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

Keeping order is a crutch for those who are too lazy to search for things ... )

To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.

But from a purely linguistic perspective, and as a rule of thumb, when two varieties of what used to be the same language are no longer mutually intelligible, they can be called different languages.

abstract' comes from a Latin verb which simply meant 'draw away' (abstrahere).

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

As strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue.

people find names for things they feel the need to talk about.

change is not the exception but the rule.

Needless to say, genders cheer up the everyday life of ordinary mortals too.

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

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.

To make a long story short, there is no way to devise an objective and non-arbitrary measure for comparing the overall complexity of any two given languages. It's not simply that no one has bothered to do it
it's inherently impossible even if one tried. So where does all this leave the dogma of equal complexity? When Joe, Piers, and Tom claim that "primitive people speak primitive languages," they are making a simple and eminently meaningful statement, which just happens to be factually incorrect. But the article of faith that linguists swear by is even worse than wrong
it is meaningless. The alleged central finding of the discipline is nothing more than a hollow mouthful of air, since in the absence of a definition for the overall complexity of a language, the statement that "all languages are equally complex" makes about as much sense as the assertion that "all languages are equally cornflakes".

Much of a language's complexity is not necessarily for effective communication.

Some languages, for example, have a gender distinction that is based only on "animacy," the distinction between animate beings (people and animals of both sexes) and inanimate things.

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.

The cultural significance of blue, on the other hand, is very limited. As noted earlier, blue is extremely rare as a color of materials in nature, and blue dyes are exceedingly difficult to produce. People in simple cultures might spend a lifetime without seeing objects that are truly blue. Of course, blue is the color of the sky (and, for some of us, the sea). But in the absence of blue materials with any practical significance, the need to find a special name for this great stretch of nothingness is particularly non-pressing.

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

There are many languages that don't make a distinction between green and blue and treat these as shades of one color.

There is an inverse correlation between the complexity of society and of word structure!

The new anthropology required each culture to be understood on its own terms, as a product of its own evolution rather than as merely an earlier stage in the ascent toward Western civilization.

The names we use for things bear no inherent relation to the things themselves.

Japanese used to have a color word, ao, that spanned both green and blue.

envisaged Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday as men but Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday as women. Why should this be so?

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.

Without these much maligned forces of destruction, language would never have developed in the first place.

Since red is a signal for many vital things, most importantly danger (blood) and sex