A masterpiece of linguistics scholarship, at once erudite and entertaining,
confronts the thorny question of how and whether culture shapes language
and language, culture

Linguistics has long shied away from claiming any link between a language
and the culture of its speakers: too much simplistic (even bigoted) chatter
about the romance of Italian and the goose-stepping orderliness of German
has made serious thinkers wary of the entire subject. But now, acclaimed
linguist Guy Deutscher has dared to reopen the issue. Can culture influence
language--and vice versa? Can different languages lead their speakers to
different thoughts? Could our experience of the world depend on whether our
language has a word for "blue"?

Challenging the consensus that the fundaments of language are hard-wired
in our genes and thus universal, Deutscher argues that the answer to all
these questions is--yes. In thrilling fashion, he takes us from Homer to
Darwin, from Yale to the Amazon, from how to name the rainbow to why
Russian water--a "she"--becomes a "he" once you dip a tea bag into her,
demonstrating that language does in fact reflect culture in ways that are
anything but trivial. Audacious, delightful, and field-changing, Through
the Language Glass is a classic of intellectual discovery.

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