On the other hand, Cicero drew exactly the opposite conclusions from the absence of a word in the language. In his treatise On the Orator (De oratore, 55 BC), he delivers a long sermon on the absence of a Greek equivalent to the Latin ineptus (meaning "inappropriate" or "tactless"). Russell would conclude that the Greeks had such impeccable manners that they simply did not need a word to describe a non-existent phenomenon. Cicero was not like that: from his point of view, the absence of a word proved that this vice was so widespread among the Greeks that they did not even notice it. The language of the Romans itself was often censured. About twelve centuries after Cicero, Dante Alighieri, in his De vulgari eloquentia, gives an overview of the Italian dialects and states that “the speech of the Romans is not popular, but rather wretched — more ugly than any other Italian folk speech; Yes, this is not surprising, because the ugliness of their customs and clothing, they are clearly more disgusting than everyone else. "

Appreciated the book

pornography is just a matter of geography

I'll start right away with a tip for readers of the electronic copy: colored tabs are about 150 pages... I discovered them only after reading half a book :)))

The book is very interesting, at least for those who are looking not for fairy tales, but for how in fact our world works. I am thinking, in which folder should I put the file now: in linguistics, anthropology or ethnology? Probably, I'll put it in linguistics, although the story told is related to the other disciplines mentioned.

The author examines the influence of nature and culture on language and the influence of language and culture on our perception of reality. Reality is an immense thing, so only three aspects fall into the spotlight:
- orientation in space;
- the relation of the grammatical gender to the features of objects in the real world;
- perception of color depending on the language.
(The latter has been given the most attention for various reasons.)
Since I have already read several books on these topics, most of the above reasoning was not new, but it was very interesting to read, because it was written interestingly. The "Russian blues experiment" alone is worth a lot! After all, we will plug these soulless Americans into the belt when it will be necessary to distinguish shades of blue and light blue! Still: we have two Russian blues (Siniy vs. Goluboy), and they only have shades of the same color (Navy blue vs. Sky blue). It is clear that in certain cases we are able to distinguish them faster. The Pentagon is probably already working hard to create a weapon of genocide based on this difference in perception. Gotta throw this idea by this who shout loudly in the evenings on TV :)))

An absolute hit for me was the story of the Australian people, Guugu Yimithirr. His language operates with directions in such a way that every speaker at every moment of time is obliged to know the directions of the cardinal points. And learning the Guugu Yimithirr language from early childhood leads to the fact that the carrier cannot get lost in the forest and knows the cardinal points even in a cave or in a building without windows. That's cool! The only pity is that this language will die out in one generation.

So which is more important: nature or culture? Does language affect thinking? You cannot answer in a nutshell, so I recommend the book to everyone who can read in English. At the same time, it will be possible to rejoice at the author's writing talents: in the literary sense, the book is also very worthy.
It was also very pleasant to learn about a whole cohort of outstanding people, about whose scientific merits I did not know or knew little. These are Gladstone, Geiger, Magnus, Rivers, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Humboldt, etc.

ne_spi_zamerznesh

Appreciated the book

Perhaps the most interesting thing is how much the author's style in non-fiction matters more than in fiction. This, of course, is a personal opinion and not confirmed by experiments (may Mr. Deutscher forgive me), but how it turns out in practice - artistic literature, written in even the most dry language. can lure: characters. locations, plot development, unusual structure, logic of the world, playing with concepts, etc. etc. And non-fiction seems to lose some of its evidence if the author is poor at presenting (even the most proven theories) in front of less developed, but more skillfully served ideas (there is something from the field of culinary art in this).
And now - "Through the mirror of the tongue." A great example, actually. Dull, though supported by confident examples, the introduction is replaced by the first chapter with an analysis of Homer (from Gladstone onwards):

This is extremely regrettable, because although Gladstone did not calculate how many angels could dance on the edge of the Achilles spear, his allegedly taking Homer too seriously lifted him high above the mental horizon of most of his contemporaries.

And the book blossoms, literally everything changes, it is already impossible to stop. because here he is, Deutscher, inspired to the limit and letting go of the reins of irony, a toiler of a feather and a shovel - for he digs deeply, devoting a third of the book (at least) to The Origin of Species, and more, perhaps, talking about the inheritance of certain traits, than about linguistics. Motivating by the fact that:

in his multivolume discussions on this topic, Humboldt remained faithful to the first two commandments of any great thinker: 1) do not specify; 2) do not refrain from contradicting yourself.

but he is not some kind of Humboldt and is inclined to concretize and not contradict. Although it does not specify, and contradicts, but okay, at least 50-100 pages are really devoted to the evidence base of some small thesis - but what else is needed?
In general, I cannot say that the study of the influence of language on the perception of space / gender / color was what I ended up reading for - that is, no, of course, very exciting, etc., but I am not a linguist. I have come to look for treasure. And found
from examples in the spirit of Alice Carroll:

I must have told you about that cocky seal [who looked at a disappointed but rather attractive fish [which jumped out of the icy water and dived back [and which did not pay the slightest attention to the heated debate [between two young oysters and the phlegmatic walrus [recently hinted by a whale with connections at the top [that the government is going to impose speed limits on reef navigation due to traffic congestion [caused by an influx of new tuna emigrants from the Indian Ocean [where temperatures have climbed so high last year , [what…]]]]]]]]].

human relationships:

