Guy Deutscher > Quotes

“And if Germans do have systematic minds, this is just as likely to be because their exceedingly erratic mother tongue has exhausted their brains' capacity to cope with any further irregularity”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“Anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language knows only too dearly that languages can be full of pointless irregularities that increase complexity considerably without contributing much to the ability to express ideas. English, for instance, would have losed none of its expressive power if some of its verbs leaved their irregular past tense behind and becomed regular.”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“Really, it is unfair to say that English spelling is not an accurate rendering of speech. It is – it's only that it renders the speech of the 16th century.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

“fluent speech, there are no real spaces between words, so when two words frequently appear together they can easily fuse into one.”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“His analysis showed that there was a significant correlation between the level of complexity of a society and the number of distinctions that are expressed inside the word. But contrary to what Joe, Piers, and Tom might expect, it was not the case that sophisticated societies tend to have sophisticated word structures. Quite the opposite: there is an inverse correlation between the complexity of society and of word structure! The simpler the society, the more information it is likely to mark within the word; the more complex the society, the fewer semantic distinctions it is likely to express word-internally.”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“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.”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“there is an inverse correlation between the complexity of society and of word structure!”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“When one is trying to speak a foreign language without years of schooling in its grammatical nuances, there is one survival strategy that one always falls back on: strip down to the bare essentials, do away with everything but the most critical content, ignore anything that’s not crucial for getting the basic meaning across. The aborigines who try to speak English do exactly that, not because their own language has no grammar but because the sophistication of their own mother tongue is of little use when struggling with a foreign language that they have not learned properly.”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“The teacher claimed it was so plain, I only had to use my brain. She said the past of throw was threw, The past of grow – of course – was grew, So flew must be the past of fly, And now, my boy, your turn to try. But when I trew, I had no clue, If mow was mew Like know and knew (Or is it knowed Like snow and snowed?) The teacher frowned at me and said The past of feed was – plainly – fed. Fed up, I knew then what I ned: I took a break, and out I snoke, She shook and quook (or quaked? or quoke?) With raging anger out she broke: Your ignorance you want to hide? Tell me the past form of collide! But how on earth should I decide If it’s collid (Like hide and hid), Or else – from all that I surmose, The past of rise was simply rose, And that of ride was surely rode, So of collide must be collode? Oh damn these English verbs, I thought The whole thing absolutely stought! Of English I have had enough, These verbs of yours are far too tough. Bolt upright in my chair I sat, And said to her ‘that’s that’ – I quat.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention

“Tale of the Fishwife and its Sad Fate’, purportedly translated literally from the German: It is a bleak day. Hear the rain, how he pours, and the hail, how he rattles; and see the snow, how he drifts along, and of the mud, how deep he is! Ah the poor fishwife, it is stuck fast in the mire; it has dropped its basket of fishes; and its hands have been cut by the scales as it seized some of the falling creatures; and one scale has even got into its eye. And it cannot get her out. It opens its mouth to cry for help; but if any sound comes out of him, alas he is drowned by the raging of the storm. And now a tomcat has got one of the fishes and she will surely escape with him. No, she bites off a fin, she holds her in her mouth – will she swallow her? No, the fishwife’s brave mother-dog deserts his puppies and rescues the fin – which he eats, himself, as his reward …”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention

“people find names for things they feel the need to talk about.”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“Language is mankind’s greatest invention – except, of course, that it was never invented.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention

