinate me particularly. There is nothing about these in this book; but I enjoyed it enormously. (The book makes several references to coloured inserts. There were none such in the paperback copy I received from Amazon; but one could deduce from the text what they probably looked like.)

Author: Andrew

Rating: 2

Review: Oh dear. I really enjoy books on language and was looking forward to reading this, but I find its style hard to tolerate. It is a strange mixture of cliche and overblown, flowery rhetoric. It is certainly not to my taste. The book also begins with invective against views he disagrees with and only later do you get reasons for this. Everyone is entitled to the odd grandiloquent phrase, but the author doesn't seem to know when to stop. There is an awful lot like the following: "Before long a flame will flare up and illuminate the intellectual firmament, leaving no corner of human reason untouched." "But when all is said and sung, the elegant conceit of the critics' animadversions does not bear up to Gladstone's literal mindedness..." "Today, under the bright neon lights of the genetics lab, when the human genome has been mapped, when scientists can twiddle their pincers to clone sheep and engineer soybeans, and when children learn about DNA in primary school, it is difficult to imagine the complete darkness in which even the greatest minds were groping just over a century ago in all that concerned life's recipe.". "Geiger, who had died in 1870, was not allowed to bask in posthumous glory, however." (Errm?) On other thinkers about language we get: "in their pronouncements on language, culture and thought, it seems that big thinkers in their grand oeuvres have not always risen above little thinkers over their hors d'oeuvre." And this patronising tone is applied to almost everyone: "is the Chambers definition not the quintessence of Englishness? Rather amateurish in its non-committal list of synonyms, politely avoiding any awkward definitions?". "Like flies to the honeypot or philosophers to the unknowable, the most inspired charlatans, the most virtuoso con artists, not to mention hordes of run-of-the-mill crackpots, have been drawn to expostulate on the influence of the mother tongue on its speakers' thoughts.". Certain well known linguists and anthropologists have their views dismissed with the sentence "How could such piffle be spouted by sober scientists?" I prefer to be given the evidence and to make up my own mind - and not to be told "when Gladstone finishes drawing his circle of evidence, any reader with at least half an open mind would have to accept that....". Or to have people's views blackened before they have been explained with phrases like: "the most notorious of con men, Benjamin Lee Whorf, who seduced a whole generation into believing, without a shred of evidence that....". May be, but the book doesn't tell me what he said until several chapters later. All this is a pity, as there are lots of interesting things in the book - and I agree with much of what it says, particularly the attack on relativism. It is such a shame that the style is painful and polemical. I would recommend that readers ignore the first third of the book - the florid language and the author's temper calm down a little as the book goes on.