Through the Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages

This isn't the usual sort of book that I review - Language & Linguistics is a bit more upmarket than the usual romance or vampire novels that I tend to read. However, I was browsing in a bookshop in Berlin and among the `Englische Bücher' I saw this book featured. It had an endorsement on the front by Stephen Fry so I thought I'd give it a go. I'm really glad I did as reading this book opened up a whole new way of looking at things. Guy Deutscher looks in detail at how the language we speak may colour our view of the world - focusing on colour and how we name/see it (from the Greek Iliad and the wine-dark sea to how Russians react to different shades of blue) and how position of objects can be described in different ways depending on how your culture marks out place. There was so much packed into this book that I found myself hooked, reading it until late in the night and going back to read some sections again. The language examples are from a vast array of languages - modern European ones with which we may be familiar to some of the much less well-known tongues from the antipodes and further. Although the author is an academic this book was fun, engaging, warm and in no way dry and dusty. I also think it worth mentioning that the quality of the writing was absolutely excellent. Deutscher's English is lovely, with a great turn of phrase. All the more amazing when you discover that his mother tongue is Hebrew and so English is a second language to him. I was really impressed by the way that he could express himself in English whilst explaining how something may seem to him as someone who sees the world through a Hebrew mind. I heartily recommend this book to anyone with the faintest of interest in language, linguistics, colours and more.

In general I found this a useful and interesting read, though perhaps not quite up to “The unfolding of language”. I didn’t find the book particularly overlong nor Deutscher’s language too verbose (I’ve come across far worse), and perhaps there was too much on colour and not enough on gender or other language differences. That said, the journey was perhaps more interesting than the destination. Of course our language affects the way we think: language is part of our culture and our culture certainly has an impact on our social mores. The converse is also true: changes in our culture will effect changes in our language. Foreign words are adopted to discuss new ideas, the uses of gender are modified, new words are created by the “pop” generation, new poetries are invented. Investigation of the impact of language on culture could be investigated by studying bilingual children, for instance do they choose which language to use for a specific task? Deutscher thinks we should be surprised that the English concept of “we” can have multiple words in other languages. I don’t find this surprising as “we” is so often ambiguous: does it or does it not include the person being spoken to? Multiple words for “I” might be more interesting. Homer’s use of colour is superficially strange, but we also use colour in very poetic ways: from Coleridge’s Rime of the ancient mariner we have “All in a hot and copper sky, The bloody Sun at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the Moon”. And there’s a wonderful line from Tom Jones’s Delilah, “Her golden lips like cherries”. In discussing colours Deutscher perhaps misses a trick: colour has a well-defined scientific meaning, however I think a popular language definition of colour would be difficult. Does “colour” have the same meaning in all languages? I found it interesting that some colours were named before others, with “blue” being relatively recent and I’m dying to ask my grandchildren if they can identify the sky as blue. Deutscher states that the bible makes no direct mention of blue, however the colours turquoise (techelet, (תכלת, purple, and scarlet are mentioned in Exodus 25:4 and in many of the following verses. Also in Numbers 15:38 is the commandment to wear turquoise “tzizit” (fringed garment). There is an interesting Wikipedia article on techelet: the exact colour of techelet is not known and might be any colour from midnight blue to turquoise. My guess is that detailed colour naming happens on demand, for instance when people start to use pigments for dying clothes or in art. Ascribing names to colours by hue is only one option. Even in English we use value and saturation: brown is orange with a lower colour value, and white through grey through black represents a change in value. Pink, on the other hand, is a desaturated red. The appendix provided a useful primer on colour vision: I hadn’t realised how close the frequency responses of the “red” and “green” cones were to each other and how much they overlapped. I like Deutscher’s argument that whilst any language can be used to express any idea (Turing complete, anyone?), languages vary in what they require is expressed. Take the sentence “a neighbour visited him”: French and many other languages would reveal the sex of the neighbour. Hungarian (and Finish) and other languages would not reveal the sex of the subject (male in this example). In Chinese the tense can be omitted so we would have no notion of when the visit happened. In the Matse language the tense reveals how recently the visit occurred and how certain the reporter was about the event. Deutscher clarifies the distinction between gender and sex. The former just means type or genus, and is used to classify nouns; the latter reflects an animal’s physical characteristics (technically the female animal provides eggs, the male provides sperm: with the difference between egg and sperm being solely a matter of the cell size). Why does English not have gendered nouns? In general language simplification is a consequence of invasion resulting in Pidgin and then a Creole. English did have three genders, but these were lost following the Norman conquest. Overall, a useful book.

