Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages
Ratings8
Average rating3.8
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!
The Sapir-Whorf theory of sociolinguistics was trendy almost 100 years ago: it suggested that the language we use controls the way that we think. It's an initially intriguing hypothesis with a lot of instinctual appeal. If a language doesn't have a word for a particular phenomenon, or lacks a particular tense, why wouldn't speakers of that language have a hard time conceiving of that phenomenon or that kind of world? Until you realize that some languages, like the Italian I studied as an undergrad, have an entire tense for the remote past, passato remoto, while the English language doesn't. Does that mean English speakers can't conceive of events very far in the past? Of course not. Does that mean that we don't understand implicitly terms like saudade, a melancholy longing for things that are gone and will never come back? Again, of course not, but for a while educated people would have thought so.
Deutscher reinvigorates the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis among a very few limited lines: primarily, he focuses on the idea that our languages impact how we think about color, along with how we process geolocation, and objects in gendered languages. As speakers of a neuter language, we don't think about objects as inherently gendered things. But if you speak a language that thinks of bridges as masculine, like Spanish, bridges are strong and sturdy. If you speak a language that thinks of bridges as feminine, like German, however, you're much more likely to implicitly think of bridges as beautiful and delicate. And color! There's an incredible explanation of the Homeric description of the sea as “wine-dark” that I can't possibly condense, but if you're into this kind of thing, you'll be enraptured.
Fascinating stuff, for a person who has a real interest in psychology and language. If not, probably not a text for you. Since I'm the former rather than the latter, I loved this book and found it incredibly compelling.