Reddit Reddit reviews Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

We found 7 Reddit comments about Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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7 Reddit comments about Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages:

u/[deleted] · 12 pointsr/AskReddit

edit, amazon explained it better than I did kind of

Well....shit. Never knew that the random book on linguistics I was reading would actually come in handy on reddit some day.

I'm reading a book called "Through the Language Glass" that attempts at forming an argument for the underdog theories in linguistics. I don't remember the premise of the chapter, but there was a section that used Literature to prove that human beings evolved the ability to distinguish colors differently only in the past thousands of years.

It started off by analyzing Homer's poems, and noting he described the sea as "wine colored" as well as the sky. There was also no mention of green throughout his work and only used Reds, Blacks, and Whites to describe colors of things that really weren't the same color at all. Thus one could conclude that maybe Homer himself was colorblind.

But then the author takes it further. He looks at literature over the course of time in several different parts of the world, and they all seem to distinguish colors at different times in their literature. There is no word for certain colors up until a certain point.

The thing is, the way we slice up the visible spectrum is not the way others slice it up. They point out one culture that uses the same word for both Blue and Green. Strange huh ? But consider this. Think of "Sky Blue" and "Navy Blue" - they are both shades of the same color to us. But there was another culture that saw these two as two distinctly different colors and did not consider them to be different shades of the same color. Likewise, the culture that saw both "Blue" and "Green" as the same color saw Blue and Green as being different shades of the same color.

Basically, the pattern that was distinguished by the linguist after looking at works of literature over time was that Black and White were the first colors to be distinguished. Then Red and Green or Yellow. Blue was the last one to be distinguished, and other colors like Orange and Purple didn't come until later.

One reasoning behind this could be that over time our eyes evolved to see different colors of the spectrum, or see the contrast better. So back then, we could not differentiate as well between all the different colors we can differentiate between today.

Another theory, however, is that people did not have uses for particular colors until they learned how to produce dyes. Once dyes were invented and we could pick out the color of what we were making, our language began to adapt to that change and we had to come up with a color for new things that once did not need to be distinguished.

So I believe in both theories. It is interesting to believe that there is the possibility that people thousands of years ago could not distinguish the color of the Sky or the Sea from the color of Wine, which maybe appeared to them as very Dark Red. It is also possible that our ability to distinguish contrast improved over time. Imagine a dark room, can you tell if things are different colors as easily? No. So it is a possibility that people long ago could see all the colors in a dimmer light which made them appear less vibrant.

It is also interesting to consider that people did not necessarily care if something was Red or Orange or Yellow because these colors did not have any practical use to them as separate entities. So back in hunter-gatherer times, we did not need to "pay attention" to the colors of things so we did not register them as separate colors and were able to lump them together under one color category umbrella.

TL;DR Two possible reasons exists for this question, one being that we did evolve over time the ability to distinguish different colors, as evidenced by literature's lack of words for certain colors for extended periods of time until the words were invented. Or the other explanation is that we were always able to distinguish the entire spectrum, but the need to have words for different colors did not arrive until we had a need to distinguish different colors as separate. Either way there is no way of knowing for sure what people thousands of years ago saw, but there is a possibility their world looked nothing to them like ours does to us.

u/typewryter · 6 pointsr/AskFeminists

I originally heard about it on RadioLab:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/211213-sky-isnt-blue

They link this book as their source:
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/080508195X/radiolabbooks-20/

As to "westerners view sex the way saudis do"... I mean, we have, historically? For purposes of this conversation, I'm defining the "Saudi view of sex" to mean "women are the property of their closest male relative, and have minimal choice in spouse. Women are sequestered from public life."

Into the early 20th century, public toilets for women were not really A Thing, because women were expected to stay in the home: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_toilet#Social_hierarchies_(access_for_women)

Into the 20th century, it was considered inappropriate for a reputable woman to be out and about without a male escort (or older woman). Women belonged in the home, and their society was focused in the home; they did not have a role in public life. In my grandmother's professional career, she was forced out of her job when she was married, because there was the expectation that married women belonged at home; they shouldn't be out of the house working.

