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Loading... Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other… (2010)by Guy Deutscher
 h_d | Mar 31, 2013 |  A fascinating book on the links between language and culture that sets out to prove that language can impact on the way we think. There is quite a heavy emphasis on colour (some of which is difficult to comprehend as a colourblind person) but there's also sections on spacial orientation and gender. The book is well written and manages to make what could be very dry become easily accessible without being patronising. There's a few humourous inserts throughout and I never felt overwhelmed with technical linguist jargon. A well written, well researched book I encourage those who want to understand more about language and the human mind to give it a try. (  ) Shirezu | Mar 31, 2013 | This book is so enjoyable - funny and charmingly written. Lots of interesting facts about languages and the differences between them. ( ) amaraduende | Mar 30, 2013 | Murphy-Jacobs | Mar 30, 2013 | In 'Through the Language Glass' Deutscher examines whether or not a society's language affects its habits of thought, its way of viewing the world, and its culture. He discusses color perception and naming, the differences in treatment of noun gender in various languages, and how different groups of people will use different coordinate systems to orient themselves in the physical world. It turns out that not only are there different ways of ways of doing this but it may be that some peoples do perceive the world slightly differently from other groups. But Deutscher explains all this much better that I can and he does it in an entertaining manner. I enjoyed this book and learned some interesting things but I remember his 'The Unfolding of Language' as a really outstanding book and I would recommend it over this one. 1  hailelib | Feb 7, 2013 |
 Deutscher starts with the puzzling fact that many languages lack words for what (to English speakers) seem to be basic colors. For anyone interested in the development of ideas, Deutscher’s first four chapters make fascinating reading. Did you know that the British statesman William Gladstone was also an accomplished Greek scholar who, noting among other things the surprising absence of any term for “blue” in classical Greek texts, theorized that full-color vision had not yet developed in humans when those texts were composed? Or that a little-known 19th-century philologist named Lazarus Geiger made profound and surprising discoveries about how languages in general divide up the color spectrum, only to have his discoveries ignored and forgotten and then rediscovered a century later? Deutscher argues that the key to differences between languages is a contained in a maxim of the linguist Roman Jakobson: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” As an example, he quotes the English statement, “I spent last night with a neighbour”, in which we may keep private whether the person was male or female.
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I certainly didn't expect it to be as funny as it is. At one point Deutscher is talking about some dude's paper which tries to link philosophical tradition to grammar by attributing thought to syntax, and Deutscher mocks it thus: 'It might. It might also be attributable to the irregular shape of hot cross buns'. (