During World War I, Rivers worked at Craiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh, where he was the first to use psychoanalytic methods to help officers suffering from military neurosis. Sassoon was sent to him in 1917 after his public doubts about the rationality of war, throwing the Order of the War Cross into the Mersey River and refusing to return to his regiment were declared mentally damaged. Rivers treated him with compassion and understanding, and eventually Sassoon voluntarily returned to France. In many of his patients, Rivers aroused affection, even friendship, which did not lose its strength even many years after the war. Sassoon, nicknamed Lunatic for his fearlessness in battle, fainted with grief at Rivers' funeral in 1922.

and the most delicate linguistic features of certain peoples:

Luzhitsky, a Slavic language spoken in a small enclave of East Germany, distinguishes hród for "castle", hródaj for "two castles" and hródy for "more than two castles."

to the graceful constructions of Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain and the "full of drama story of the Hittite king Mursili" about how a severe illness befell him.
You should end up with quotes, even though it's a bit tricky.
What can I say in general: for me the search ended in victory, serious linguists, too, I think, will not be left at a loss (because what is a language without deep culturological research at all levels of history?). A charming book by a very passionate person. Here.

However, most of the attention here is paid to the differences in the definition of color characteristics, from the time of Homer to the present day, grammar, in particular, the genders of nouns, as well as the perception of space around oneself and the reflection of this perception in a particular language. The curiosities arising from these differences and carefully collected by the author make it possible to retain information in memory for a long time. This is facilitated by the ease with which the author mentions this or that fact in order to convince, and then immediately dissuade the reader in some controversial thesis.

The problem with the book, in my opinion, is only one: excessive verbosity where everything has long been explained. Continuing beliefs where everyone is already convinced is very tiring, and somewhere an interesting topic ends abruptly, and somewhere does not see the end and edge.
In general, it turned out to be a very good and useful job for those who are fond of learning foreign languages ​​or are simply interested in the cultures of other countries.

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

© Guy Deutscher, 2010

© Translation. N. Zhukova, 2014

© Edition in Russian by AST Publishers, 2016

Prologue
Language, culture and thinking

The Talmud says: "Four languages ​​are good to use: Greek for song, Roman for battle, Syriac for crying, and Hebrew for conversation." Other writers have been equally strong in their judgments about what different languages ​​are good for. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, King of Spain, Archduke of Austria, who spoke several European languages, confessed that he spoke "Spanish with God, Italian with women, French with men and German with his horse."

The language of a people, as we are often told, reflects their culture, psychology and way of thinking. People in a tropical climate are so careless that they quite naturally lost almost all their consonants. And you just have to compare the soft sounds of Portuguese with the harshness of Spanish to understand the essence of the difference between these two neighboring cultures. The grammar of some languages ​​is simply not logical enough to express complex ideas. On the other hand, the German language is an ideal means for the most accurate formulation of philosophical profundity, it is a very orderly language, therefore the Germans themselves think in a very orderly way. (But isn't the Prussian step heard in its joyless, graceless sounds?) In some languages ​​there is no future tense, so their speakers, naturally, have no idea of ​​the future. The Babylonians would have a hard time understanding the name "Crime and Punishment" because in their language the same word was used to describe both. Rocky fjords emanate from the sharp intonations of the Norwegian language, and in the mournful melodies of Tchaikovsky, you can hear the hard Russian "l". French is not only a Romance language, but also a language of novels. English is too adaptable, you could say that it is a language with illegible connections, and Italian ... oh, that Italian!

Many table conversations are embellished with vignettes like this, because few topics are more reflective than the nature of the different languages ​​and their speakers. And yet, as soon as these sublime observations are transferred from the merry banquet hall into the cold cold of the laboratory, they will immediately fall off like the foam of an anecdote - at best funny and aimless, at worst - demonstrating intolerance and stupidity. Most foreigners cannot hear the difference between mountainous Norway and the endless Swedish plains. The industrious Danish Protestants have dropped more consonants on their icy, windy soil than any idle tropical tribe. And if the thinking of the Germans is systematic, then it might just as well be because their extremely whimsical mother tongue has so exhausted their mental faculties that they would not have coped with additional inaccuracies. English speakers can talk for a long time about the future in the present tense ("I'm flying to Vancouver next week ... - I'm flying to Vancouver that week ...") without losing the ability to perceive the future. There is no language - not even among the most "primitive" tribes - that by its very nature is unsuitable for expressing the most complex ideas. Some lack of linguistic opportunities for philosophizing comes down simply to the lack of a specialized vocabulary of abstract terms and, possibly, some syntactic constructions, but they can be easily typed in the same way as all European languages ​​inherited their set of philosophical tools from Latin, which, in turn, en masse borrowed them from Greek. If speakers of any tribal language were concerned about this, they could easily do the same today, and they could easily talk in Zulu about the comparative merits of empiricism and rationalism, or rant about the phenomenology of existentialism in West Greenlandic.

If reflections on nations and languages ​​hovered only over aperitifs, they could be excused as harmless, albeit meaningless, entertainment. But it turned out that powerful learned minds have also been practicing with this subject for centuries. Philosophers of all countries and directions stood in line to declare that each language reflects the qualities of the people who speak it. In the 17th century, the Englishman Francis Bacon explained that it is possible "on the basis of the languages ​​themselves to draw conclusions worthy of the most careful observation about the mental makeup and mores of the peoples who speak these languages." "All this confirms," ​​agrees a century later, the Frenchman Etienne de Condillac, "that each language expresses the character of the people who speak it." His younger contemporary, German Johann Gottfried Herder, shares this opinion: “In every language is imprinted the reason and character of the people. Active peoples have an abundance of moods, more refined nations have many properties of objects elevated to the rank of abstractions. " In short, "the genius of the people is revealed most of all in the physiognomic image of their speech." American Ralph Waldo Emerson summed up in 1844: "We draw conclusions about the spirit of the people on the basis of their language, which is akin to a monument in which every remarkable individual has put at least one stone."