Well, what a extremely pleasant surprise this book turned out to be! I work as a teacher in advertising so language is quite logically one of my interests, and in a way very much the basis of everything I discuss with my students. Brilliant advertising strategies and original creative concepts will still get you nowhere if the language doesn't appeal to the target group. But alas, many books on language (regardless whether they focus on advertising or not) are, how shall I put this?, not very engaging. Not so with 'Through the language glass'! In fact, this book had me enthralled from the very start and is as gripping reading as some of the very best detective novels. It's insightful, Deutscher argues his case (that the language you grow up with can and does indeed colour - in more than a literal sense of the word - the way your mind works) very convincingly and eloquently, and on top of that it's absolute fun to read. If only all books on communication and language were this good! Absolutely must-read, and not just for language teachers! After all, whatever field you're active in, language is what we all use to reason with and express ideas in so if - as Deutscher convinced me is effectively the case - language can colour the way your mind works this surely is of interest to all of us.

The extent to which language shapes our thoughts has been the subject of much hyperbole and confusion. Even Stephen Fry (quoted on the cover) has got confused more than once on QI. Guy Deutscher brings historical perspective, philosophoical clarity and extensive knowledge to this exposition. He reveals a world of surprising differences and subtle effects, and brings the reader right up to date with experiments of fiendish ingenuity. The book could well have been shorter, but it's such a pleasant read that the padding causes little distress. It was surprising not to find Welsh coloiur words mentioned, but I suppose that's me being insular. This is an active field of research, anthropological, experimental and philosophical, but I doubt if there will need to be another general book like this for a long time.

In terms of content, this is a fascinating, mind-blowing introduction to the ways in which language may affect our views of the world. the question of whether our mother tongue influences our thinking and perceptions is considered through questions of colour vocabulary, means of giving directions and grammatical gender. By far the largest portion of the book considers colour, and this is the most intriguing - I had certainly never questioned that "blue" is a concept that every language would have a word for, but it seems I was wrong. Each of the concepts is illustrated by examples and thought experiments, including a description of various scientific experiments which have attempted to prove links between language and other areas of brain function. Unfortunately, although the topic, examples etc are intriguing, the style is annoying. The author seems to subscribe to the view that one sentence is never enough - he can use pages to cover what could be expressed just as well in one paragraph. There is also a sneering tone which creeps in at many points, which is frankly annoying. The book could undoubtedly be both shorter and less annoying if written in a different style. However, I would recommend reading it for the insights it gives into the world, and the preconceptions about what is "normal" that it challenges.

I have to agree with all the previous reviewers of this book whose quotations adorn its covers: not a book that can be easily put down, I finished it on the Sunday evening after it arrived on the Saturday morning. It gave me a lot of fascinating new information about colour and spatial perception and description in other languages and cultures, and the author's analogies are wonderfully clear (such as his machine for making food to order that would require the development of a more refined sense of, and vocabulary for, taste). More specifically for me, living in a bilingual English/French family in a multilingual environment, it was interesting that he implicitly but definitely answered the question: does the continued presence of genders make French a more difficult language to learn than English (for, say, Greeks or Turks)? His answer is: Yes, it does, but as a native speaker of a language with genders he would not want to be without them!

In the mid 19th century, an English classics scholar noticed an anomaly while translating Homer. The colours used to describe things in ancient Greek were often different from the words we'd use in English. That scholar was none other than William Ewart Gladstone, four-time Prime Minister of the UK. His discovery started a long standing discussion about the relationship between the languages we speak and how we perceive the world around us. This fun book takes us from the wacky Victorian world of natural selection, orientalism and the discovery of colour blindness to the present day via the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. To cut a long story short, it turns out that the Grand Old Man was more or less correct! Deutscher has a fun and engaging writing style and details interesting research on language and perception. Highly recommended!

An interesting and readable treatise that answers the question as to what degree language is responsible for the way different cultures perceive the world.The book pays particular attention to areas concerning colour,space and gender,with rather more emphasis on the colour side of perception. The author has an entertaining and fluid writing style that brings the subject alive by recounting the events that surround various discoveries,rather than presenting us with a purely scientific document which just recounts experimental outcomes. Unless you have a degree in linguistics, you are likely to come away with a new appreciation of the power of culture to shape our understanding of the human environment and a renewed faith in the ability of scientific authors to present there ideas without being ego-centric or obtuse.