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

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A nation’s language, so we are often told, reflects its culture, psyche, and modes of thought.

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.”

“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.”

Your language will then simply reflect the fact that you think in the egocentric system anyway. On the other hand, if you are a nomad in the Australian bush, there are no roads or second left turnings after the traffic lights to guide you, so egocentric directions will be far less useful and you will naturally come to think in geographic coordinates. The way you then end up speaking about space will just be a symptom of the way you think anyway

Kipling’s elephant got his long trunk because the crocodile pulled his nose until it stretched and stretched, and Ted Hughes’s lovelorn hare got his long, long

But for the general public, Gladstone’s virtuoso Homerology was a subject of fascination and admiration

Its three stout, door-stopping tomes of well over seventeen hundred pages sweep

difficult to swing from one extreme position and settle directly in the middle, without first hurtling all the way to the opposite extreme.

And experiments with humans have shown that exposure to red induces physiological effects such as increasing the electrical resistance of the skin, which is a measure of emotional arousal.

The only thing that culture was free to chose, they said, was how many of these foci receive separate names (and what labels to give them, of course). Once a culture has decided on a number, nature takes care of all the rest: it dictates which foci will receive names, it dictates in which order, and it draws the rough boundaries around these foci according to a predetermined design.