Through the Language Glass

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.

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.

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.