Make sure whatever you're drinking (be it tea, coffee, a soft drink or anything stronger) is nearby; it's gonna be a long review.
The overall scope of Guy Deutscher's
Through the Language Glass was a discussion of culture. But, in his words, "The focus here will be on those every day cultural traits that are impressed so deeply in our mind that we do not recognize them as such. In short, the aspects of culture that will be explored here are those where culture masquerades as human nature." (page 9)
The book was interesting, although at times hard reading. The author divides his study of language and culture into three areas: language as it relates to color, to space and to gender. In the review I'll use these three divisions, along with words and other comments.
Color:
1) The author bases the first part of this book on a linguistic debate that ranged from the late 1800s through the middle of the 20th century. It began with detailed studies of Homer's writing. Research found that the only colors Homer used in description were black, white and red. The reasoning, early linguists determined, was that the human eye was not evolved enough to see more than those colors. A few decades later though linguists started arguing against that, saying that the eye was fine, the problem was that the Greeks had no words for other colors. Thus, early linguists found themselves involved in a nature/nurture argument. Oops. I just recalled that in one of my graduate courses at Indiana U. the professor, a scholar of Greek drama, said that the Greeks thought the color yellow was funny. I've always thought that Homer and the famous dramatists were writing at about the same time. According to Deutscher, Greeks at that time either did not see yellow or if they saw it, did not have a name for it. Am I interested in doing the research that would have to be done to resolve this conflict? Not right now.
2) William Gladstone, prime minister and before that literary scholar and linguist, started the nature side of the argument. "The eye may require a familiarity with an ordered system of colors as the condition of its being able closely to appreciate among them. … The organ was given to Homer only in its infancy which is now full-blown in us." (page 39) Unless, of course, Homer, like the Greek dramatists, was amused by the color yellow.
3) The author explains the other side of the debate with a quote from an earlier linguist: "But it was a biblical scholar, Franz Delitsch, who put it the most memorably when he wrote in 1878 that 'we see in experience not with two eyes but with three: with the two eyes of the body and with the eye of the mind that is behind. And it is in this eye of the mind in which the cultural-historical perspective progressive development of the color sense takes place.'" (page 55) I'm not sure I dog-eared a page to use as reference for the following, but the accepted ordering of color knowledge was black, white and red, followed by either blue or green and then shades derived from all of them. I assume divisions continue even today, having had a friend who, while decorating a house, informed me that there were 30 some shades of white. EEK! (Or perhaps my eye has not evolved sufficiently.)
4) Deutscher refutes the idea of "primitive language." The idea of primitive language comes when an individual learns another language, particularly one associated with a tribe or undeveloped region, or when the person whose language is being studied takes his first stab at English. The first step in learning a new language, in that sense, is to take the language down to its most simplistic terms. He refers to this point in language development as the "me sleep here" stage. But, linguists have decided, "there are no truly 'primitive languages.' "Hundreds of languages of simple tribes have now been studied in depth, but not one of them, be it spoken by the most technologically and sartorially challenged people, is on the 'me sleep here' level." (page 102)
5) During the discussion of primitive languages, Deutscher writes that the first two rules that the beginning student of linguistics learns are: "Wherever humans exist, language exists and that all languages are equally complex." (page 104)
6) For two pages Deutscher then sets out to prove that the second of those two points has never been proven. "Anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language knows only too dearly that languages can be full of pointless irregularities that could increase complexity considerably…" (page 106)
7) Interesting, at least for me, is that the only area where language is more complex or more sophisticated is that of subordination. "With subordination, we can produce expressions of increasing complexity that nevertheless remain coherent and comprehensible." (Page 119) If we're careful.
8) Then there are verb tenses. " We can be defined as the mammal that uses the future of the verb 'to be,' he (Steiner, an earlier linguist) explains. The future tense is what gives us hope for the future and without it we are all condemned to be 'in hell', that is to say, in a grammar without futures.'" (Pages 144 – 145) I like the idea and its expression.
9) Deutscher, of course, elaborates further on the subject of verb tense and language complexity. The language of the Matses, an Indian tribe in South America, has "three degrees of pastness … you cannot just say that someone 'passed by there'; you have to specify different verb endings whether this action took place in the recent past (roughly up to a month), distant past (roughly from a month to fifteen years), or remote past (more than fifty years ago). (page 153) And "there are separate verbal forms depending on whether you were reporting direct experience (you saw someone passing with your own eyes), something inferred from evidence (you saw footprints in the sand), conjecture (people always pass by at the time of day), or hearsay (your neighbor told you he had seen someone passing by). (Page 153) Think of the trouble that could cause in modern-day American English.
