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

On the Historical Evolution of the Color Sense (Magnus)

“orange”

wavelength of

Origin of Species, The (Darwin)

Orwell, George

Ovaherero tribe

Oxford English Dictionary

Paiute

Papua New Guinea

parametric variations theory

passive vocabulary

Pasternak, Boris

pattern-recognition algorithms

Perkins, Revere

Philosophy Today

photoreceptor cells

Pindar

“pink”

wavelengths of light and

Pinker, Steven

Pirahã

Planck, Max

plurality

Polish

Portuguese

primates

Primitive Culture (Tylor)

“primitive” peoples, See also specific groups and languages

changing attitudes of anthropologists to

color words in languages of

complex grammar and

Geiger’s sequence and

Torres Straits study on

pronouns

“purple”

race

Ray, Verne

“red”

“black” and

as first color named

Geiger’s sequence and

Homer and

Magnus’s evolution of color sense and

primitive people and

wavelength, energy, and retina and

red-green blindness

Regier, Terry

relativism

retina

Rivarol, Antoine de

Rivers, W. H. R.

Rodman, Robert

rod monochromats

rods

Romanian

Rotokas

Russell, Bertrand

Russian

gender system and

two blues ( siniy-goluboy ) and

Sanskrit

Sapir, Edward

Sarcee

Sassoon, Siegfried

Schleicher, August

Schliemann, Heinrich

Schmidt, Lauren

Schwarz, G. H.

Science

Scientific Club of Vienna

Semitic languages

sentence complexity

Sera, Maria

Shaw, George Bernard

ships, gender for

simplification patterns

Sioux Indians

sky, color of

Slavic languages

Some Things Worth Knowing

Sorbian

sound inventory

South American Indian languages

Spanish

color terms and

gender system and

spatial coordinate systems

egocentric

geographic

influence of, on thought

lack of egocentric

Steiner, George

Stubbs, George

Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (Gladstone)

Stuff of Thought, The (Pinker)

subordination

Sumerian

Supyire

Swahili

Swedish

“syntactic universals”

Syriac

systemic complexity

Tagalog

“Tale of the Fishwife and Its Sad Fate” (Twain)

Talmud

Tamil

Tarahumara

Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilich

Teda tribe

television

Tennyson, Alfred (Lord)

Thai

Thomson, James

thought, influence of language on

assumptions about, vs. demonstrations of

color and

directions on

future tense and

gender systems and

Hopi time and

Humboldt on

lack of conceptual vocabulary and

Müller, Whitney, and Clifford on

“prison-house” concept and

Sapir-Whorf theories and

scientific research on

what may vs. what must be conveyed and

“three blind mice” experiment

time concepts

Times (London)

Tlingit

Torres Straits (Murray Island) expedition

Troy

Tulo (Aborigine poet)

Turkish

Twain, Mark

Tylor, Edward

Tzeltal

ultraviolet light

Unfolding of Language, The (Deutscher)

U.S. Geological Survey

universal dictionaries

universalism

color naming and

grammar and

Uzbek

Vedic poems

verbs

evidentiality and

factive vs. non-factive

gender distinctions and

irregular

– noun fusion

tenses

Vietnamese

“violet”

etymology of

Homer and

primitive peoples and

wavelength, energy, and retina sensitivity to

Virchow, Rudolf

vocabulary

size of

Voltaire

vowels

Wade, Alex

Wallace, Alfred Russel

Warlbiri

Weismann, August

West Greenlandic

“white”

artificial dyes

Berlin and Kay and

Geiger sequence and

Homer and

primitive peoples and

Whitney, William

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

Wien, Wilhelm

Wilusa

Winawer, Jonathan

“wine-dark” sea

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Witthoft, Nathan

women, gender systems and

Woodworth, Robert

word order

Wu, Lisa

!Xóõ language

Yana

Yanomamö Indians

“yellow” See also “gray-yellow” distinction; “green-yellow” distinction

Berlin and Kay on

dyes

etymology of

evolution of primate vision and

Geiger’s sequence and

Homer and

Magnus on

primitive peoples and

wavelength, energy, and retina sensitivity to

Young, Thomas

Yukatek

Zulu

Guy Deutscher is the author of The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention. Formerly a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, and of the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Languages in the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, he is an honorary Research Fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures in the University of Manchester. He lives in Oxford with his wife and two daughters.

1 . A rainbow.

2 .Kit of wools for the Holmgren color blindness test.

3 .The difference between these two pictures demonstrates Magnus’s revised theory. The picture on the top is what Europeans see, and the picture on the bottom is what Magnus argued the ancients would have seen: the red hues are just as vivid, but the cooler colors green and blue are much less so .

4a. The English colors “yellow,” “green,” and “blue.”

4b. An alternative division: “grellow,” “turquoise,” and “sapphire”.

5a. The Bellonese three-color system.

5b. The Ziftish three-color system.