Quotes from Guy Deutscher

In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has.

The wheels of language run so smoothly that one rarely bothers to stop and think about all the resourcefulness and expertise that must have gone into making it tick. Language conceals its art.

Why does the egocentric system feel so much easier and more natural to handle? Simply because we always know where 'in front of' us is and where 'behind' and 'left' and 'right' are. We don't need a map or a compass to work this out, we don't need to look at the sun or the North Star, we just feel it, because the egocentric system of coordinates is based directly on our own body and our immediate visual field.

how modern Hebrew has recently coined a rather recherché template, the passive of the reflexive ('he was made to snog himself'),

People can cope with the chaos of change over the years (that is, with 'diachronic variation'), simply because they can cope with the even greater chaos of synchronic variation, the diversity at any one point in time.

One example that can illustrate how deeply such conceptual mappings are engrained in both language and mind is the image 'more is up, less is down'.

As earl as the seventeenth century, John Locke recognized that in the realm of abstract notions each language is allowed to carve up its own concepts -- or "specific ideas" as he called them -- in its own way.

within two to three generations at least half the world's six thousand or so languages will have disappeared,

Subordination is a syntactic process that is often touted (by syntacticians, at least) as the jewel in the crown of language, and the best example for the ingenuity of its design: the ability to subsume a whole clause within another.

Mankind's perception of color, he says, increased "according to the schema of the color spectrum": first came the sensitivity to red, then to yellow, then to green, and only finally to blue and violet. The most remarkable thing about it all, he adds, is that this development seems to have occurred in exactly the same order in different cultures all over the world. Thus, in Geiger's hands, Gladstone's discoveries about

abstract' comes from a Latin verb which simply meant 'draw away' (abstrahere).

Gladstone's was neither the first nor the last of great minds to be led astray by religious fervor, but in the case of his Studies on Homer, his convictions took the particular unfortunate turn of trying to marry Homer's pagan pantheon with the Christian creed. ... The Times was not amused: "Perfectly honest in his intentions, he takes up a theory, and no matter how ridiculous it is in reality, he can make it appear respectable in argument. Too clever by half!

For just like the rainforests and the coral reefs, the languages of the world are vanishing. At an estimated death-rate of one language every two weeks, it seems that before this century is out, between half and three-quarters of the world's six thousand or so languages will have disappeared, and among them almost all the languages of small preliterate societies.

And he showed, using methods which would today be considered exemplary applications of systematic textual analysis but which one of his contemporary critics derided as the bean-counting mentality of "a born Chancellor of the Exchequer," that this vagueness in Homer's color descriptions was the rule, not the exception.

change is not the exception but the rule.

The real differences between languages, he argued, are not in what a language is able to express but rather in "what it encourages and stimulates its speakers to do from its own inner force.

word that is not actively used by one generation will not be heard by the next generation and will then be lost forever.

since red is a signal for many vital things, most importantly danger (blood) and sex

simple concepts – here, parts of the body from 'head' to 'heel' and from 'breast' to 'intestines' – are swept out of their original environment and carried into the domain of spatial relations.

without these much maligned forces of destruction, language would never have developed in the first place.

The new anthropology required each culture to be understood on its own terms, as a product of its own evolution rather than as merely an earlier stage in the ascent toward Western civilization.

There are many languages that don't make a distinction between green and blue and treat these as shades of one color.

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 parts of the body are the closest and most immediate things in our physical environment, and are thus most deeply imprinted in our cognition, so it is no wonder that body-parts are the sources of terms for all kinds of more abstract concepts in so many languages.