This impressive international unanimity has one problem - it collapses as soon as thinkers move from general principles to thinking about the specific properties of certain languages ​​and what these linguistic properties can tell about the qualities of specific peoples. In 1889, Emerson's words were posed as a subject for an essay to 17-year-old Bertrand Russell while he was in his preparatory courses in London, preparing for the entrance exam to Trinity College, Cambridge. Russell profoundly declares: “We can study the character of a people from the ideas that are best expressed in their language. For example, French contains words such as spirituel or l'esprit, the meaning of which can hardly be expressed in English at all; from which we can conclude, confirmed by real observations, that the French have more esprit and are more spirituel than the English. "

On the other hand, Cicero drew exactly the opposite conclusions from the absence of a word in the language. In his treatise On the Orator (De oratore, 55 BC), he delivers a long sermon on the absence of a Greek equivalent to the Latin ineptus (meaning "inappropriate" or "tactless"). Russell would conclude that the Greeks had such impeccable manners that they simply did not need a word to describe a non-existent phenomenon. Cicero was not like that: from his point of view, the absence of a word proved that this vice was so widespread among the Greeks that they did not even notice it. The language of the Romans itself was often censured. About twelve centuries after Cicero, Dante Alighieri, in his De vulgari eloquentia, gives an overview of the Italian dialects and states that “the speech of the Romans is not popular, but rather wretched — more ugly than any other Italian folk speech; Yes, this is not surprising, because the ugliness of their customs and clothing, they are clearly more disgusting than everyone else. "

No one even in their thoughts had such a mood in relation to the French language, which is not only romantic and spirituel, but also, of course, an example of logic and clarity. We know this thanks to none other than the French themselves. In 1894, the famous critic Ferdinand Brunettier told the members of the French Academy on the occasion of his election to this illustrious institution that French was "the most logical, most intelligible and clear language that man has ever spoken." The brunettier, in turn, substantiated this with the authority of a long series of experts, including Voltaire, who in the 18th century argued that the uniqueness of the genius of the French language lies in its clarity and order. And Voltaire himself owes this insight to a stunning discovery made a whole century earlier, more precisely in 1669. French grammarians of the 17th century have spent decades trying to understand why French has more clarity than any other language in the world, and why, as one academy member stated, French is gifted with such clarity and precision that a simple translation into it has the effect of real clarification. Finally, after years of labors, in 1669, Louis le Labourer discovered that the answer was the very simplicity of language. His painful grammatical research showed that, unlike speakers of other languages, the French "in all their statements exactly follow the train of thought, and this is the order of Nature." Well, there is no wonder that French cannot be incomprehensible. As the thinker Antoine de Rivarol later said: “What is incomprehensible may be English, Italian, Greek or Latin,” but ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français (“what is incomprehensible is not French”).

Not all intellectuals in the world, however, agree with this analysis. Equally sophisticated thinkers - oddly enough that most of them were not from France - were of a different opinion. The famous Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, for example, was convinced that English was superior to French in a number of ways, including logic, since, unlike French, English is “a methodical, energetic, business-like and serious language that does not care too much about pomp and elegance, but it attaches importance to consistency. " “As is the language, so is the people,” concludes Espersen.

Great minds were even more prolific when they moved from the question of how language reflects the nature of its speakers, to the more important question of how language affects the thought processes of its speakers. Benjamin Lee Wharf, to whom we will return in one of the following chapters, has bewitched an entire generation, arguing that our habit of dismembering the world into objects (for example, "rock") and actions (for example, "falling") is not a true reflection of reality, but only an artificial division imposed on us by the grammar of European languages. According to Whorf, American Indian languages, in which a noun and a verb are combined in one word, dictate a "monistic view" of the universe, so their speakers simply will not understand our distinction between objects and actions.

A generation later, George Steiner, in his 1975 book, After Babylon, came to the conclusion that “the tradition of anticipation in our syntax,” our “spoken future,” or, in other words, the existence of the future tense of the verb, is what gives us hope. for the future, saves from nihilism, even from mass suicide. "If our timing system were less solid," Steiner said, "we might not be able to stand it." (Prophetic inspiration descended upon him, as dozens of languages ​​die out every year, in which there is no future tense.)

More recently, a philosopher revolutionized our understanding of Tudor history by revealing the real reason for Henry's breakup with the Pope. He found that the Anglican Revolution was not the result of a desperate desire to have an heir, as is usually portrayed, and not a cynical ploy aimed at appropriating church wealth and possessions. The birth of Anglican theology was inevitable due to the nature of the English language: since English grammar occupied an intermediate position between French and German, then English religious thought was halfway between (French) Catholicism and (German) Protestantism.

* * *

In terms of language, culture and thinking, it seems that the big thinkers in their grandes oeuvres have not strayed too far from the small thinkers with their hors d'oeuvre. Can we hope that with such an unappetizing previous story, something edible will turn out from the discussion? If we separate the inconsistent and the ignorant, the ridiculous and the fantastic, is there anything meaningful left that can be said about the relationship between language, culture and thinking? Does language reflect the culture of a society in a deeper sense than little things like the number of words for snow or shearing of camels? And even more controversial - can different languages ​​lead their speakers to different thoughts and perceptions?

