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

(Metropolitan, 320 pages, $28)

“Which came first,” asked Sam Leith in the London Sunday Times, “the chicken or ‘the chicken’?” Guy Deutscher’s “bizarre and fascinating” new book asks whether we can think of something for which we have no word. Through the Language Glass opens in the 1850s, when William Gladstone, the future British prime minister, noticed the peculiar use of color words in Homer’s Iliad. Objects are usually described as either black or white, while other color terms seem misused. Chloros (green) is applied to faces and honey, while the sea is “wine-dark,” not blue. Gladstone thought the ancient Greeks were colorblind; actually, they simply had no word for blue. So did they see the same thing as we do when we look at the sea?

Deutscher’s ultimate, surprising answer is a qualified “no,” said Christine Kenneally in New Scientist. Yet along the way he presents a spirited chronicle of a centuries-long debate that’s raged over the question. “So robustly researched and wonderfully told that it is hard to put down,” his book overflows with curious phenomena. The Guugu Yimithirr aborigines of Australia, for instance, have no words for left or right. They only use terms like north and south—and, remarkably, a Guugu Yimithirr speaker can orient himself to the north even when spun around in a dark room.

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The argument over “interactions between language, culture, and thought” has taken some odd turns over time, said Clive Cookson in the Financial Times. Gladstone concluded that humans only evolved color vision after Homer—and he thought this explained the “lack of color words in many ‘primitive’ languages.” Such racist ideas were later rejected, in favor of Noam Chomsky’s contention that language differences are superficial. More recent research suggests things aren’t quite so simple: The brains of Russian speakers, who use different words for dark and light blue, react differently to those shades than English speakers’ brains do. They are quite literally not seeing—or saying—the same thing.