What colour is your vocabulary?

Guy Deutscher: Through the Language Glass 

Arrow Books, 2011   £7.99

ISBN: 978 0 09 950557 0

Does language affect the way we think?  I find it self-evident that coherent thought is impossible without language (although many, including my wife who’s a poet and artist, don’t agree); so the reverse proposition – that our mother tongue must affect the structure of our thinking – makes sense.  For linguists, however, it’s a contentious issue.  Guy Deutscher seeks to clarify the matter with modest claims based on careful research.

 

The problem is that linguists’ past claims in this area have been all too immodest and founded on the  flimsiest of evidence.  Prime suspect, for Deutscher, is Benjamin  Lee Whorf, who claimed, among other things, that American Indian languages lead their speakers to an entirely different conception of reality from that of European-language speakers.  Modern linguists, partly in response to this unfortunate legacy, now tend to deny that language can influence thought in any meaningful way.  Deutscher believes this position, while understandable, is also too extreme.  He sets out to show that there is real evidence for the influence of language on thinking.

He asks two questions.  First, does language reflect anything about the society in which it’s spoken?  And second, do different languages force their speakers to perceive and think differently? 

 

He begins with Homer.  Or rather, with Gladstone’s vast study of Homer (yes, that Gladstone).  Buried at the back of the third volume is an analysis of Homer’s description of colour.  Gladstone scrupulously observes that the poet often uses the same word to denote colours that we consider different, or describes the same object with different colours.  And the colour blue is entirely absent from his vocabulary. (Homer's sea, of course, is ‘wine-dark’.)

 

Was Homer blind, or colour-blind?  Has our perception of colour evolved?  Is there a difference between being able to differentiate colours and having the words to distinguish them?  Deutscher tells a gripping tale of research, theory and counter-theory, concluding that languages acquire names for different colours in a more or less predictable order.  Red tends to come first because it’s more useful: it’s the colour of blood, for example, which is important as a sign of danger or threat.  Blue, in contrast, is usually the least necessary colour – why bother about the colour of the sky or the sea?  And blue dyes are among the most difficult to synthesise.  So languages name red before blue, on a need-to-know basis.

Deutscher then turns to complexity.  Are all languages equally complex, as linguists blithely tell us?  The question’s impossible to answer: how to measure a language’s complexity?  Deutscher investigates morphology.  Why do larger, more sophisticated societies tend to have languages with simpler word structures? The answer: the more strangers you meet on a daily basis, the simpler your word structures have to be. (The morphological complexity of Old English was wiped out after the Norman Conquest, for example.)

So language does indeed seem to reflect the nature of the society in which it’s spoken.  But does it influence the way we think?  This idea – that language is a prison-house of the mind – is known notoriously as ‘linguistic relativity’ (or Whorfianism).  Deutscher calls it a ‘toxic fallacy’: the limits of my language don’t limit my world, because the concepts I can utter aren’t the same as the concepts I can understand, and grammatical distinctions aren’t the same as cognitive distinctions.  Just because my language has nouns and verbs, I’m not limited to perceiving the world in terms of objects and the things that happen to them. 

 

 

Deutscher subscribes to a different pattern of influence.  He quotes Roman Jakobson: “languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” 

 

 

If I tell you, in English, that I met my neighbour this morning, my language doesn’t force me to tell you that neighbour’s gender.  But in French, or German, or Russian, I can’t avoid telling you.  “When a language forces its speakers to pay attention to certain aspects of the world each time they open their mouths,” says Deutscher, “such habits of speech can eventually settle into habits of mind.”  He explores this theme, fascinatingly, looking at three aspects of language use: gender, spatial coordinates, and – in a neat move that satisfyingly closes the narrative arc – colour.

Because language has no influence on our ability to reason logically, linguists tend to assume that it has no influence at all.  Deutscher shows that this assumption is itself exaggerated.  Language can indeed affect our perceptions, our memory, our associative thinking and our ability to carry out practical tasks.  Perhaps its influence on our thoughts and feelings is more pervasive than the evidence – so far – shows.

For all his erudition (and passing over his odd use of ‘practise’ as a noun), Deutscher’s aim is admirably modest.  And his book provokes speculation well beyond its conclusions.