For most serious scientists today, the answer to all these questions is a resounding "no." The dominant point of view among modern linguists is that language is primarily an instinct, in other words, the foundations of language are encoded in our genes and are the same for all of humanity. As Noam Chomsky brilliantly argued, a Martian scientist would conclude that Earthlings speak dialects of the same language. According to his theory, all languages ​​are basically united by the same universal grammar, common implied concepts, the same degree of systemic complexity. Therefore, only those aspects of language that reveal language as an expression of the inner nature of a person are important (or at least deserve research). Finally, the general consensus is that if our native language influences the way we think, then that influence is negligible, trivial - and basically we all think the same way.

In the following pages, however, I will try to convince you - perhaps contrary to the original opinion and certainly contrary to the current academic approach - that the answer to the above questions is yes. In my defense of culture speech, I will argue that cultural differences are deeply reflected in languages, and a growing body of scientific research convincingly shows that our mother tongue can influence the way we think and perceive the world. But before you put this book on the same shelf with the other madmen, between the latest celebrity recipe book and How to Befriend a Goldfish, I make a solemn promise to you that we will not indulge in any kind of baseless gossip. We will not impose a "monistic view" on any universes, we will not soar to proud questions like which language has more esprit, and we will not dive into the mysteries of which cultures are more "deep". The problems that will concern us in this book are of a very different kind.

In fact, the cultural issues that we will deal with are related to the most mundane level of everyday life, and the aspects of language that interest us lie at the same level of everyday speech. Because, it turns out, the most significant connections between language, culture and thinking are to be found where you least expect, in places where common sense suggests that all cultures and all languages ​​should be exactly the same.

High-level cultural differences that we immediately notice - in musical taste, sexual morality, dress requirements or drinking manners - are all in some way superficial, precisely because we notice them so sharply: we know that pornography is it’s just a matter of geography, and we have no illusion that people around the globe share the same preferences in music or hold the same plugs. But culture can leave deeper marks where we do not recognize them as such, where its traditions are so indelibly engraved in impressionable young minds that we have grown up mistaking them for something completely different.

For all of these statements to have any meaning, we must first expand the concept of culture beyond its usual use in everyday language. What's your first reaction to the word "culture"? Shakespeare? String quartets? The gracefully protruding little finger of the hand holding the cup? Naturally, how you understand "culture" depends on your own native culture - as a quick glance through the prism of the three dictionaries will show.

English:

Culture - cultivation, state of cultivation, improvement, result of cultivation, type of civilization.

Dictionary of the English language, ed. W. Chambers, R. Chambers

German:

Culture - Gesamtheit der geistigen und künstlerischen Errungenschaften einer Gesellschaft (all intellectual and artistic achievements of society).

A large explanatory dictionary of the German language, ed. G. Sterig

French:

Culture - ensemble des moyens mis en oeuvre par l'homme pour augmenter ses connaissances, développer et améliorer les facultés de son esprit, notamment le jugement et le goût (a set of means used by a person to increase his knowledge, develop and improve mental abilities, in particular judgment and taste).

No doubt many will argue that there is little better to confirm the entrenched stereotypes of the three great European cultures than how they themselves define the concept of "culture." Isn't the Chambers definition the very quintessence of Englishness? Quite unprofessional in his unsolicited list of synonyms, politely avoiding any awkward definitions. And what could be more German than a German definition? Mercilessly thorough, overly abstruse, it mercilessly drives the concept into the head. And French? Pompous, hopelessly idealistic and obsessed with le goût.

When anthropologists speak of “culture,” however, they use the word in an entirely different sense than in the definitions above, and in a much broader sense. The scientific concept of "culture" originated in Germany in the middle of the 19th century, but it was first clearly defined by the English anthropologist Edward Taylor in 1871. His seminal work, Primitive Culture, begins with the following definition, which is still quoted in the introduction to the subject:

"Culture in the broad ethnographic sense is composed in its entirety of knowledge, beliefs, art, morality, laws, customs and some other abilities and habits assimilated by a person as a member of society." Culture is understood here as all human traits that do not manifest themselves as instincts - in other words, as a synonym for upbringing and the opposite of "nature." Thus, culture encompasses all aspects of our behavior that have evolved as social conventions and passed on through training from generation to generation. Scientists sometimes even talk about "chimpanzee culture", when individual groups of these monkeys use stones and sticks in a different way than in neighboring groups, and when it can be shown that the transfer of this skill through imitation is more likely than genetic.

Human culture, of course, usually includes more than sticks and stones. But the type of culture we are interested in in this book has little to do with high art, high intellectual achievement, or impeccable manners and taste. Here we will focus on those mundane cultural traits that have so deeply entered our consciousness that we, as such, are not aware of them. In short, the aspects of culture that we will explore here are those that culture has disguised as human nature.

Language like a mirror

Is language included in these aspects? Is he a cultural artifact or a natural heritage? If we consider language as a mirror of consciousness, then what reflection do we see there: human nature or the cultural traditions of our society? This is the central question of the first part of this book.

On the one hand, even the posing of the question seems rather strange, because language is a cultural convention that does not pretend to be anything other than cultural convention. The languages ​​of the world are extremely diverse, and everyone knows that the specific language that a child learns is just an accident, depending on the culture in which he was lucky to be born. The Boston toddler will grow up speaking Boston English because she happened to be born in Boston English, not because she carries Boston genes. And a newborn Pekinese will eventually speak Mandarin Chinese, because he grows up surrounded by Mandarin Chinese, and not because of a genetic predisposition. If you swap the babies, the Beijing boy will end up speaking correct Boston English, and the Boston girl will speak excellent Mandarin. There are millions of living confirmations to this fact.

