A masterpiece of linguistics scholarship, at once erudite and entertaining, confronts the thorny question of how -- and whether -- culture shapes language and language, culture

Linguistics has long shied away from claiming any link between a language and the culture of its speakers: too much simplistic (even bigoted) chatter about the romance of Italian and the goose-stepping orderliness of German has made serious thinkers wary of the entire subject. But now, acclaimed linguist Guy Deutscher has dared to reopen the issue. Can culture influence language -- and vice versa? Can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts? Could our experience of the world depend on whether our language has a word for "blue"?

Challenging the consensus that the fundaments of language are hard-wired in our genes and thus universal, Deutscher argues that the answer to all these questions is -- yes. In thrilling fashion, he takes us from Homer to Darwin, from Yale to the Amazon, from how to name the rainbow to why Russian water -- a "she" -- becomes a "he" once you dip a tea bag into her, demonstrating that language does in fact reflect culture in ways that are anything but trivial. Audacious, delightful, and field-changing, Through the Language Glass is a classic of intellectual discovery.

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• ReferenceWords, Language & GrammarLinguistics
• FranceWords, Language & Grammar(Current)Linguistics
• France
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• Publication Date: August 31, 2010
• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 308 Pages
• File Size: 11 KB