Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages
Ratings13
Average rating3.8
This book confronts the thorny question of howand whetherculture shapes language and language, culture. Linguistics has long shied away from claiming any link between a language and the culture of its speakers: too much simplistic (even bigoted) chatter about the romance of Italian and the goose-stepping orderliness of German has made serious thinkers wary of the entire subject. But now, acclaimed linguist Guy Deutscher has dared to reopen the issue. Can culture influence languageand vice versa? Can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts? Could our experience of the world depend on whether our language has a word for "blue"? Challenging the consensus that the fundaments of language are hard-wired in our genes and thus universal, Deutscher argues that the answer to all these questions isyes. In thrilling fashion, he takes us from Homer to Darwin, from Yale to the Amazon, from how to name the rainbow to why Russian water -- a "she" -- becomes a "he" once you dip a tea bag into her, demonstrating that language does in fact reflect culture in ways that are anything but trivial. Audacious, delightful, and field-changing, Through the Language Glass is a classic of intellectual discovery. - Publisher.
Reviews with the most likes.
If you haven't studied [much] linguistics, this will be a great book for you. It's playfully written and covers really interesting material, with a healthy dose of scientific intellectual history. If you took Semantics with Pulju at Dartmouth, you will learn nothing new and just be frustrated by that fact.
P.S. It's a little annoyingly Eurocentric.
Gave up at 33%.
This topic is simply not the part of languages I'm mostly interested in, so it felt too dry to continue. And I'm sure it's not the author, because I read another one of his language books which was great!
You don't get as many impressive cocktail-party stories as you would hope (“and that's why French-speakers ...!”). But Deutscher writes entertaining, and he is especially thorough. His task is to take the field of linguistic relativity - which has gotten itself into trouble by boasting with too big claims early on - and bring it back to a level of credibility. His careful study of the field's history, its early failures and its more recent small successes (word genders influencing associations, the russian blues, egocentric vs geographic coordinates) show in parallel the difficult history of devising empirical experiments dealing with the human mind that avoid any form of priming or vagueness.