Moreover, the most obvious difference between languages ​​is that they choose different names, or labels, for concepts. And as everyone knows, these labels do not claim anything more than the status of cultural conventions. Apart from a few marginal cases of onomatopoeia, such as the cuckoo, where the label does try to reflect the nature of the bird being described, the vast majority of labels are arbitrary. "A rose smells like a rose, even call it a rose ...", even though douce, γλυκο, édes, zoet, sladká, sød, hoş, makea, magus, dolce, ngọt, or even sweet. Labels, therefore, are directly and directly within the competence of each culture and do not carry practically anything natural in themselves.

But what happens when we try to look beyond the mirror of language, beyond the surface layer of labels, to the concepts behind them? Are the concepts under the English labels rose, or sweet, or bird, or cat as arbitrary as the labels themselves? Is the way our language shapes the world into concepts also just a cultural convention? Or is it nature that draws for us a noticeable border between "cat" and "dog" or "rose" and "bird"? If the question seems rather abstract, let's put it to a practical test.

Imagine that you were rummaging through books in a remote corner of an old library and accidentally dug up a moldy 18th century manuscript that seems to have never been opened since it was placed there. It is entitled "Adventures on the distant island of Zuft" and, judging by the details, it seems to be related to the mysterious lost island, which the author, according to his assurances, discovered. You flip through the manuscript with trembling hands and begin to read the chapter titled "Further Reports on the Zuft Language, detailing its Fantastic Phenomena":

“At dinner I got up the nerve to ask the Names of several things in their Language; and these noble Persons had the pleasure of giving me the Answer. Although my main Aspiration was to learn, the difficulties turned out to be almost insurmountable, because the range of their Thoughts and Conceptions did not include such Differences that seem to us the most natural. For example, in their Language there is no Word by which our Idea of ​​the Bird can be expressed, and also there are no Terms by which this Language can express knowledge of the Rose. For instead of them Zuftsky uses one word "Ptosa", which means white Roses and all birds, except those with a crimson breast, but another word, "Ritsa", unites birds with a crimson breast and all roses, except for white ones.

Having become even more talkative after the third Glass of Drink, my Boss began to tell the Tale that he remembered from Childhood, about how Ptosa and Ritsa met their sad end: “Ritsa with bright plumage and honey yellow Ptosa flew up a high branch and chirped. They, of course, began to discuss which of them sings sweeter. Unable to agree, Ritsa suggested that they be judged by the Symbols of Beauty among the flowers in the garden below them. Without delay, they sprang to the fragrant Ptosa and the bud of red Ritsa and humbly asked their Opinions. Yellow Ptosa hummed in a gentle voice while Ritsa whistled her merry tune. Alas, neither Ptosa nor Ritsa could distinguish Ptosa's cascading cadences from Ritsa's quivering trills. The proud songbirds were terribly offended. Ritsa, inflamed with anger, swooped down on the red Ritsa and cut off all her petals, and the yellow Ptosa, whose vanity was deeply wounded, attacked Ptosa with the same fervor. And so both judges stood naked, all the petals were torn from them, Ptosa no longer smelled, and Ritsa no longer blushed. "

Realizing my confusion, the Boss said Moral, shaking his finger: "So, remember: never confuse Ptosa and Ritsu!" I sincerely assured him that I would try in every possible way to prevent this. "

What will you take this precious document for? For the unknown diary of an old explorer or the lost sequel to Gulliver's Travels? If you choose the version of fiction, this is probably because your common sense tells you that the implied Zuft way of distinguishing concepts is completely impossible and that it is clearly unnatural to combine red-breasted birds and non-white roses in one concept of "ritsa" and combine the rest of the birds and white roses in the concept of "ptosis". And if the Zuft distinction between ritsa and ptosa is unnatural, the English separation of bird and rose should be at least somewhat natural. Normal common sense assumes, therefore, that although languages ​​can sculpt completely random labels, they cannot approach the concepts behind the labels as lightly. Languages ​​cannot group arbitrary sets of objects, since one field of berries must be collected under one label. Any language should divide the world into categories that unite objects that are similar in reality - or at least in our perception of reality. So it would be natural to name different birds as one concept, but it is unnatural to collect a random set of birds and a random set of roses under one label.

In fact, even a cursory observation of how children learn language will confirm that concepts such as "bird", "cat" or "dog" have something natural under them. Children ask all possible (and often impossible) questions. You've probably heard a child ask: "Mom, is it a kitty or a dog?" Now think about it and dig deep into your memory - and still you can hardly remember a child asking: "How to understand, is it a bird or a rose?" Children need to be taught what labels are assigned to concepts in the language of the people around them, but they do not need to be taught to distinguish between the concepts themselves. For a child who has just started to walk, it is enough to see several pictures with cats in a book, and the next time he sees a cat, even if it is red and not striped, fluffier, with a short tail, one-eyed and without a hind paw, he is all equally recognizes her as a cat, not a dog, not a bird or a rose. The fact that children instinctively acquire such concepts shows that the human brain from birth has a powerful pattern recognition algorithm that allows you to group similar objects. So concepts like "cat" or "bird" must somehow correspond to this innate ability to divide the world into categories.

