Guy Deutscher's pop linguistics - a review-like post

Ignorant of linguistics, I followed the recommendation of Language Hat, and the prodding of a couple of my commenters, and read Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (2010) by Guy Deutscher.   The subtitle is not accurate, or is mostly inaccurate.  The book is primarily about how the world does not look different in other languages in any significant way, except when it occasionally does.

Deutscher’s method is to trace the intellectual history of a particular linguistic theory.  An example:

1.  Homer makes strange use of colors, or so observes William Gladstone in 1858.  Honey is green; sheep are violet.  Nothing is blue.  Therefore Homer saw honey as green, and could not see the color blue.  His eyes, and those of the Ancient Greeks, were different than ours.

2.  Primitive languages generally lack the color blue, and perhaps also, green, yellow, etc.  The primitive people who speak those languages cannot see those colors.  They are at an earlier evolutionary stage.

3.  Hey, there, 19th century anthropologists, I’m not so comfortable with that word “primitive,” plus it turns out everyone can tell blue from other colors whether they have a word for it or not.  Linguistic differences in color words are therefore cultural artifacts, curious but entirely without meaning.

4.  Well, perhaps not entirely without meaning.  The color vocabulary of our language does seem to have some minor effect on our perception of the world around us.

Substitute, for color, grammar or spatial language or gendered nouns and repeat.  Discovery, reaction, wild overreaction in the opposite direction, small retreat from the overreaction, which is where we are today.  Deutscher did not convince me that today’s frontier linguistics research has uncovered any mighty discoveries, but he provides a number of cautionary tales about sealing off a research path for political or cultural reasons, so I should consider myself cautioned, as well.

The best part of a pop social science book like this one is the range of strange facts that provide evidence for one or another theory.  The Australian speakers of Guugu Yimithirr do not distinguish between right and left or other directions that relate to their own position (like “egocentric” English), but use compass directions.  The television is not in front of me, but to the north; the character on screen is not walking toward me, but walking south.

Speakers of the Peruvian Amazon language Matses distinguish between not just the past and the present, but the recent past, distant past, and remote past, and also require the speaker to specify how he knows what he is saying, and most amazingly, when he learned it.    Wild pigs passed by (long ago,  which I found out recently by direct observation).  Everything in the parentheses is contained in the verb conjugation.  As Deutscher points out, the difference is not what speakers of English and Matses can say, but rather what they have to say.

Absolutely fascinating stuff, written by Deutscher with vigor and humor, even, perhaps too often, sarcasm.  I now consider myself slightly less ignorant.