Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages » (First Edition)

Guy Deutscher is the author of The Unfolding of Language. Formerly a fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, and of the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Languages at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, he is an honorary research fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Manchester. He lives in Oxford, England.

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 simplistic (even bigoted) chatter about the romance of Italian and the goose-stepping orderliness of German has made serious thinkers wary of the entire subject. But now, acclaimed linguist Guy Deutscher has dared to reopen the issue. Can culture influence language—and vice versa? Can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts? Could our experience of the world depend on whether our language has a word for "blue"?

Challenging the consensus that the fundaments of language are hard-wired in our genes and thus universal, Deutscher argues that the answer to all these questions is—yes. In thrilling fashion, he takes us from Homer to Darwin, from Yale to the Amazon, from how to name the rainbow to why Russian water—a "she"—becomes a "he" once you dip a tea bag into her, demonstrating that language does in fact reflect culture in ways that are anything but trivial. Audacious, delightful, and field-changing, Through the Language Glass is a classic of intellectual discovery.

The Washington Post - Christopher Schoppa

…a thrilling and challenging ride…

Prologue: Language, Culture, and Thought 1

PART I THE LANGUAGE MIRROR

1 Naming the Rainbow 25

2 A Long-Wave Herring 41

3 The Rude Populations Inhabiting Foreign Lands 58

4 Those Who Said Our Things Before Us 79

5 Plato and the Macedonian Swineherd 99

PART II THE LANGUAGE LENS

6 Crying Whorf 129

7 Where the Sun Doesn't Rise in the East 157

8 Sex and Syntax 194

9 Russian Blues 217

Epilogue: Forgive Us Our Ignorances 233

Appendix: Color: In the Eye of the Beholder 241

Notes 251

Bibliography 274

Acknowledgments 293

Illustration Credits 294

Index 295