So enchanted by how clever we are

I've just finished Guy Deutscher's brilliant book Through The Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages. The book was meticulously researched and well argued, and it fired my imagination in so many ways. Deutscher examined whether language affects thought. On this evidence, the answer is complex. He looked at the relationship between language, colour and culture; words used to describe spatial relationships (right, left, behind, in front of vs. the cardinal directions of north, south, east and west in other languages and cultures); gendered languages and how generalising the perceptions of a given mother tongue as universals for all languages has been a major flaw in enthusiastic yet erroneous research in the past. Hence this book charts the haphazard progression of research per se, which in turn reminded me of these song lyrics:

We light the deepest ocean
Send photographs of Mars
We're so enchanted by how clever we are

Julian Lennon – 'Saltwater' (1991)

Our knowledge of language and science barely scratches the surface of what lies undiscovered and what remains for us to get wrong. Occasionally even Deutscher's own examples to illustrate his points seemed questionable. Recalling his daughter's ability to recognise that the sky is blue, at the ripe old age of four, she declared that the black night sky was 'blue' (Deutscher, 2011:72). The lack of even a name for the colour blue in some languages led the author to ask his daughter to describe the appearance of an object/concept (the sky) that is not always the same colour. In my view, we see the sky as 'blue' because most of the time, we want it to be so. Grey skies, white snowy skies, red or orange sunsets or black nights cannot compete with a bright blue sky on a sunny day. Yet towards the end of the book we find this (ibid:249):

"It has been shown, for example, that long-term memory and object recognition play an important role in the perception of colour."

So depending on one's individual experiences, is it possible that a child's inability to correctly identify the colour of an object or concept merely demonstrates their underdeveloped long-term memory? Is it conceivable that by the age of four, the images and descriptions of the different skies I mentioned above have not yet been committed to memory for future recall at specific times or during certain seasons? If so, the relative rarity of a blue sky might account for a child's alternative description, drawing on a different memory of the sky.

My second query concerns Deutscher's investigation into the extent to which different languages' descriptions of an event provoke different perceptions of that event (ibid:140). Taking the example of 'It rains', he tells us how the action of falling and the object (droplets) are wrapped up in one verbal concept. In his mother tongue (Hebrew), these two concepts are kept apart. Despite different renderings in different languages, one's perception of the actual event is unchanged. And to confirm his central thesis that languages only differ in what they habitually compel their speakers to say, 'It rains', to my English eyes and ears, requires additional information in a way that other languages do not. This is because the grammar of English, unlike many other languages, compels speakers to use one of two ways to express an action in the present tense:

1.It rains.
(Simple present, used to describe a habitual action in the present)
e.g. It rains somewhere and at some time – and we need to know – every day.)

2. It is raining.
(Present continuous form, used to describe the action occurring at the time the statement is made)
e.g. At the time of writing, droplets are falling from the sky. If no further information concerning the location of the action is provided, we logically assume that it is occurring in the immediate vicinity of the person making the statement.)

'It rains.' on its own withholds the identity or location of the unfortunate souls subjected to a daily soaking! Deutscher keeps grammar and perception separate. Our understanding of the actual precipitation itself is not altered in either example, though I would argue that the events and our perception of them are significantly different, coloured by differing degrees of immediacy – and the resultant temporal or geographical data required in English.

So after all that, I would highly recommend this book. It will leave you asking questions and will change the way you think about languages in general, the empirical veracity of research, as well as the capacity of your own language to adequately reflect thought.

Source: Deutscher, Guy, (2011) 'Through The Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages', Arrow, ISBN: 978-0-09-950557-0