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

“significant marks of the genius and manners”: Bacon 1861, 415 ( De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum , 1623, book 6: “Atque una etiam hoc pacto capientur signa haud levia [sed observatu digna quod fortasse quispiam non putaret] de ingeniis et moribus populorum et nationum, ex linguis ipsorum”).

“Everything confirms”: Condillac 1822, 285.

“the intellect and the character of every nation”: Herder 1812, 354-55.

“We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure”: Emerson 1844a, 251.

“We may study the character of a people”: Russell 1983, 34.

Cicero on ineptus : De oratore 2, 4.18.

“what the Romans speak is not so much a vernacular”: Dante, De vulgari eloquentia 1.11.

page 4 “the most logical, the clearest, and the most transparent language”: Brunetière 1895, 318.

Voltaire on the unique genius of French: Dictionnaire philosophique (Besterman 1987, 102): “Le génie de cette langue est la clarté et l’ordre: car chaque langue a son génie, et ce génie consiste dans la facilité que donne le langage de s’exprimer plus ou moins heureusement, d’employer ou de rejeter les tours familiers aux autres langues.”

Seventeenth-century French grammarians: Vaugelas, Remarques sur la langue fran ç oise , nouvelles remarques , 1647 (Vaugelas 1738, 470): “la clarté du langage, que la Langue Françoise affecte sur toutes les Langues du monde.” François Charpentier 1683, 462: “Mais ne conte-t-on pour rien cete admirable qualité de la langue Françoise, qui possedant par excellence, la Clarté & la Netteté, qui sont les perfections du discours, ne peut entreprendre une traduction sans faire l’office de commentaire?”

“we French follow in all our utterances”: Le Laboureur 1669, 174.

“What is not clear may be English”: Rivarol 1784, 49.

English is “methodical, energetic, business-like”: Jespersen 1955, 17.

“monistic view”: Whorf 1956 (1940), 215.

“If our system of tenses was more fragile”: Steiner 1975, 167, 161.

Anglican revolution due to English grammar: Harvey 1996.

Chomsky’s Martian scientist: Piattelli-Palmarini 1983, 77.

“Taken in its wide ethnographic sense”: Tylor 1871, 1.

“impressions of the soul”: Aristotle, De interpretatione 1.16a.

“great store of words in one language”: Locke 1849, 315.

Tagalog: Foley 1997, 109.

Body parts: See Haspelmath et al. 2005, “Hand and Finger.” In earlier Hebrew, there was a differentiation between (hand) and (arm), and the latter is still used in some idiomatic expressions in modern Hebrew. But in the spoken language, (hand) is regularly used for both hand and arm. Likewise, English has a word, “nape,” that refers to the back of the neck, but it’s not in common use.

“founded for the race”: Gladstone 1877, 388.

“the most extraordinary phenomenon”: Gladstone 1858, 1:13.

Gladstone’s view of Homer: Wemyss Reid 1899, 143.

“You are so absorbed in questions about Homer”: Myers 1958, 96.

The Times ’s review of Gladstone: “Mr Gladstone’s Homeric Studies,” published on August 12, 1858.

“There are few public men in Europe”: John Stuart Blackie, reported in the Times, Nov. 8, 1858.

“statesman, orator, and scholar”: John Stuart Blackie, Horae Hellenicae (1874). E. A. W. Buchholz’s Die Homerischen Realien (1871) was dedicated to “dem eifrigen Pfleger und Förderer der Homerischen Forschung.”

“a little hobby-horsical”: Letter to the Duke of Argyll, May 28, 1863 (Tennyson 1897, 493).

“Mr. Gladstone may be a learned, enthusiastic”: John Stuart Blackie, reported in the Times, Nov. 8, 1858. On the reception of Gladstone’s Homeric studies, see Bebbington 2004.

“characteristic of the inability of the English”: Marx, letter to Engels, Aug. 13, 1858.

“I find in the plot of the Iliad ”: Morley 1903, 544

page 28-29 Ilios, Wilusa, and the historical background of the Iliad : Latacz 2004; Finkelberg 2005.

Leto “represents the Blessed Virgin”: Gladstone 1858, 2:178; see also 2:153.

Gladstone’s originality: Previous scholars, from as early as Scaliger in 1577, had commented about the paucity of color descriptions in ancient writers (see Skard 1946, 166), but no one before Gladstone understood that the differences between us and the ancients went beyond occasional divergences in taste and fashion. In the eighteenth century, for example, Friedrich Wilhelm Doering wrote (1788, 88) that “it is clear that in ancient times both Greeks and Romans could do without many names of colors, from which a later era was in no way able to abstain, once the tools of luxury had grown infinitely. For the austere simplicity of such unsophisticated men abhorred that great variety of colors used for garments and buildings, which in later times softer and more delicate men pursued with the greatest zeal.” (“Hoc autem primum satis constat antiquissimis temporibus cum graecos tum romanos multis colorum nominibus carere potuisse, quibus posterior aetas, luxuriae instumentis in infinitum auctis, nullo modo supersedere potuit. A multiplici enim et magna illa colorum in vestibus aedificiis et aliis operibus varietate, quam posthac summo studio sectati sunt molliores et delicatiores homines, abhorrebat austera rudium illorum hominum simplicitas.”) And in his Farbenlehre (1810, 54), Goethe explained about the ancients that “Ihre Farbenbenennungen sind nicht fix und genau bestimmt, sondern beweglich und schwankend, indem sie nach beiden Seiten auch von angrenzenden Farben gebraucht werden. Ihr Gelbes neigt sich einerseits ins Rote, andrerseits ins Blaue, das Blaue teils ins Grüne, teils ins Rote, das Rote bald ins Gelbe, bald ins Blaue; der Purpur schwebt auf der Grenze zwischen Rot und Blau und neigt sich bald zum Scharlach, bald zum Violetten. Indem die Alten auf diese Weise die Farbe als ein nicht nur an sich Bewegliches und Flüchtiges ansehen, sondern auch ein Vorgefühl der Steigerung und des Rückganges haben: so bedienen sie sich, wenn sie von den Farben reden, auch solcher Ausdrücke, welche diese Anschauung andeuten. Sie lassen das Gelbe röteln, weil es in seiner Steigerung zum Roten führt, oder das Rote gelbeln, indem es sich oft zu diesem seinen Ursprunge zurück neigt.”

sea red because of algae: Maxwell-Stuart 1981, 10.

“blue and violet reflects”: Christol 2002, 36.

“if any man should say”: Blackie 1866, 417.

“a born Chancellor of the Exchequer”: “Mr. Gladstone’s Homeric studies,” Times , Aug. 12, 1858.

Violet iron: Iliad 23.850; violet wool: Odyssey 9.426; violet sea: Odyssey 5.56.

no one can be insensitive to the appeal of the colors: Goethe, Beiträge zur Chromatik .

“Homer had before him the most perfect example of blue”: Gladstone 1858, 3:483.

“As obliterating fire lights up”: Iliad 2.455-80.

page 35 “their head aslant”: Iliad 8.306.

“blackening beneath the ripple of the West Wind”: Iliad 7.64.

“have been determined for us by Nature”: Gladstone 1858, 3:459.

“continued to be both faint and indefinite”: Gladstone 1858, 3:493.

“only after submitting the facts”: Gladstone 1877, 366.

“the organ of colour and its impressions”: Gladstone 1858, 3:488.