* * *

So, it seems that we have found a simple answer to the question, reflects the language of culture or nature. We drew a clear map and divided the language into two different territories: the realm of labels and the land of concepts. Labels reflect cultural conventions and concepts reflect nature. Each culture is free to label concepts as it pleases, but the concepts under these labels were dictated by nature. We can talk about this division for a long time. It is clear, simple and elegant, it seems convincing to both the mind and the senses, and, last but not least, it has a solid pedigree that goes back centuries, right up to Aristotle, who in the 4th century. BC NS. wrote that, although the sounds of speech may differ in different races, the concepts themselves - or, as he called them, "impressions of the soul" - the same for all of humanity.

Are there any possible objections to this division? Only one thing: it bears little resemblance to reality. The clear line that we have drawn would do credit to the diligent cartographer, but, unfortunately, does not give an accurate idea of ​​the balance of power between states on the map. The fact is that in practice, culture not only manages labels, but also arranges constant raids across the border, to where the fiefdom of nature should be. The distinction between some concepts, such as "cat" and "dog", nature can draw quite clearly, and then they become largely invulnerable to the encroachment of culture. But sometimes cultural conventions manage to interfere in the internal affairs of concepts, confusing common sense. How deeply culture penetrates into the domain of concepts and how difficult it can be to come to terms with this state of affairs will become clearer in the following chapters. In the meantime, we will take a quick look at several cultural outposts on the other side of the border.

Let us first consider the realm of abstract concepts. What happens when we move from simple physical objects like cats, birds, or roses to abstract concepts like victory, justice, or gloating? Are such concepts under the jurisdiction of nature? Once I had a friend who liked to say that the French and the Germans have no reason. He meant that in their languages ​​there is no word analogous to the English mind, and in a sense he was right: neither in French nor in German is there a single concept with a single label that would overlap all meanings of the English concept of mind. If you look up the French translation of mind in the dictionary, it will patiently explain to you that it depends on the context, and will offer you a list of possible meanings, such as:

esprit (peace of mind = tranquillité d'esprit)

tête (it's all in the mind = c'est tout dans la tête)

avis (in my opinion = à mon avis)

raison (he got crazy = il n'a plus toute sa raison)

intelligence (with the mind of a two-year-old = avec l’intelligence d’un enfant de deux ans)

Conversely, there is no single concept in English that encompasses the full range of meanings of French esprit, as Bertrand Russell noted with such enthusiasm. Again, the dictionary will give you a long list of English translation options, for example:

to know (to mean) (avoir de l'esprit = to mean)

mood (je n'ai pas l'esprit à rire = I have no mood to laugh)

mind (avoir l'esprit vif = to have a quick mind)

spirit (esprit d'équipe = team spirit)

So, concepts like "mind" and "spirit" cannot be natural in the same sense as "rose" or "bird", otherwise they would be the same in all languages. As early as the 17th century, John Locke discovered that in the realm of abstract ideas, each language is allowed to draw a line between concepts - or "separate ideas," as he called them - in its own way. In his 1690 essay, An Essay on Human Understanding, he substantiated this view by means of “a large number of words in one language, for which there are no corresponding words in another. This clearly shows that the population of one country, according to their customs and their way of life, found it necessary to form and name such different complex ideas that the population of another has never created ”Per. A. Mikhailova. Herder 1812, 354-355. (Rus. Ed. - Herder I. G. Ideas for the philosophy of the history of mankind. M .: Nauka, 1977.). Aristotle. De interpretation. 1.16a. "A large number of words in one language": Locke 1849, 315. (Russian edition - J. Locke. Works in three volumes. M .: Mysl. Editions of philosophical literature, 1985.)

How the Germans and Greeks treat their girls, how Mark Twain scoffed at the German language, how an "airplane" could fall into a "vegetable" genus, how in English they stopped believing that "a ship" is "she" and how the gender system affects thinking native speakers in an excerpt from Guy Deutscher's Through the Mirror of Language, published by AST in June.

Guy Deutscher, 2010
Translation. N. Zhukova, 2014
Russian edition by AST Publishers, 2014
Reprinted with permission of the author and literary agencies
United Agents Ltd. and Synopsis

In our time, the word "gender" has become familiar. It may not be as risky as "sex", but it is fraught with serious misunderstanding, so first let's figure out how the rather dispassionate use of this word by linguists differs from how it is used in ordinary English, and moreover, in the most fashionable scientific disciplines. Originally the word “gender” has nothing to do with gender: it means “type”, “kind”, “variety” - in fact, the word “gender” has the same origin as “gene” and “genre”. Like most major life problems, the current divergence in the meaning of "gender" is rooted in ancient Greece. Greek philosophers began to use the noun ge'nos (which means "race" or "type") to denote one particular division of things into three distinct "types": masculine (humans and animals), feminine, and inanimate objects. And from Greek this meaning passed through Latin to other European languages.

In English, both meanings of "gender" - the common meaning for "type" and the more specific grammatical distinction (gender) - have successfully coexisted for a long time. Back in the 18th century, the word "gender" could be used in a completely non-sexual sense. When the writer Robert Badge wrote in 1784: “I am also a significant person, a famous person, Sire, patriotic kind " I also am a man of importance, a public man, Sir, of the patriotic gender., he meant nothing more than "genus." But later this general meaning of the word began to be misused in everyday English, the category of "neuter" also disappeared, and the division into masculine and feminine became the dominant meaning of the word. In the twentieth century, “genus” became just a euphemism for “gender”, so if you find a “gender” item in some official form, then you’re unlikely to write “patriotic” there these days.

In some scientific disciplines, especially in "gender studies", the sexual connotations of "gender" have developed in an even more specific sense. They began to be used to refer to the social (as opposed to biological) aspects of the difference between women and men. "Gender studies" thus deal more with the social roles of each sex than with the differences in their anatomy.