Spatial relationships:
1) "Now, as far as language and spatial thinking go, the only thing we have actually established is correlation between two facts: the first is that different languages rely on different coordinates; the second is that speakers of these languages perceive and remember space in different ways." (pages 186 – 187)
2) Regarding spatial relationships and language, Deutscher discusses egocentric and geographic approaches. Egocentric is when an individual describes where something is, locating it by naming things . Example: The red barn is beyond the willow tree. Geographically uses North, South, East and West One result is that speakers who use egocentric are aware of surroundings more so than speakers who use geographic; they are therefore acutely aware of where North, South, East and West would be. (Thank heavens English uses egocentric. If it used geographic, I'd never know where anything was.) Deutscher holds that an individual's concept of spatial expression is based on the language rather than some innate sense that leads to the formation of language. (In which case I'd be okay.)
Gender:
1) Gender, of course, refers mainly to pronoun usage, and German takes a beating. One example is a bit of dialogue translated from German into English.
Gretchen: where is the turnip?
Wilhelm: She has gone to the kitchen
Gretchen: And where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
Wilhelm: It is going to the opera. (page 202)
Fun, huh?
2) While Deutscher assumes that gender identification for nouns may originally have had some basis in fact, he now thinks it is totally random and at one point labels it "a mere grammatical habit." (page 209)
3) "When a language treats inanimate objects in the same way as it treats women and men, with the same grammatical forms, with the same 'he' and 'she' pronouns, the habits of grammar spill over to the habits of mind beyond grammar." (page 214) I think I'll leave this one open for discussion, if anyone is interested.
4) "It goes without saying that gender is language's gift to poets." (Page 214) Does it? I'm not convinced.
Words:
1) sartorially. Used above in a sentence—color, section 4. Upon first reading I assumed the word had something to do with satire . While typing the quote, I realized my assumption made no sense. So:
www.dictionary.com says, "adjective, 1. of or pertaining to tailors or their trade: sartorial workmanship. 2. of or pertaining to clothing or style or manner of dress: sartorial splendor. 3. Anatomy . pertaining to the sartorius." And now I'm totally confused.
2) Morphology. "Finally, one factor that may slow down the creation of new morphology is that ultimate hallmark of a complex society—literacy." (Page 117) I'm assuming the term has something to do with adding words. I'll go find out if that's the case. It is. According to
www.dictionary.com, "Linguistics. a. the patterns of word formation in a particular language, including inflection, derivation, and composition. b. the study and description of such patterns. c. the study of the behavior and combination of morphemes." Got it. And I might even remember the first meaning.
Other:
1) As Deutscher works his way through his main topics, he often veers into semi-related issues. Within the section on color, he discusses grammar, which he ties loosely into his overall topic by the fact that that linguists have argued that there should be some aspects of grammar that are common to all cultures. So far that has not appeared to be the case. But one sentence pertaining to that issue illustrates the author's humor, which I appreciated throughout the book. "The controversy over grammar has thus produced a most impressive pile of paper over the last decades, and many a library shelf across the globe quietly groans under its burden." (page 98) So, Martha, does that go in your category of "easily amused"? Probably.
2) Deutscher tells an interesting story regarding Japan. As most cultures develop new concepts, they create new words, and over time those new words take on additional meetings. That happened in Japan. The word
ao, for green, took on many unrelated meanings. Traffic lights appeared. A conflict arose between green as used in a stop light and green in all its other meanings. Deutscher wrote that rather than inventing a new word, the Japanese changed the color in the traffic light. He expressed the situation better than I have. "Nations with a weaker spine might have opted for the feeble solution of simply changing the official name on the green light to
midori. Not so the Japanese. Rather than alter the name of the go light to live with that reality, the Japanese government decreed in 1973 that reality should be corresponding to the dominant meaning of
ao. … The solution was thus to make the
ao light as bluish as possible while still being sufficiently green…" (page 218)
3) Late in the book, while explaining another theory Deutscher writes, "Their idea was simple, but like most other clever ideas, it appears simple only once someone has thought of it." (page 226) I'm sure the statement is true, but I can't think of any examples. Can you?
4) "The real effects of the mother tongue are … the habits that develop through the frequent use of certain ways of expression. The concepts we are trained to treat as distinct, the information our mother tongue continuously forces us to specify, the details it requires us to be attentive to, and the repeated associations imposed on us – all these habits of speech can create habits of mind that affect more than merely the knowledge of the language itself." (page 234) Actually, that's the book I wanted to read, but Deutscher downplays the level of linguistics who talk about the many words for snow in native Alaskan languages. His approach to linguistics is much, much deeper. Call me shallow, but I would have liked it a little less deep. (Pun intended.)
