Sublime

No mute tribe has ever been discovered, and there is no record that a region has served as a “cradle” of language from which it spread to previously languageless groups.

The results are remarkable. Let’s take the word “key”—which is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. German speakers chose adjectives like “hard,” “heavy” and “jagged.” Spanish speakers chose “little,” “lovely,” “shiny” and “tiny.” Or “bridge,” which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish. German speakers chose “beautiful,” “elegant,

We give words only to the things that matter to us as a society. The things that make no difference to us are erased from our world by never becoming a part of language in the first place. In this way, each language organizes the world into a pattern. Each language decides what has meaning—and what does not. As native speakers, we are born inside t

1 The process of acquiring language is deeply affected by the process of becoming a competent member of society. 2 The process of becoming a competent member of society is realized to a large extent through language.

Noam Chomsky. In 1965, he wrote: “A consideration of the character of the grammar that is acquired, the degenerate quality and narrowly limited extent of the available data, the striking uniformity of the resulting grammars and their independence of intelligence, motivation, and emotional state . . . leave little hope that much of the structure of

“Isn’t it strange that our familiarity with color doesn’t seem to translate into an ability to describe it? We can really only refer to it; you might know what I mean when I say ‘blue’ or ‘red,’ but only because you’ve already seen these colors yourself. My words are merely invoking your memories; they aren’t imparting new information.”

His own answer was that it is highly unlikely that people with the same eyesight as us could nevertheless have made do with such strikingly deficient color concepts. And since it is so unlikely, he suggests that the only plausible explanation for the defects in the ancients’ color vocabulary must be an anatomical one.

If people move across an ethno-linguistic frontier freely, then the frontier is often described in anthropology as, in some sense, a fiction. Is this just because it was not a boundary like that of a modern nation? Eric Wolf used this very argument to assert that the North American Iroquois did not exist as a distinct tribe during the Colonial peri

Benjamin Lee Whorf, to whom we shall return in a later chapter, captivated a whole generation when he taught that our habit of separating the world into objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”) is not a true reflection of reality but merely a division thrust upon us by the grammar of European languages.