Among rich folks, again into the early 20th century, there was the whole idea of a girl being "out", which signaled they were available on the marriage market, and men could make offers for their hand in marriage. The idea of a daughter as a piece of property to be sold to uphold alliances or strengthen bonds between families has absolutely been part of western culture.

Up until the late 20th century, marital rape was still legal in some US states, because "a husband can't rape his wife, he's entitled to sex from her",which is treating the wife as property.

In my own mother's adult lifetime, married women couldn't open bank accounts or have credit cards because they were seen as just an extension/property of men.

That's kind of drifting from the idea of sex, but it's the ingrained idea that women are property, not people, and thus objects to be acted upon.

And while many of those things I cited above were 100 years ago, that doesn't mean we have cultural amnesia and the values of prior generations have no effect on us.

In the modern day, "Purity Culture" is going strong. You have the trope of the Dad with a shotgun or rifle, scaring off his daughter's suitors. Or purity balls, in which teen women make pledges of virginity-until-marriage, often to their father. Again, it casts women as property, and men as the owners of women's sexuality.

u/urish · 5 pointsr/linguistics

Most definitely! I'm a Hebrew speaker, and this happens all the time. Also, in Guy Deuthscher's book Through the Language Glass he gives a nice example of a poem by Heine where this comes through. Look at the original poem, alongside several translations. The German song hinges on the fact that "pine" is a masculine noun, while "palm" is feminine, and the English translations choose various ways to accommodate this. In Deutscher's book (I read the Hebrew version of it) there's also a Hebrew translation of the poem, using Hebrew's gendered nouns in a way analogous to that of the original.

u/Spider__Jerusalem · 1 pointr/KotakuInAction

> That's absurd.

No. It isn't. And many have written about this subject.

“To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.” - Aldous Huxley

u/potterarchy · 1 pointr/explainlikeimfive

There's an interesting book by Guy Deutscher called Through the Language Glass which - among other things - talks about the way that the Ancient Greeks used colors. He discusses how linguists have postulated that Greeks actually perceived colors differently, because they talk about "green" honey, and "wine-colored" sea, which seem really odd to us today. He debunks this theory, and says that Greeks saw color the same way we do, but their word for "green" may have encompassed yellow-y or blue-ish colors as well, meaning they grouped their colors differently than we do. For example, some languages don't have a distinct word for both "green" and "blue," while other languages (like Russian) have a distinct word for "light blue" and "dark blue." This doesn't mean that they necessarily perceive these colors differently (that's still up for debate), but they simply divide their rainbow of colors into different word-groups than we do. It may explain why Ancient Greeks described things the way they did.

u/5secondsofmayhem · 1 pointr/AskReddit
u/derekpearcy · -1 pointsr/AskHistorians

That's a very interesting question. I'm not sure specifically about "the black earth," though I have heard a lot about the use of color by Greek poets.

I found the most articulate answer in this segment from Radiolab.

Basically, the Greeks, and other ancient people, simply didn't have the color perception that we do. We don't think it had anything to do with the number of cones in their eyes, though. Rather, they didn't have names for some colors, and lacking labels they the lacked handles necessary for perception. A survey of texts across cultures showed that, for example, red is always the first color to appear in writing, and blue is always the last to be explicitly labeled.

There are several theories as to why. One hypothesis tells us that we only create words for colors we can produce ourselves — creating blue dye seems to come late to most cultures, for example, while humans have never had trouble making red messes wherever they go. But what about the blues in nature — such as water, or the sky? If you look at the works attributed to Homer, the sea is "wine-dark" and the sky is silver or grey, not blue.

There was a book written on the subject, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, by Guy Deutscher. The larger Radiolab episode from which the Homer piece is excerpted is also terrific.

I hope this leads you toward a reasonable and more specific answer to your question.

Edit: I neglected to bring it back around and say that lacking more subtle color labels, such as brown, it would make sense that they'd see the earth as simply black. But that's only my hypothesis.