Quotes from Guy Deutscher

Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.

Beloved men, know that this is the truth:1 This world is in haste, and it approaches its end, and therefore always in the world The longer (it is), the worse (it gets) …

But from a purely linguistic perspective, and as a rule of thumb, when two varieties of what used to be the same language are no longer mutually intelligible, they can be called different languages.

Needless to say, genders cheer up the everyday life of ordinary mortals too.

Some languages, for example, have a gender distinction that is based only on "animacy," the distinction between animate beings (people and animals of both sexes) and inanimate things.

Japanese used to have a color word, ao, that spanned both green and blue.

envisaged Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday as men but Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday as women. Why should this be so?

According to some researchers, hominids prior to Homo sapiens could not, for instance, produce the vowel i {ee}. But ultimately, this does not say very much, since by all accounts, et es perfectle pesseble to have a thoroughle respectable language wethout the vowel i.

The German starts by claiming: 'German is off course ze best language. It is ze language off logik and philosophy, and can commuicate viz great clarity and precision even ze most complex ideas.' 'Boeff,' shrugs the Frenchman, 'but French, French, it ees ze language of lurve! In French, we can convey all ze subtletees of romance weez elegance and flair.

Another area where languages often display erratic behaviour is what linguists call 'gender',

Like any pendulum worth its weight, received opinion finds it difficult to swing from one extreme position and settle directly in the middle, without first hurtling all the way to the opposite extreme.

But, in reality, the ingenious inferences made in these experiments are symptoms not of great strength but of great weakness. For all this ingenuity is needed only because we know so little about how the brain works. Were we not profoundly ignorant, we would not need to rely on roundabout methods of gleaning information from measures such as reaction speed to various contrived tasks.

reason is much more prosaic, and is simply that meta-phora is Greek for 'carry across' (meta = 'across', phor = 'carry'). Or to use the Latin equivalent, meta-phor just means trans-fer.

Linguistic "technology" in the form of sophisticate grammatical structures is not a prerogative of advanced civilization, but is found even in the languages of the most primitive hunter-gatherers. As the linguist Edward Sapir memorably put it in 1921, when it comes to the complexity of grammatical structures "Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam".

In India there is a sect of Jainist monks called the Shvetambara, who always carry a broom and sweep the ground before them as they walk, lest they accidentally tread on some insects and squash them.

The conventional predictions are that within two to three generations at least half the world's six thousand or so languages will have disappeared, especially those remote tribal tongues that are really different from what seems natural to us.

Language is mankind's greatest inventiom… that it was never invented.

The simple truth is that ll languages change, all the time - the only static languages are dead ones.

As strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue.