Skip to main content. Books Agent: Caroline Dawnay. Assistant: Kat Aitken. Books Download CV. View all posts by gregdowney. What does Deutscher really think about the Saphir- Whorf hypothesis? What did the critics find wrong with this? Much of Wally Chafe work is relevant.
My guess is that many readers of this blog would find his explicitly theoretical stuff very intriguing. Readers lacking control of basic linguistic theory , however, will gain very little from it. Let me make the point using a different ethnographic example. A local ESL teacher found some time ago that her Puerto Rican students always gave directions using socially relevant location markers. The ESL teacher, when asked for directions to a local grocery store, would use typical middle class Anglo directions: take Smith Drive half a mile, turn right on Center Street, take the second left, which is Vernon Place, and the store is about 3 blocks down.
The grocery store is across from the hair dresser that Maria likes. I elicited a text from the Ewe consultant in the Linguistic Field Work course I took by asking her to give me directions from her place to campus. Neither really has anything to do with the compass rose. The lexicon of English identifies both cardinal and relative directions. English speakers who are not geographers, thru-hikers, or service persons probably only use the latter, but the point is that their language offers them the resources to do the former.
What Deutscher is asking you to imagine is being a speaker of a language in which your only choice—which is to say, not a choice at all—was the former. I am aware of what Deutscher is asking me to imagine, but wondered a is this ethnographically correct? Do speakers of such languages really lack, utterly lack, any comparable vocabulary, and 2 if so, is he reversing the causal arrows a bit: he assumes that language has the causal role, when there are many examples of lexical gaps for culturally irrelevant concepts.
I have no axe to grind with his position, just a level of curiosity about whether linguists foreground language where anthropologists might foreground culture. Do speakers of such languages really lack, utterly lack, any comparable vocabulary[? It seems to me that pro-linguistic relativity conclusions face questions about the quality of the data set upon which they draw at a higher rate than do other anthropological and linguistic studies.
I found some interesting ideas in this. Although I have an M. My early degrees in LInguistic came from a school in which the study of linguistics was interdisciplinary and most of my classes were taken through the Anthropology. I provide this introduction because I find that linguists with no background in Anthrhopology dismiss the ideas of Whorf too easily and interpret them too dramatically.
And then, in some countries, you just have a long tradition of doing spelling reforms. Guy Deutscher: Yes, except the French have hardly reformed anything.
So, I think, French is almost as bad as English. But, you know, in Holland, they have just had a spelling reform a few years ago.
They really just changed a few minor things, and there was very little opposition to that because these sort of small reforms are already a tradition. David Boulton: Interesting.
If we go back to what we were saying about Deacon earlier and how the evolutionary dynamic in spoken language is, in some respects, constraining or conserving language to be learnable by children at a certain age; that same mechanism is in play, but in an entirely different way here, in that the levels of illiteracy that we have are relative to the lack of learnability of the orthography by children.
Guy Deutscher: Yes, and you need a sociologist to think about why that is tolerated. That is that writing systems are a different class of invention. Guy Deutscher: Of course, writing evolved much more gradually than most people think. It is an invention in the completely traditional, normal sense, whereas spoken language is a different beast altogether. Guy Deutscher: So, in some societies, there are debates about changes in the writing system, and there are institutionalized changes.
Though the idea that you could institutionalize change in the spoken language is fairly absurd, opposition to changes in the spelling convention are purely political….
So, anything you have to say about those two poles is particularly interesting to me. Guy Deutscher: Well, the second one is very difficult to say something sensible about.
It just must be that at some stage, once language became a sufficiently powerful tool, it must have appropriated the process of thinking itself. At the core of your book, you describe this as being the greatest invention, or as we discussed in the beginning, the invention that invented us.
With the other question, what writing did to spoken language, we are on more secure ground. Because there, we are talking about the beginning of the historical period, when writing starts. David Boulton: We can see what must have been the trajectory of oral language shifting a bit in the written record of oral language, yes?
Guy Deutscher: Of extreme interest. In particular, one negative result is that written language quickly usurped spoken language as the real thing, so to speak. And, it has created a tension between what spoken language really is, and what it thinks it ought to be.
