Through the language glass
This book 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 languageand 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 isyes. 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. - Publisher.
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What Hacker News says
- Cool to see this experiment crowdsourced.
Guy Deutscher’s “Through the Language Glass” is a very readable history of linguistic relativism, including the long history of this experiment. It even has some colour plates to illustrate. Recommended.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/412264/through-the-language-...
- The Hittite example is expanded on in Deutscher's excellent book Through the Language Glass, which is a really good read. It's about linguistics, the mind, and the history of ideas, and is beautifully written, to boot.
- There's a great deal of research on colour expression and perception in different languages - some of it summarized very well in Guy Deutscher's very accessible pop-sci book "Through the Language Glass". Nobody (edit: apparently except this historian cited in TFA - well, he's a historian, not a psycholinguist) seriously doubts (anymore) that humans fundamentally perceive the same colours (barring specific disabilities), but we do carve up the colour space in different ways, although usually along a predictable path: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Color-term_hierar...
The whole idea that the Ancient Greeks were maybe colour blind came up due to Homer's epics containing descriptions such as "the wine-dark sea" while never really using a specific term for blue (that would be found in later Greek). Nowadays we understand this to mean that colour description in Homeric times was more focused on light vs. dark than on exact hues.
There have been at least some studies showing measurable, though small, effects of this on processing speed, e.g. Russians being slightly faster at distinguishing different shades of blue than English speakers: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0701644104
In my opinion this is consistent with the general idea that the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is bunk, but some weak effects of language patterns influencing habitual thought can be found.
When you write
> But claims like that are made as part of the everything-is-relative-and-culturally-determined movement.
it sounds like you're trying to engage in some cultural war thing that I will stay out of, but in general it's probably better to look at the actual data instead of dealing in sweeping generalisations.
- I can recommend this book by Guy Deutscher: "Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages"
- There's an amazing book on the naming of colors and more: Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher.
- Even the weak Sapir-Worf hypothesis is quite tricky to test in practice. It's likely true, but quite hard to prove. Guy Deutscher's excellent book Through the Language Glass documents much of the work that's been done in that area. Mostly, what's amenable to testing is colour perception and absolute direction, more than anything else.
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