At the same time, linguists have deviated strictly in the opposite direction: they returned to the original meaning of the word, namely "type" or "kind", and today they use it for any division of nouns according to some significant properties. These properties can - but do not have to - be based on gender. Some languages, for example, have gender differences based only on "animate", on the difference between animate beings (humans and animals of both sexes) and inanimate objects. Other languages ​​draw the line differently and make a gender distinction between humans and non-humans (animals and inanimate objects). And also there are languages ​​that divide nouns into much more specific genders (gender). The African suppiret language in Mali has five genders: people, large objects, small objects, collectives and liquids. Bantu languages ​​such as Swahili have up to ten genera, and Australian Ngankitemerri is rumored to have fifteen different genera, including male human, female human, canine, neps, vegetable, drinking, and two different genera for the spear (depending on size and material).

In short, when a linguist (s) speaks of "studies of gender (genus)," it is equally likely to mean both "animals, plants and minerals" and the differences between men and women. Nevertheless, since studies of the influence of grammatical gender on thinking have so far been carried out exclusively on the material of European languages, in the gender system of which the masculine and feminine gender are more often distinguished, in the following pages we will focus on the masculine and feminine gender, and touch on the more exotic ones only in passing.

Everything that has been said so far may have given the impression that gender does make sense. The idea of ​​grouping objects with similar important properties in itself seems very reasonable, so it would only be natural to assume that, whatever criteria a language chooses to distinguish by genus, it will adhere to certain rules. As a consequence, we would expect the feminine genus to include all human or animal females, and only them, that the inanimate genus would include all inanimate objects, and only them, and that the vegetable genus would include ... well, vegetables.

Indeed, there are a handful of languages ​​that do behave this way. There are three genders in Tamil: masculine, feminine and neuter, according to the obvious properties of each noun, you can fairly confidently tell what kind it is. Nouns denoting men (and gods) are masculine; those that represent women and goddesses - female; everything else is objects, animals (and babies) are neuter. Another example of this correctness was Sumerian, the language spoken on the banks of the Euphrates about five thousand years ago by the people who invented writing and laid the foundation for history. The Sumerian gender system was not based on gender, but on the distinction between human and non-human, and nouns belonged to the corresponding gender in meaning. The only ambiguity was with the noun "slave", which was sometimes considered human and sometimes referred to non-human. Another language about which we can say that it is included in the elite club of logical division by gender is English. Gender there is noted only in pronouns (he, she, it), and the use of such pronouns is generally clear: "she" refers to women (and sometimes to female animals), "he" - to men and some male animals, "it" - to everything else. Exceptions such as "she" when applied to a ship are few and far between.

There are also some languages, like the Manambu from Papua New Guinea, where genders may not be entirely consistent, but where you can at least discern some rational principles. In manamba, the masculine and feminine genders include not only men and women, but also inanimate objects. But there are also reasonable and obvious rules for this division. For example, small and rounded things are feminine, and large and elongated ones are masculine. The belly is feminine, for example, but the belly of a pregnant woman, when it becomes very large, is said to be masculine. The conspicuous phenomena are masculine, less noticeable are feminine. The darkness is feminine, it is not yet completely dark, but when it becomes completely impenetrable black, it becomes masculine. You may not agree with this logic, but at least it is.

Finally, there are also languages ​​such as Turkish, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Indonesian and Vietnamese, which are absolutely consistent on the gender issue simply because they have no grammatical gender at all. In such languages, even pronouns referring to people do not carry generic differences, so there are no separate pronouns for "he" and "she". When my Hungarian friend gets tired, phrases like "she is Emmin's husband" slip through his speech. This is not because native Hungarian speakers are blind to the differences between men and women, but simply because it is not customary for them to determine a person's gender every time he or she is mentioned.

If gender divisions were always as consistent as in English or Tamil, then it would make no sense to ask whether their system affects how people perceive objects. After all, if the grammatical gender of each object only reflects its properties in the real world (man, woman, inanimate object, plant, etc.), it cannot add anything to those associations that already exist. But the fact is that languages ​​with a consistent and transparent gender system are in a hefty minority. The vast majority of languages ​​divide words by gender in a completely unpredictable manner. Most European languages ​​also belong to this group with incomprehensible genders: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Russian, Polish, Czech, Greek.

Even in the most disordered gender systems, there is usually a main group of nouns that are assigned grammatical gender for obvious reasons. In particular, males are almost always masculine. At the same time, women are much more often denied the privilege of belonging to the female gender, and instead they are ranked among the middle gender. German has a whole set of words for women, which are treated like "it": das Mädchen (girl, diminutive of "maiden"), das Fräulein (diminutive of Frau, diminutive of woman ), das Weib (woman, a word related to the English wife - "wife") or das Frauenzimmer ("woman", but literally "women's chambers": the original meaning refers to the living rooms of a lady, but the word began to be used to surround a noble lady, then for individual members of this environment, and then for less and less sophisticated women).

The Greeks are not much better with their women: their word for girls, kori`tsi (кορι`τσι), is, as you might expect, neuter, but if someone speaks of a pretty, curvy girl, they add the augmenting suffix -aros, and the resulting noun, kori`tsaros, "gingerbread maiden," then refers to ... masculine. (God knows that Whorf, or, in this case, Freud, would have built on this basis.) And if this seems complete madness, consider that in those old days, when the English language still had a real system of childbirth, the word "woman" did not belong to the female gender and not even to the middle, but, like the Greeks, to the male. The word woman comes from the Old English wif-man, literally "female man." Since in Old English the gender of a complex noun like wif-man was determined by the gender of the last element, and here he is man - "man" - masculine, it was necessary to use the pronoun "he" when speaking of a woman.