We tend to think that what we ought to be doing is to speak with these perfectly formed sentences, which begin in the beginning, and end in the end, and which are grammatical all the way through. But when you look at real spoken language, it looks just completely different. This is when they discovered that things in spoken language are really quite different from the written one.
Otherwise, there is no standard in spoken language except that imposed by cultural acceptance of convention. That interests me. What can be more obvious than that? There are cases where people have very seriously and earnestly discussed questions like that. David Boulton: Like the Greek writing, no space between. What we see in written language then feeds back to how we perceive our spoken language.
Well, fantastic. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much, Sir. Special thanks to volunteer Carol Covin for transcribing this interview. Skip to content An Interview Bold is used to emphasize our [Children of the Code] sense of the importance of what is being said and does not necessarily reflect gestures or tones of emphasis that occurred during the interview. Personal Background: David Boulton: Your book is a fascinating piece of work. Guy Deutscher: Thank you. Learning Together: David Boulton: It seems pretty clear that language is our species most distinguishing attribute.
Animal Communication — Human Language: Dr. David Boulton: Are you referring to Proto-languages evolving? David Boulton: Which is when language began to be written. David Boulton: We can make inferences based on how it looks today.
Guy Deutscher: To mean? Economy: Dr. David Boulton: Dimensionally constrained. Expressivness: Dr. Guy Deutscher: In what sense speciation? Analogy: David Boulton: So, in addition to these two… Dr. Guy Deutscher: Precisely. Generational Changes: David Boulton: Which you showed really remarkably well with words that have almost changed degrees over time in their meaning and usage across generations. David Boulton: Could we just touch on that?
Metaphor, Destruction and Creation: Dr. David Boulton: Express our analogies through assembling words into metaphors? David Boulton: …an immediate end-goal motive that caused it. The Tower of Babel: Dr. Language Families: One of the things that is particularly interesting is how the dominant languages in the world today have come through this tree, this Indo-European manifold of differentiation.
Non Punctuated Equilibriums: Dr. David Boulton: There are no singularities here. So, the point, when you decide to call a different variety a different language, is to a large extent, arbitrary, and depends on many other, political… David Boulton: More to do with the convenience of the researcher. So, I really admire that argument. David Boulton: Good. Writing is Different: Dr. Guy Deutscher: Yes, and some of them are even intended. Intentionally Confusing: Dr. David Boulton: The complexity served their interest.
Unintentional Confusion: David Boulton: Right. That is grossly over simplistic. Confusing Sounding Letters: Dr. Sounds and Letters: David Boulton: Yes. You have all the diacritics, or the umlauts in German, or the accents in French, and you have various… David Boulton: Mechanisms for connecting the spoken language to the legacy system of the Roman writing. David Boulton: That was a prestige inheritance, right?
David Boulton: Arrogant elitism. David Boulton: Which meant the scribes actually had more tools to reconcile the gap. Unique Processing Challenge: David Boulton: What seems interesting to me is that the original writing systems developed and adapted, at least the alphabetic ones, in environments where the spoken language had phonemes roughly correspondent in number to the number of alphabet characters in use.
And, yet, for children coming up into it… Dr. Guy Deutscher: They expect that it should be. Guy Deutscher: Again, I agree entirely. David Boulton: Do share with us what you thought was the most powerful example in that group. Complexity Simplified: Dr. They have… Dr. Spelling Reform: Dr. David Boulton: Those who made it through. Guy Deutscher: Sure. My focus is on the effects of language on thought, but I try to concentrate on those effects that can be demonstrated scientifically.
Neurology may be an exciting subject, but we are still profoundly ignorant about its subject matter — we know little about how the brain works. So to show any influence of language on thought, we need to find examples where this influence has practical and measurable consequences in actual behaviour. If we were having this conversation in 50 years' time, it would be much easier to talk about real neurology, because we would be able to scan the brain and find out exactly how each different language influences different aspects of thought.
Our current ruminations about the subject would then look pitifully primitive. But progress can only come through trying and failing and failing better. Robert McCrum. The linguist argues that in our haste to explain language in terms of genetics we've underestimated the power of culture.
Linguist Guy Deutscher debunks the view that language isn't shaped by culture. Photograph: Sophia Evans for the Observer.
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