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

“the perceptions so easy and familiar to us”: Gladstone 1858, 3:496.

“The eye may require a familiarity”: Gladstone 1858, 3:488.

“The organ was given to Homer”: Gladstone 1877, 388.

Gladstone accurate and farsighted: On the modernity of Gladstone’s analysis, see also Lyons 1999.

Geiger’s lecture: “Ueber den Farbensinn der Urzeit und seine Entwickelung” (Geiger 1878).

Geiger’s bold original theories: Many of these ideas, such as the discussion of the independent changes of sound and meaning, which anticipate Saussure’s arbitrariness of the sign, or the systematic discussion of semantic developments from concrete to abstract, are found in Geiger 1868 and the posthumous Geiger 1872. See also Morpurgo Davies 1998, 176, for Geiger’s ideas on accent in Indo-European. For assessments of Geiger’s life and work, see Peschier 1871, Keller 1883, Rosenthal 1884.

Geiger’s curiosity piqued by Gladstone’s discoveries: It seems, however, that Geiger misread one aspect of Gladstone’s analysis, since he seems to think (1878, 50) that Gladstone believed in the legend of Homer’s blindness, whereas, as we have seen, Gladstone explicitly argued against this legend.

“These hymns, of more than ten thousand”: Geiger 1878, 47.

Biblical Hebrew does not have a word for “blue”: As various scholars from Delitzsch (1878, 260; 1898, 756) onward as well as Geiger himself (1872, 318) have pointed out, there is one cryptic remark in the Old Testament, in Exodus 24:10 (also echoes in Ezekiel 1:26), that seems, at least indirectly, to relate the sky to lapis lazuli. In Exodus 24, Moses, Aaron, and seventy of the elders of Israel climb up Mount Sinai to see Yahweh: “And then they saw the God of Israel. Beneath his feet was something like a mosaic pavement of lapis lazuli, and like the very essence of the heavens as regards purity.” There are two descriptions of the “pavement” beneath God’s feet here: this surface is first said to have the appearance of a pattern of bricks of lapis lazuli, and secondly it is said to be pure “like the very essence of the heavens.” The sky itself is not directly compared to lapis lazuli, but it is hard to escape the impression that the two descriptions are based on a close association between the sky and this blue gemstone. On the interpretation of this passage, see Durham 2002, 344.

pages 44-45 Geiger quotes: 1878, 49, 57, 58.

Geiger’s confusions about black and white: Geiger may have assumed that black and white should be considered colors only if they have separate names from dark and bright. This may explain his obscure (and apparently conflicting) statements about the position of white with respect to red. In his lecture (1878, 57) he says: “Wei ist in [den ächten Rigvedalieder] von roth noch kaum gesondert.” But in the table of contents for the second (unfinished and posthumously published) volume of his Ursprung und Entwickelung der menschlichen Sprache und Vernunft (1872, 245), he uses the opposite order: “Roth im Rigveda noch nicht bestimmt von wei geschieden.” Unfortunately, the text of the unfinished volume stops before the relevant section, so it is impossible to ascertain what exactly Geiger meant on the subject of white.

Tantalizing hints in Geiger’s own notes: In Der Urpsrung der Sprache (1869, 242) he writes, “Da es sich auf niedrigen Entwickelungsstufen noch bei heutigen Völkern ähnlich verhält, würde es leicht sein zu zeigen.” And in his posthumously published notes, he explicitly considers the possibility that language lags behind perception (1872, 317-18): “[Es] setzt sich eine ursprünglich aus völligem Nichtbemerken hervorgegangene Gleichgültigkeit gegen die Farbe des Himmels… fort. Der Himmel in diesen [Texten wird] nicht etwa schwarz im Sinne von blau genant, sonder seine Bläue [wird] gänzlich verschwiegen, und ohne Zweifel geschieht dies weil dieselbe [die Bläue] nicht unmittelbar mit dem Dunkel verwechselt werden konnte… Reizend ist es sodann, das Ringen eines unklaren, der Sprache und Vernunft überall um einige wenige Schritte vorauseilenden Gefühles zu beobachten, wie es… hie und da blo zufällig einen mehr oder weniger nahe kommenden Ausdruck leiht.”

Lagerlunda crash: Olsén 2004, 127ff., Holmgren 1878, 19-22, but for a critical view see Frey 1975. The danger to the railways from color-blind personnel was pointed out twenty years earlier, by George Wilson (1855), a professor of technology at the University of Edinburgh, but his book does not seem to have had much impact.

Color blindness in the newspapers: E.g., New York Times , “Color-blindness and its dangers” (July 8, 1878); “Color-blindness: How it endangers railroad travelers-some interesting experiments before a Massachusetts legislative committee” (Jan. 26, 1879); “Color-blindness of railroad men” (May 23, 1879); “Color-blind railroad men: A large percentage of defective vision in the employees of a Massachusetts road” (Aug. 17, 1879); “Color-blindness” (Aug. 17, 1879). See also Turner 1994, 177.

Magnus’s treatise: In fact, Magnus published two more or less identical monographs in the same year (1877a, 1877b), one of a more academic and the other of a more popular nature.

Geiger’s rousing speech: As described by Delitzsch 1878, 256.

Magnus’s evolutionary model: 1877b, 50.

“the retina’s performance was gradually increased”: Magnus 1877a, 19. See also Magnus 1877b, 47.

“still just as closed and invisible”: Magnus 1877a, 9.

Magnus’s theory ardently discussed: According to Turner 1994, 178, the literature on the Magnus controversy exploded to more than 6 percent of all publications on vision between 1875 and 1879.

Nietzsche on Greek color vision: Nietzsche 1881, 261. Orsucci 1996, 244ff., has shown that Nietzsche followed the debate over Magnus’s book in the first volume of the journal Kosmos.

Gladstone’s review of Magnus: Gladstone 1877.

“if the capacity of distinguishing colours”: Wallace 1877, 471n1. Wallace changed his mind the next year, however (1878, 246).

page 49 “the more delicate cones of the retina”: Lecture delivered on March 25, 1878 (Haeckel 1878, 114).

“and the results of this habit”: Lamarck 1809: 256-57.

Wallace on the giraffe’s neck: 1858, 61.

“when a boy, had the skin of both thumbs”: Darwin 1881, 257. Darwin also quotes approvingly “Brown-Sequard’s famous experiments” on guinea pigs, which were taken at the time to prove that the results of operations on certain nerves in the mother were inherited by the next generation.

The belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics was virtually universal: Mayr 1991, 119. For an assessment of Weismann, see Mayr 1991, 111.

“Weismann began to investigate the point”: Shaw, introduction to Back to Methuselah (1921, xlix). Shaw in fact had a strong aversion to (neo-) Darwinism and passionately believed in Lamarckian evolution.

Weismann reported on the still ongoing experiment: 1892, 523n1, 514, 526-27.

Weismann’s remained the minority view: For example, in 1907, Oskar Hertwig (1907, 37), the director of the Anatomical and Biological Institute in Berlin, still predicted that in the end the Lamarckian mechanism would prove the right one. See also Mayr 1991, 119ff.

“the acquired aptitudes of one generation”: Gladstone 1858, 426, and similar formulation a few years later (1869, 539): “the acquired knowledge of one generation becomes in time the inherited aptitude of another.”