“Jakobson gives the following example. If I say in English, “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor,” you may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we are speaking French or German or Russian, I don’t have the privilege to equivocate, because I am obliged by the language to choose between voisin or voisine, Nachbar or Nachbarin, sosed or sosedka. So French, German, and Russian would compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I felt it was your business. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are oblivious to the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors. Nor does it mean that English speakers cannot express the distinction should they want to. It only means that English speakers are not obliged to specify the sex each time the neighbor is mentioned, while speakers of some languages are.”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“Why should color, of all things, be at the center of so much crossfire? Perhaps because in meddling with such a deep and seemingly instinctive area of perception, culture camouflages itself as nature more successfully there than in any other area of language. There is nothing remotely abstract, theoretical, philosophical, hypothetical, or any other -cal, so it seems, about the difference between yellow and red or between green and blue.”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“فالمشكلة هنا أن صعوبة تعلم لغة ما تعتمد بشكل أساسي على اللغة الأم لمتعلميها. فاللغة السويدية سهلة جداً -إن كنت نرويجياً، وكذلك الإسبانية إن كنت إيطالياً. لكن إذا كانت لغتك الأم هي الإنجليزية فلن تستسهل أياً من السويدية أو الإسبانية. لكنها تظل أسهل للناطقين باللغة الإنجليزية من اللغة العربية أو الصينية. فهل يعني ذلك أن اللغتين الصينية والعربية أصعب بشكل عام؟ لا، لأن العربية لن تكون صعبة عليك إن كانت لغتك الأم هي العبرية، وإن كانت لغتك الأم تايلندية، فستكون اللغة الصينية أسهل بالنسبة إليك من السويدية أو الإسبانية. وباختصار، ليست هناك طريقة واضحة لتعميم مقياس لدرجة التعقيد العام بالاعتماد على صعوبة تعلم اللغة، لأنها تعتمد على نقطة البداية التي تأخذها -مثلها مثل الجهد المبذول في السفر إلى أي مكان.”
― غاي دويتشر, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention

“Franz Delitzsch, who put it most memorably when he wrote in 1878 that “we see in essence not with two eyes but with three: with the two eyes of the body and with the eye of the mind that is behind them. And it is in this eye of the mind in which the cultural-historical progressive development of the color sense takes place.”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“the names we use for things bear no inherent relation to the things themselves.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention

“And there are also languages that divide nouns into much more specific genders. The African language Supyire from Mali has five genders: humans, big things, small things, collectives, and liquids. Bantu languages such as Swahili have up to ten genders, and the Australian language Ngan’gityemerri is said to have fifteen different genders, which include, among others, masculine human, feminine human, canines, non-canine animals, vegetables, drinks, and two different genders for spears (depending on size and material).”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“When one hears about acts of extraordinary bravery in combat, it is usually a sign that the battle has not been going terribly well. For when wars unfold according to plan and one's own side is winning, acts of exceptional individual heroism are rarely called for. Bravery is required mostly by the desperate side.”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“Gender thus provides our second example of how the mother tongue influences thought.”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“The culturalists tried to make the idea more appealing by pointing out that even in modern languages we use idioms that are rather imprecise about color. Don’t we speak of “white wine,” for instance, even if we can see perfectly well that it is really yellowish green? Don’t we have “black cherries” that are dark red and “white cherries” that are yellowish red? Aren’t red squirrels really brown? Don’t the Italians call the yolk of an egg “red” (il rosso)? Don’t we call the color of orange juice “orange,” although it is in fact perfectly yellow? (Check it next time.)”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“...the Russian-American linguist Roman Jakobson encapsulated Boas’s insight into a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” The crucial differences between languages, in other words, are not in what each language allows its speakers to express—for in theory any language could express anything—but in what information each language obliges it speakers to express.”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“So if you, O subsequent ones, ever deign to look down at us from your summit of effortless superiority, remember that you have only scaled it on the back of our efforts. For it is thankless to grope in the dark and tempting to rest until the light of understanding shines upon us. But if we are led into this temptation, your kingdom will never come.”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“keeping order is a crutch for those who are too lazy to search for things …)”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention

“The mind cannot just manufacture words for abstract concepts out of thin air – all it can do is adapt what is already available.”
― Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention

“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.”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“The real differences between languages, he argued, are not in what a language is able to express but rather in “what it encourages and stimulates its speakers to do from its own inner force.”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“Mankind’s perception of color, he says, increased “according to the schema of the color spectrum”: first came the sensitivity to red, then to yellow, then to green, and only finally to blue and violet. The most remarkable thing about it all, he adds, is that this development seems to have occurred in exactly the same order in different cultures all over the world. Thus, in Geiger’s hands, Gladstone’s discoveries about”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

“Much of a language's complexity is not necessarily for effective communication.”
― Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages