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Description edit
A masterpiece of linguistics scholarship, at once erudite and entertaining, confronts the thorny question of how—and whether—culture 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... read more
Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit
Quotes edit
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“In the end, after years of travail, it was Louis Le Laboureur who discovered in 1669 that the answer was simplicity itself. His painstaking grammatical researches revealed that, in contrast to speakers of other languages, "we French follow in all our utterances exactly the order of thought, which is the order of Nature." No wonder, then, that French can never be obscure. As the later thinker Antoine de Rivarol put it: "What is not clear may be English, Italian, Greek, or Latin" but "ce qui n'est pas clair n'est pas francais." Not all intellectuals of the world unite, however in concurring with this analysis. Equally distinguished thinkers - strangely enough, mostly from outside France - have expressed different opinions.”
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“In their pronouncements on language, culture, and thought, it seems that big thinkers in their /grandes oeuvres/ have not always risen much above little thinkers over their /hors d'oeuvres./ Given such an unappetizing history of precedents, is there any hope of getting something savory out of the discussion? Once one has sifted out the unfounded and the uninformed, the farcical and the fantastic, is there anything sensible left to say about the relation between language, culture , and thought?"”
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“For there is one toxic fallacy that runs like quicksilver through all the arguments that we have encountered so far, and this is the assumption that the language we happen to speak is a prison-house that limits the concepts we are able to understand."”
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“Roman Jakobson encapsulated Boas's insight into a pithy maxim: "Languages differ essentially in what they *must* convey and not in what they *may* convey." The crucial differences between languages, in other words, are not in what each language allows its speaker to express - for in theory any language could express anything - but in what information each language obliges its speakers to express.”
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“But ye readers of posterity, forgive us our ignorances, as we forgive those who were ignorant before us. The mystery of heredity has been illuminated for us, but we have seen this great light only because our predecessors never tired of searching in the dark. So if you, O subsequent ones, ever deign to look down at us from your summit of effortless superiority, remember that you have only scaled it on the back of our efforts. For it is thankless to grope in the dark and tempting to rest until the light of understanding shines upon us. But if we are led into this temptation, your kingdom will never come."”
First Sentence edit
"There are four tongues worthy of the world's use," says the Talmud: "Greek for song, Latin for war, Syriac for lamentation, and Hebrew for ordinary speech."
Table of Contents edit
PROLOGUE: Language, Culture, and Thought
PART I: THE LANGUAGE MIRROR
1. Naming the Rainbow
2. A Long-Wave Herring
3. The Rude Populations Inhabiting Foreign Lands
4. Those Who Said Our Things Before Us
5. Plato and the Macedonian Swineherd
PART II: THE LANGUAGE LENS
6. Crying Whorf
7. Where the Sun Doesn't Rise in the East
8. Sex and Syntax
9. Russian Blues
EPILOGUE: Forgive Us Our Ignorances
APPENDIX: Color: In the Eye of the Beholder
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Illustration Credits
Index
Errata edit
"The crucial differences between languages, in other words, are not in what each language allows its speaker to express - for in theory any language could express anything - but in what information each language obliges it <sic> speakers to express." - p. 151
Correct to: "obliges *its* speakers to express."
Series & Lists edit
Authors & Contributors edit
- Guy Deutscher (Author)
Awards edit
- Samuel Johnson Prize (2011: Non-Fiction, Longlist)
Classification edit
- Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
- Dewey: 410
Subjects edit
Links to Supplemental Material edit
- Guy Deutscher's Homepage: Guy Deutscher is the author of Through the Language Glass and The Unfolding of Language. Formerly a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge and of the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Languages in the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, he is an honorary Research Fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures in the University of Manchester.
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