Through the Language Glass

Well, I finally finished Guy Deutscher 📚 Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. I promised I'd post my thoughts, just skip this if you're not into linguistics.

I take back the scepticism. He does make a convincing case, from the experimental evidence, that language does influence thought, in three areas anyway: colour terminology, spatial terminology and grammatical gender.

Some small thoughts:

1. His examples are fairly small scale, on the level of vocabulary rather than syntax. I think there was some news recently about an experiment on German speakers that found that language influenced thought on the syntactic level, but I can't find the link now.

2. He barely mentions any research on multi-lingual speakers. Some experiments on grammatical gender were carried out on German and Spanish speakers through the medium of English, which has interesting implications for mother tongues versus later acquired languages.

3. The experimental evidence is based on groups of people. He doesn't discuss the idea that Sapir-Whorf might be stronger for some individuals than others.

One big unanswered question:

Okay, so Russian has two words for blue. This has a measurable effect on the time it takes for Russian speakers to distinguish between different shades of blue, etc., etc. But, this is the thing: English has many words for blue also. Cyan, indigo, what have you. Ah, but си́ний and голубо́й are core vocabulary, like blue is, and cyan and indigo aren't. But why? There's nothing intrinsic in those words to make them core vocabulary. Their coreness is, what, a cultural or historical thing? Similarly, Guugu Yimithirr habitually uses compass directions to mark location: There's an ant just to the north of your foot. This forces Guugu Yimithirr speakers, from a very early age, always to know which compass direction they're facing. Okay, but again, English also has the terms north, south, east and west. We just don't use them habitually. We would say in front, behind, left or right. Deutscher claims that Guugu Yimithirr does not make use of egocentric co-ordinates at all, but this is disputed; GY does apparently have terms for left hand, right hand, front and back, Haviland 1988, see the Wikipedia article for links if you're really interested. So what makes English speakers habitually use egocentric co-ordinates while Guugu Yimithirr speakers use compass directions? Again, there's nothing intrinsic in the vocabulary or syntax. It's just what you do.

So yes, language influences thought, but culture or habit or usage or something controls language, maybe, and I don't think Deutscher gets to the bottom of it. Let's hope John McWhorter's book has more to say.