Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Technological Kickback

Language is a form of technology, perhaps the source-technology from which all others are generated (even if academic linguists have difficulty in seeing it as such).* Language may not look like look a technology because it’s largely invisible. It takes time and effort to master but then it’s taken for granted so that it is no longer noticed. But like any technology, it does things for people which couldn’t be done without it. And like all technologies, language does things to the people who use it which they never anticipated. In both senses - as tool and as environment - language is the most powerful technology ever created.

Or more accurately, the most powerful family of technologies because while all languages allow the same things to be achieved, they don’t do that in the same way. Some languages, like Ancient Greek, are extremely precise and complicated in their components (words, or as Deutscher calls them: labels) and how these work together (grammar) to form very precise expressions. Others, like Hebrew, are noticeably lacking in many of these features (like extensive vocabularies and tenses). Yet both can be used, more or less efficiently, to express the same ideas. Concepts seem constant while the labels change. Or do they?

The mechanism of the language machine works on us as well as through us. Eons before the term Artificial Intelligence was coined, language itself took on a life of its own and started influencing the lives of human beings in ways of which we are entirely unaware. Its categories and its logics come to be perceived as natural, as an expression of the way the world really is. Things and labels became conjoined. Linguistic truth becomes confused with reality. Reasonableness, another linguistic trait, becomes a universal standard of human behaviour. Language runs the show. Deutscher calls it culture, which is shorthand for language at work.

Of course it isn’t possible to even discuss the hegemony of language outside of language. So the deck is stacked from the start. But it turns out that there’s a crack in the Great Linguistic Wall. Each language has some distinctively unique effects on the human beings who use it. Differences can be compared in order to ‘out’ the concealed structures that each language imposes. These differences typically hide in plain sight. As Deutscher says, “it turns out that the most significant connections between language, culture, and thought are to be found where they are least expected, in those places where healthy common sense would suggest that all cultures and all languages should be exactly the same.”

Culture likes to masquerade as human nature. Most religions (and more generally, ideologies), for example, claim that their precepts simply reflect the authentic ‘being’ of Homo sapiens and the society that species has created. The discovery that other cultures had different ideas about what constitutes true humanity, typically provokes a sort of fundamentalist response of cultural superiority. And naturally this response is expressed in words, which often contain within themselves the very superiority being argued. What the fundamentalists themselves don’t understand is that they are being used by the language they think they control.

This is an important book, and not just because it is an interesting and entertaining exposition of recent language-research. More importantly, it lifts the veil of language just enough to see its creative mechanism at work. No language provides a neutral, objective description of the world. All languages come with historical (and ideological) baggage which directs attention and prejudices conversation as much as it allows communication and cooperation. It probably takes as much effort to recognise this as it does to learn a language in the first place. The fact is that “language is a cultural convention that doesn’t masquerade as anything but a cultural convention.”

Yes, just like the internet claims to be nothing more than a socially liberating form of communication!

* Deutscher calls it a ‘lens.’ I’m generalising a bit from that; but I think making the metaphor more useful. The title as well as the contents is an oblique homage to the philosopher, Richard Rorty's, 1981 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. It often does take social sciences, actually science in general, one or two generations to catch up with good philosophy.

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