Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages
Author:
Genre: Reference
Book Type: Hardcover
Author:
Genre: Reference
Book Type: Hardcover
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 it used to be prevalent. It made me wonder if writing if 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.
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 it used to be prevalent. It made me wonder if writing if 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.
