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Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages QUOTES

Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " 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

5 " 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

6 " 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

7 " 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

8 " 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

9 " 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

10 " ...ultimately, what common sense finds natural is what it is familiar with. "

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

11 " 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

12 " 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

13 " Noam Chomsky has famously argued that a Martian scientist would conclude that all earthlings speak dialects of the same language. "

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

14 " the brain of a child learning a language can cope with a mind-boggling amount of linguistic complexity. "

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

15 " there is no way to devise an objective and non-arbitrary measure for comparing the overall complexity of any two given languages. "

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

16 " 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

17 " 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

18 " Pek çok dilde kırmızı rengin adı "kan" kelimesinden türemiştir. İlginçtir, bu dilsel bağlantı kuşaklar boyunca Kitabı Mukaddes tefsircilerinin kafasını yormuştur, çünkü söz konusu olan insanlığın atasının adıdır. Kitabı Mukaddes etmiolojisine göre Adem adını yapıldığı adamah denen kırmızı çamurdan alır. Ama adamah kelimesi de Sami kökenli adam, yani "kırmızı" kelimesinden gelir ve bu kelimenin de kökeninde dam yani "kan kelimesi vardır. "

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

19 " 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

20 " 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