Through the Language Glass
Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages
Guy Deutscher
First annotation on .
16 quotes
frontmatter 1
- “There are four tongues worthy of the world’s use,” says the Talmud: “Greek for song, Latin for war, Syriac for lamentation, and Hebrew for ordinary speech.”Jul 9 2024 9:30AM
- The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, king of Spain, archduke of Austria, and master of several European tongues, professed to speaking “Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.”Jul 9 2024 9:31AM
- The grammar of some languages is simply not logical enough to express complex ideas. German, on the other hand, is an ideal vehicle for formulating the most precise philosophical profundities, as it is a particularly orderly language, which is why the Germans have such orderly minds.Jul 9 2024 9:32AM
- Some languages don’t even have a future tense, so their speakers naturally have no grasp of the future. The Babylonians would have been hard-pressed to understand Crime and Punishment, because their language used one and the same word to describe both of these concepts.Jul 9 2024 9:32AM
- Any shortcomings in a language’s ability to philosophize simply boil down to the lack of some specialized abstract vocabulary and perhaps a few syntactic constructions, but these can easily be borrowed, just as all European languages pinched their verbal philosophical tool kit from Latin, which in turn lifted it wholesale from Greek.Jul 9 2024 9:33AM
- In short, “the genius of a nation is nowhere better revealed than in the physiognomy of its speech.” The American Ralph Waldo Emerson summed it all up in 1844: “We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone.”Jul 9 2024 9:35AM
- Cicero, on the other hand, drew exactly the opposite inference from the lack of a word in a language. In his De oratore of BC, he embarked on a lengthy sermon about the lack of a Greek equivalent for the Latin word ineptus (meaning “impertinent” or “tactless”). Russell would have concluded that the Greeks had such impeccable manners that they simply did not need a word to describe a nonexistent flaw. Not so Cicero: for him, the absence of the word was a proof that the fault was so widespread among the Greeks that they didn’t even notice it.Jul 9 2024 9:35AM
- A generation later, George Steiner reasoned in his 1975 book, After Babel, that the “conventions of forwardness in our syntax,” our “articulate futurity,” or, in other words, the existence of the future tense, is what gives us hope for the future, saves us from nihilism, even from mass suicide. “If our system of tenses was more fragile,” said Steiner, “we might not endure.” (He was clearly touched by prophetic inspiration, for dozens of languages that do not possess a future tense are becoming extinct every year.)Jul 9 2024 9:38AM
- Culture: cultivation, the state of being cultivated, refinement, the result of cultivation, a type of civilization. Chambers English dictionary Kultur: Gesamtheit der geistigen und künstlerischen Errungen-schaften einer Gesellschaft. (The totality of intellectual and artistic achievements of a society.) Störig German dictionary Culture: Ensemble des moyens mis en œuvre par l’homme pour augmenter ses connaissances, développer et améliorer les facultés de son esprit, notamment le jugement et le goût. (The collection of means employed by man to increase his knowledge, develop and improve his mental faculties, notably judgment and taste.) ATILF French dictionaryJul 9 2024 9:40AM
- Is the Chambers definition not the quintessence of Englishness? Rather amateurish in its noncommittal list of synonyms, politely avoiding any awkward definitions. And what could be more German than the German? Mercilessly thorough, overly intellectual, knocking the concept on the head with charmless precision. And as for the French: grandiloquent, hopelessly idealistic, and obsessed with le goût.Jul 9 2024 9:41AM
- So far, then, we seem to have arrived at a simple answer to the question of whether language reflects culture or nature. We have drawn a neat map and divided language into two distinct territories: the domain of labels and the land of concepts. The labels reflect cultural conventions, but the concepts reflect nature. Each culture is free to bestow labels onto concepts as it pleases, but the concepts behind these labels have been formed by the dictates of nature. A great deal can be said for this partition. It is clear, simple, and elegant, it is intellectually and emotionally satisfying, and, last but not least, it has a respectable pedigree that extends all the way back to Aristotle, who wrote in the fourth century BC that, although the sounds of speech may differ across the races, the concepts themselves—or, as he called them, the “impressions of the soul”—are the same for the whole of mankind.Jul 9 2024 9:45AM
- I once knew someone who enjoyed saying that the French and the Germans have no mind. What he meant was that neither of their languages had a word for the English “mind,” and he was right in one sense: neither French nor German has a single concept, with a single label, that covers exactly the range of meanings of the English concept “mind.”Jul 9 2024 9:46AM
- If you ask a bilingual dictionary how to translate “mind” into French, the dictionary will explain patiently that it depends on the context. You will be given a list of possibilities, such as: esprit (peace of mind = tranquillité d’esprit)tête (it’s all in the mind = c’est tout dans la tête)avis (to my mind = à mon avis)raison (his mind is going = il n’a plus toute sa raison)intelligence (with the mind of a two-year-old = avec l’intelligence d’un enfant de deux ans)Jul 9 2024 9:46AM
- So concepts like “mind” or “esprit” cannot be natural in the way that “rose” or “bird” are; otherwise they would have been identical in all languages. As early as the seventeenth century, John Locke recognized that in the realm of abstract notions each language is allowed to carve up its own concepts—or “specific ideas,” as he called them—in its own way. In his 1690 Essay concerning Human Understanding, he proved the point through the “great store of words in one language which have not any that answer them in another. Which plainly shows that those of one country, by their customs and manner of life, have found occasion to make several complex ideas, and given names to them, which others never collected into specific ideas.”Jul 9 2024 9:47AM
- Noam Chomsky and the influential research program that he has inspired—is that most of the grammar of language, that is to say, of all human languages, is innate. This school of thought, which is known as “nativist,” contends that the rules of universal grammar are coded in our DNA: humans are born with brains preequipped with a specific tool kit of complex grammatical structures, so that children do not need to learn these structures when they acquire their mother tongue. For the nativists, therefore, grammar reflects universal human nature, and any differences between the grammatical structures of different languages are superficial and of little consequence.Jul 9 2024 9:52AM
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- As George Bernard Shaw later wrote, “Everyone who had a mind to change changed it.”Jul 9 2024 9:55AM