Monthly Archives: June 2014

Commenting on the language glass

I am preparing a post about graph properties and better Wikipedia extraction but before I go into that I wanted to comment on a book I just read, Guy’s Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass. Although I usually read books in the original language, this time I just took a Dutch translation I found at the public library while looking for something else and I couldn’t put it down. This version is good, definitely. Deutscher reads Dutch and he collaborated with the translator.

The book touches a well-known topic: the possible relationships between languages and perception and the eternal discussion on nurture versus nature, as applied to languages. Guy makes a good review of the evolution of linguistic theories about the language-culture language-brain and language-complexity issues.

Although I have done my homework from Humboldt through Sapir to modern linguists, there were quite some interesting details I learnt here.

Deutscher makes a particular point in showing how the linguistics community has often taken several very strong positions about some key issues without questioning. One of the cases is their stance about complexity in languages.

Deutscher then goes into the main topic of the book, the nature-nurture discussion. He starts to describe the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. After he is done with it, he attacks it and then he goes in the other direction in order to say that, after all, reality might be somewhere in between.

There is where I had problems. Some of the arguments he uses to take weight from the Sapir-Whorf stance are rather weak. Guy mentions the case of gender markers in English and Hebrew. Whorf had said the lack of markers in English might have influenced the less gender division in the English speaking world. Guy counter-attacks this example by mentioning such languages as Turkish or Indonesian, where even pronouns do not change according to gender. And Guy says that we all know how serious the Turkish and Indonesian communities take gender differentiation. For Guy these cases prove the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is not correct. The lack of specificity in one language, Guy adds, does not mean native speakers of a certain language do not perceive the semantic nuances expressed in other languages by means of more specific lexical or morpho-syntactic constructs. I actually agree with Guy – to a large extent – and yet I do not like how superficially he touches those examples.

Guy goes in the other direction and describes at large cases where particular linguistic structures seem to shape the perception of speakers of a certain language…and he uses different examples and describes the experiments that do prove specific languages do have specific influences in filtering and remodeling reality.

What is синий, what is голубой, really?

In the end, although Guy presents a very readable account about how language and mind might be interacting, his arguments for one or the other point are not always supported by solid examples.

All in all, we need to say that in spite of the ten zillion studies carried out to measure possible perception differences across different language communities, we haven’t produced a comprehensive catalog of perceptual references we need to check to determine what role a specific language plays there…and perhaps we will never be able to do that as we will always be moving within one or the other natural language.