Guy Deutscher Quotes & Sayings

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. — Guy Deutscher

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

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

Gladstone's was neither the first nor the last of great minds to be led astray by religious fervor, but in the case of his Studies on Homer, his convictions took the particular unfortunate turn of trying to marry Homer's pagan pantheon with the Christian creed. ... The Times was not amused: "Perfectly honest in his intentions, he takes up a theory, and no matter how ridiculous it is in reality, he can make it appear respectable in argument. Too clever by half! — Guy Deutscher

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

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

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. — Guy Deutscher

Fluent speech, there are no real spaces between words, so when two words frequently appear together they can easily fuse into one. — Guy Deutscher

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. — Guy Deutscher

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. — Guy Deutscher

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

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

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

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

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". — Guy Deutscher

The German starts by claiming: 'German is off course ze best language. It is ze language off logik and philosophy, and can commuicate viz great clarity and precision even ze most complex ideas.' 'Boeff,' shrugs the Frenchman, 'but French, French, it ees ze language of lurve! In French, we can convey all ze subtletees of romance weez elegance and flair. — Guy Deutscher

There is no way to devise an objective and non-arbitrary measure for comparing the overall complexity of any two given languages. — Guy Deutscher

Word that is not actively used by one generation will not be heard by the next generation and will then be lost forever. — Guy Deutscher

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

To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. — Guy Deutscher

The parts of the body are the closest and most immediate things in our physical environment, and are thus most deeply imprinted in our cognition, so it is no wonder that body-parts are the sources of terms for all kinds of more abstract concepts in so many languages. — Guy Deutscher

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

According to some researchers, hominids prior to Homo sapiens could not, for instance, produce the vowel i {ee}. But ultimately, this does not say very much, since by all accounts, et es perfectle pesseble to have a thoroughle respectable language wethout the vowel i. — Guy Deutscher

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

The normal man of intelligence has something of a contempt for linguistic studies, convinced as he is nothing can well be more useless. Edward Sapir - 1924 — Guy Deutscher

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

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

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

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

And he showed, using methods which would today be considered exemplary applications of systematic textual analysis but which one of his contemporary critics derided as the bean-counting mentality of "a born Chancellor of the Exchequer," that this vagueness in Homer's color descriptions was the rule, not the exception. — Guy Deutscher

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

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

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

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

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. — Guy Deutscher

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

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

change is not the exception but the rule. — Guy Deutscher