Amazing book so far about language and how / whether it shapes our perception.
Did we "discover" or learn to discern colour only in the last millenium, since Homer used so few colour words?
Healthy common sense suggests, therefore, that while languages can bestow labels entirely at whim, they cannot apply quite the same whimsy to the concepts behind the labels. Languages cannot group together arbitrary sets of objects, since it is birds of a feather that flock together under one label. Any language has to categorise the world in a way that brings together things that are similar in reality - or at least in our perception of reality. So it is natural for different types of birds to be named as one concept, but it is unnatural for a random set of birds and a random set of roses to be gathered together under one label. [...] have you ever heard a child saying, 'Mummy, is this a cat or dog?' Rack your brains and rummage through your memories as hard as you can, you are unlikely to recall a child asking, 'How can I tell if this is a bird or a rose?' While children always need to be taught the labels for such concepts in the particular language of their society, they don't need to be told how to distinguish between the concepts themselves.
Take pronouns such as 'I', 'you', or 'we'. Could anything be more elementary or more natural than these? Of course, no one who is aware of the existence of foreign languages would be under the illusion that the labels for such concepts are dictated by nature, but it seems unimaginable that any language would not have the actual concepts themselves. Suppose, for instance, you continue thumbing through the travelogue and come across the claim that Ziftish doesn't have a word that corresponds to English 'we'. Instead, the author alleges, Ziftish has three distinct pronouns: kita, which means 'just the two of us, me and you', tayo, which means 'me and you and someone else', and kami, which means 'me and someone else, but not you'. The author relates how tickled the Ziftians were to hear that for these three entirely different concepts English uses just one little word, a wee 'we'. You may dismiss the system our chimerical author has invented as a lame joke, but Tagalog speakers int he Philippines would disagree, because this is exactly how they speak.
No one could any longer just brush off their findings as the overreaction of overly literal philologists, and no one could dismiss the peculiarities in the colour descriptions of ancient texts as merely instances of poetic licence. For the deficiencies that Gladstone and Geiger had uncovered were replicated exactly in living languages from all over the world. The Nubians that Virchow and his colleagues probed in the Berlin Zoo had no word for 'blue' at all. When they were shown a blue skein of wool, some of them called it 'black' and others called it 'green'. Some of them didn't even distinguish between yellow, green, and grey, calling all three colours by the same word.
In America, Albert Gatschet wrote that the Klamath Indians in Oregon were happy to use the same term for 'the colour of any grass, weed or plant, and though the plant passes from the green of spring time and summer into the faded yellow of autumn, the colour-name is not changed'. The Sioux from Dakota used the same word, toto, for both blue and green. This 'curious and very frequent coincidence of green and yellow, and of blue and green' was common among other American Indian languages as well.
There is an inverse correlation between the complexity of society and of word structure! The simpler the society, the more information it is likely to mark within the word: the more complex the society, the fewer semantic distinctions it is likely to express word-internally. [...] The resent surveys strongly support Perkins's conclusions and show that languages of large societies are more likely to have simpler word structure, whereas languages of smaller societies are more likely to have many semantic distinctions coded within the word.
[...] If words tend to be more elaborate in simple societies, the reasons must be sought in the natural and unplanned paths of change that languages tread of time. In The Unfolding of Language, I showed that words are constantly buffeted by opposing forces of destruction and creation. The forces of destruction draw their energy from a rather unenergetic human trait: laziness. The tendency to save effort leads speakers to take shortcuts in pronunciation, even flatten whole arrays of endings and thus make the structure of words much simpler. Ironically, the very same laziness is also
behind the creation of new complex word structures. Through the grind of repetition, the words that often appear together can be worn down and, in the process, fuse into a single word – just think of 'I'm', 'he's', 'o'clock', 'don't', 'gonna'. In this way, more complex words can arise.
In the long run, the level of morphological complexity will be determined by the balance of power between the forces of destruction and creation. If the forces of creation hold sway, and at least as many endings and prefixes are created as are lost, then the language will maintain or increase the complexity of its word structure. But if more endings are eroded than created, words will become simpler over time.
Can the balance between creation and destruction have anything to do with the structure of a society? [...] All the plausible answers suggested so far go back to one basic factor: the difference between communication among intimates and among strangers.
[...] One relevant factor is that communication among intimates more often allows compact ways of expression than communication among strangers. [...] More generally, when communicating with intimates about things that are close at hand, you can be more concise.
[...] Another factor that may explain the differences in morphological complexity between small and large societies is the degree of exposure to different languages or even to different varieties of the same language. [...] Contact with different varieties is known to encourage simplification in word structure, because adult language learners find endings, prefixes, and other alterations within the word particularly difficult to cope with. So situations that involve widespread adult learning usually result in considerable simplification in the structure of words. The English language after the Norman Conquest is a case in point: until the eleventh century, English had an elaborate word structure similar to that of modern-day German, but much of this complexity was wiped out in the period after 1066, no doubt because of the contact between speakers of the different languages.
