Through the Language Glass

b y G u y D e u t s c h e r

reviewed by Jonathan Allin Guy Deutscher is an honorary Research Fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics, and Cultures in the University of Manchester. He is an Israeli linguist, born 1969 in Tel Aviv. He received an undergraduate degree in mathematics at the University of Cambridge, then earned a PhD in linguistics from Cambridge. He researched Historical Linguistics at St John's College. In the 2018 Rosh HaShanah magazine I reviewed Deutscher’s “The unfolding of language”. “Through the language glass” is perhaps not quite up to the same standard, but is still a useful and interesting read. The premise behind the book is the relationship, if any, between language and how we think. It’s not a perfect read: there may have been too much on colour and not enough on gender or other language differences, and perhaps by the end the journey was more interesting than the destination. It seems obvious that our language must affect the way we think: language is part of our culture and our culture certainly has an impact on our social mores. The converse is also true: changes in our culture will effect changes in our language. Foreign words are adopted to discuss new ideas, the uses of gender are modified, new words are created by the “pop” generation, new poetries are invented. We might investigate the impact of language on culture by studying bilingual

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children, for instance do they choose which language to use for a specific task? Deutscher thinks we should be surprised that the English concept of “we” can have multiple words in other languages. I don’t find this surprising as “we” is so often ambiguous: does it or does it not include the person being spoken to? Multiple words for “I” might be more interesting. Homer’s use of colour is superficially strange, but we also use colour in very poetic ways: from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner we have “All in a hot and copper sky, The bloody Sun at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the Moon”. And there’s a wonderful line from Tom Jones’s Delilah, “Her golden lips like cherries” (juxtaposing simile and metaphor). In discussing colours Deutscher perhaps misses a trick: colour has a well-defined scientific meaning, however I think a popular language definition of colour would be difficult. Does “colour” have the same meaning in all languages? I found it interesting that some colours were named before others, with “blue” being relatively recent and I’m dying to ask my grandchildren if they can identify the sky as blue. Deutscher states that the bible makes no direct mention of blue, however the colours turquoise (techelet, תלכת(, purple, and scarlet are mentioned in Exodus 25:4 and in many of the following verses. Also in Numbers 15:38 is the commandment to wear turquoise tzizit. There’s an interesting Wikipedia article on techelet: the exact colour of techelet is not known and might be any colour from midnight blue to turquoise. My guess is that detailed colour naming happens on demand, for instance when people start to use pigments for dyeing clothes or in art. Ascribing names to colours by hue is only one option. Even in English we use value and saturation: brown is orange with a lower colour value, and white through grey through black represents a change in value. Pink, on the other hand, is a desaturated red. The appendix provided a useful primer on colour vision: I hadn’t realised how close the frequency responses of the “red” and “green” cones were to each other and how much they overlapped.

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I like Deutscher’s argument that whilst any language can be used to express any idea (Turing complete, anyone?), languages vary in what they require is expressed. Take the sentence “a neighbour visited him”: French, Hebrew, and many other languages would reveal the sex of the neighbour. Hungarian, Finnish, and other languages would not reveal the sex of the subject (male in this example). In Chinese the tense can be omitted so we would have no notion of when the visit happened. In the Matse language the tense reveals how recently the visit occurred and how certain the reporter was about the event. Deutscher clarifies the distinction between gender and sex. The former just means type or genus, and is used to classify nouns; the latter reflects an animal’s physical characteristics (technically the female animal provides eggs, the male provides sperm: with the difference between egg and sperm being solely a matter of the cell size). Why does English not have gendered nouns? In general language simplification is a consequence of invasion: invaders and invaded develop a Pidgin for basic communication, which is then turned into a Creole by the second generation. English did have three genders, but these were lost following the Norman conquest. Overall, a worthwhile read, though with its flaws.

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