Quotes from Guy Deutscher

And if Germans do have systematic minds, this is just as likely to be because their exceedingly erratic mother tongue has exhausted their brains' capacity to cope with any further irregularity

Anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language knows only too dearly that languages can be full of pointless irregularities that increase complexity considerably without contributing much to the ability to express ideas. English, for instance, would have losed none of its expressive power if some of its verbs leaved their irregular past tense behind and becomed regular.

Really, it is unfair to say that English spelling is not an accurate rendering of speech. It is – it's only that it renders the speech of the 16th century.

fluent speech, there are no real spaces between words, so when two words frequently appear together they can easily fuse into one.

there is an inverse correlation between the complexity of society and of word structure!

Language is mankind's greatest invention – except, of course, that it was never invented.

people find names for things they feel the need to talk about.

the names we use for things bear no inherent relation to the things themselves.

There are four tongues worthy of the world's use," says the Talmud: "Greek for song, Latin for war, Syriac for lamentation, and Hebrew for ordinary speech.

Why should color, of all things, be at the center of so much crossfire? Perhaps because in meddling with such a deep and seemingly instinctive area of perception, culture camouflages itself as nature more successfully there than in any other area of language. There is nothing remotely abstract, theoretical, philosophical, hypothetical, or any other -cal, so it seems, about the difference between yellow and red or between green and blue.

keeping order is a crutch for those who are too lazy to search for things …)

ultimately, what common sense finds natural is what it is familiar with.

Gender thus provides our second example of how the mother tongue influences thought.

Noam Chomsky has famously argued that a Martian scientist would conclude that all earthlings speak dialects of the same language.

The mind cannot just manufacture words for abstract concepts out of thin air – all it can do is adapt what is already available.

When one hears about acts of extraordinary bravery in combat, it is usually a sign that the battle has not been going terribly well. For when wars unfold according to plan and one's own side is winning, acts of exceptional individual heroism are rarely called for. Bravery is required mostly by the desperate side.

the brain of a child learning a language can cope with a mind-boggling amount of linguistic complexity.

there is no way to devise an objective and non-arbitrary measure for comparing the overall complexity of any two given languages.

Franz Delitzsch, who put it most memorably when he wrote in 1878 that "we see in essence not with two eyes but with three: with the two eyes of the body and with the eye of the mind that is behind them. And it is in this eye of the mind in which the cultural-historical progressive development of the color sense takes place.

the Russian-American linguist Roman Jakobson encapsulated Boas's insight into a pithy maxim: "Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey." The crucial differences between languages, in other words, are not in what each language allows its speakers to express—for in theory any language could express anything—but in what information each language obliges it speakers to express.

The normal man of intelligence has something of a contempt for linguistic studies, convinced as he is nothing can well be more useless. Edward Sapir - 1924

So if you, O subsequent ones, ever deign to look down at us from your summit of effortless superiority, remember that you have only scaled it on the back of our efforts. For it is thankless to grope in the dark and tempting to rest until the light of understanding shines upon us. But if we are led into this temptation, your kingdom will never come.

The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, king of Spain, archduke of Austria, and master of several European tongues, professed to speaking "Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.

Much of a language's complexity is not necessarily for effective communication.