Guy Deutscher (1) (1969–)

I'm not surprised that I found this book fascinating, because I find language fascinating. And I like Deutscher's writing style.
The idea that language influences thought is apparently kind of taboo nowadays in linguistic circles (or at least it was when this book was published), largely because of some dudes named Sapir and Whorf who took it to quite an extreme but didn't really have any good evidence to support their ideas (for example, that someone whose language doesn't contain a future show more tense wouldn't be able to understand the concept of "the future"). But it's not entirely wrong - Deutscher gives examples of three areas where language has been shown to influence thinking to a measurable extent.

If your language uses cardinal directions only, (north-south-east-west instead of left or right, in front of, or behind), you will always know where north is, and you will perform differently on certain tasks than someone who speaks an egocentric language. Say for example you were standing in front of a table with some objects on it. You're then asked to turn around and place the objects in the same order on a table behind you, on the opposite wall of the room. People who speak these two different types of languages would put the objects in the opposite order! If you speak an egocentric language, you'll place the objects that were to the left of you at table 1 to the left of you on table 2. If you speak a cardinal direction language, you'll put the objects on the north side of table 1 on the north side of table 2. Neither answer is wrong, but if you grew up speaking English which uses egocentric directions (not exclusively, obviously, but mainly for small-scale situations), you'd probably be baffled by someone who placed the objects in the opposite order from you. It wouldn't even occur to me how they were doing this task because when I'm inside a building I almost never know which direction is north.

Language can also have an effect on colour perception - for example, of two pairs of colours that are an equal number of shades apart, we view as further apart the ones that cross a linguistic colour barrier. For example, if you're an English speaker, you'd perceive a shade of green and blue as further apart than two shades of blue, even if the blues were actually further apart on the colour spectrum. If you did the same experiment with a Russian speaker, you'd get a different result because Russian has two separate words for dark blue and light blue.

Lastly, if the language you speak has gendered words in it, that will affect your assumptions and associations with the words. In English, which doesn't have any gendered words, the only gendered assumptions we have are cultural (for example, associating "nurse" with "female" and "doctor" with "male" - these have nothing to do with the actual words but with how we've been socialized). If you speak a language like French or Spanish with gendered nouns, it can have an effect on your memory. For example, it was easier for Spanish speakers to remember a female name associated with an apple than a male one, because the word for apple in Spanish is feminine.

Basically the take-away of this book is that it's less interesting what a language allows you to say than what a language requires you to say. In English, we're forced to tell our listeners when something happens because tense is built in to our verbs. I am, I was, I will be. I can't express the concept of me being without indicating when I am being! There are languages in which these aren't linked though, where I could say that I am and listeners wouldn't automatically know when I was or will be or even if I currently am! Of course you could express that if you wanted, but it's not required.

You should definitely read this book if you finished reading my review. It goes into the history of linguistic relativism, which I found really interesting, and a bunch about colour perception (the less relevant parts to language are relegated to an appendix) which I also think is interesting. Plus different experiments that were designed to help tease language from culture which is really hard to do! show less

Wow. Astonishingly good!

This is the book on linguistics I've been looking for my entire life.
Rather than get sidetracked with details, the author talks about what is known about how languages change over time, not just sound changes but changes in grammar and meaning. From this information he creates a picture of how language, which seems too perfect to have arisen from nothing, could have evolved over time from the simplest stages (presumably a few concrete nouns and verbs) to the show more sophistication of prepositions and tenses, declensions and conjugations and subordinate clauses. Along the way we learn many man many fascinating things. This is basically The Origin of Species for languages.
And, to top it all, it's easy to read.

I cannot recommend this book enough.

As an aside, I imagine there are probably linguists out there who are already fuming at what the author has to say. Linguistics seems to breed a kind of small-minded pettiness that is astonishing to any normal scientist; witness the insane anger with which they treat the issue of grouping Native American languages together pace Joseph Greenberg. However for those of us interested in the big picture, I suspect this is a book that will be brought up fondly in many people's memories years from now. show less

There are a lot of big, interesting questions to be asked about language and psychology and culture. Does language divide things up in ways that are "natural," based on categories that exist in the real world, or is it entirely arbitrary? For instance, are "blue" and "green" obvious, separate colors that any language would recognize as distinct, or can we slice up the spectrum any old way? And what effects do linguistic differences have on us? If you speak a language that has only one word show more for both "blue" and "green," do you actually perceive those colors differently? Does it make any real difference in how you think about color in the world around you?

Deutscher delves into these questions in a fair amount of detail, with a particular focus on those questions of color, getting into how various languages differ when it comes to labeling colors and how ideas about what that means have changed over the years. This is more interesting than it sounds, honestly. I was fascinated to learn, among other things, that it was once seriously believed by many people that the ancient Greeks must have been colorblind, because Homer, whose descriptions are otherwise quite vivid, uses a notably limited number of color words, some of which seem very strangely chosen.

But while color is a main focus of the book, it's not the only one. Deutscher also considers the possibility that languages that categorize nouns randomly as masculine or feminine might have some influence on how people think of the objects named by those nouns. And he introduces us to an Australian language where it is impossible to say something is "in front of you" or "to your left" or "to your right." Instead, everything is expressed using cardinal directions, so that the thing in front of you is described instead as being "north of you," but only, of course, if you happen to be facing north. Perhaps unsurprisingly, speakers of this language are really good at knowing which direction is which at all times, which Deutscher suggests is because their language forces them to pay attention to this subject.

His arguments on that, and on pretty much everything else, seem reasonable and not remotely radical, but according to Deutscher, they are opposed to the conventional wisdom in linguistics today, which insists that the cultural and psychological influences of language are, if not nonexistent, then never more than utterly trivial. He sees this stance as a case of the pendulum swinging back a bit too far, after a period in which many linguists bought into now thoroughly discredited ideas about language shaping human thought even to the extent that that which we don't have words for is literally unthinkable.

It's all very interesting stuff, or at least it is to me, anyway. And Deutscher is a great writer, explaining complicated things in a lucid, engaging, easy-to-understand fashion, peppered with sly touches of humor. Definitely recommended for people with an interest in language and culture. And possibly those interested in the psychology of color, too. show less

I expected more from this book, not realizing that what I hoped to find has not yet been proven to be true. The author attempts to show that language can, indeed, influence how one thinks. Unfortunately he has to address the age-old questions of nature vs. nature. He gives a somewhat irreverent, and very entertaining history of the controversy of nature versus nurture in regards to language. The history he provides and how he debunks once sacred linguistics notions makes the book worth the show more read.
He uses the exploration of space, color and gender as the topics to make his claim that there is a slight significance to support the theory that language can influence the way we think.
His concluding paragraphs in the book are awesome! show less