The custom of putting people - usually of a known gender - in the wrong genus is perhaps the most offensive element of the system. But if you count how many such nouns, then this oddity is rather marginal. But in the realm of inanimate objects, the matter unfolds in earnest. In French, German, Russian and most other European languages, masculine and feminine genders are extended to thousands of objects that are not related to men and women, no matter how you strain your imagination. What is so particularly feminine, say, for a Frenchman in a beard (la barbe)? Why in Russian is water “she” and why does it become “he” if a tea bag is dipped into it? Why does the German feminine sun (die Sonne) illuminate the masculine day (der Tag), while the masculine moon (der Mond) shines on the feminine night (die Nacht)? After all, in French he (le jour - "day") is usually illuminated by him (le soleil - "sun"), while her (la nuit - "night") - she (la lune - "moon" ). German cutlery perfectly represents the full range of gender roles: das Messer ("knife") is still "it", but on the other side of the plate lies a spoon (der Löffel) in all the glitter of masculinity, and next to it, blazing with sex appeal, a feminine fork (die Gabel). But in Spanish, the fork (el tenedor) already has a hairy chest and a loud voice, and she (la cuchara - "spoon") has a seductive figure.

For native English speakers, the rampant gender assignment of inanimate objects and the sometimes de-sexing of people is a cause of frustration and fun in equal measure. The promiscuous system of childbirth was the main subject of ridicule in Mark Twain's famous indictment "On the Terrible Difficulty of the German Language":

In German, a girl has no sex, although turnips, say, have one. What an excessive respect for a turnip and what an outrageous disregard for a girl! Admire how it looks in black and white - I borrow this dialogue from a well-proven German Sunday School reader:

Gretchen. Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
William. She went to the kitchen.
Gretchen. Where is the beautiful and educated English maid?
William. It went to the theater.

German grammar inspired Twain to write his famous "The Tale of a Fisherwoman and His Woeful Fate", which he literally translated from german Since the nouns of nouns in Russian are as random as in German, for the Russian reader, all this is not at all as funny as for the English-speaking. (Note trans.)... It starts like this:

Gloomy, cloudy Day! Listen to the Splash of Rain and the drumbeats of the Hailleaf - and Snow, look how its Flakes are flying and what Dirt is all around! People are knee-deep. Poor Rybachka got stuck in the impassable Tina, the Basket with the Fish fell out of his Hands; trying to catch the dodging Beasts, it pricked the Fingers on the sharp Scales; one Scale even got into his Eye, and it cannot pull it out. It opens its Mouth in vain, calling for Help, Its screams are drowned in the furious Howl of the Storm. And then out of nowhere - the Cat, grabs the big Fish and, apparently, wants to hide with him. But no! She just took a bite of the Fin and keeps it in her Mouth - is she going to swallow it? But no, the brave fisherman Dog keeps his Puppies, rescues Plavnik and immediately eats her as a Reward for his Feat. Oh God! Lightning struck the fisherman's Basket and lit it. See how the Flame licks the fisherwoman's Property with its furious purple Tongue; and now she throws herself on the helpless fisherman's Foot and burns it to the ground, except for the thumb, although it was burned in order. But still his insatiable Tongues flutter; they rush to the fisherwoman Bedro and devour her; rush to the fisherman's Hand and devour him; throw themselves on his beggarly Dress and devour it; rush to Rybachka's Body and devour it; twine around the Heart - and it is scorched; wraps around the Neck - and he is disgraced; wrap around the Chin - and it is scorched; twine around the Nose - and she is scorched. Another minute, and if Help does not arrive in time, the End of the Fisherman ...

The fact is that for the Germans this is not even remotely funny. It is in fact so natural that German translators have to work hard to convey the humor contained in this passage. One translator solved the problem by replacing the story with another, which he called Sehen Sie den Tisch, es ist grün - literally "Look at the table, it's green." If you find that your sense of humor has denied you, remember that in fact in German you should say: “Look at the table, it's green.” Twain was sure that there is something particularly depraved in the German gender system, and among all languages German is unusually and exaggeratedly irrational. But this confidence was based on ignorance, because if anything is unusual, it is English with its lack of irrational gender system. And at this point I have to declare a conflict of interest, because my native language, Hebrew, refers inanimate objects to the feminine and masculine gender are just as haphazard as German, French, Spanish or Russian.When I enter the house (m), the door (f) opens into the room (m) with carpet (m), table (m) and bookshelves (m) lined with books (m). From the window (m) I see trees (f), and on them birds (f., regardless of the randomness of their anatomy) If I knew more about ornithology ( f. r.), then I could, looking at each bird, tell what biological sex it is. I would point at her and explain to the less enlightened: "You can tell that she is a male by this red spot on her breast and also by the fact that she is larger than the female." And I wouldn't feel anything even remotely odd about it.

The wandering category of the genus is not confined to Europe and the Mediterranean basin. On the contrary, the further into the forest, the more genera in languages ​​and the wider the range of random divisions of words according to them. And hardly any such language will miss this great opportunity. In the Australian language Dirbal, the word "water" refers to the feminine gender, but in another native language, Mayali, water refers to the vegetable species. This vegetable and vegetable genus of the neighboring language of Curr-Kony includes the word "erriplen" - "airplane". In African suppire, the genus for "big things" includes, as you would expect, all large animals: horses, giraffes, hippos, etc. All? Well, almost: one animal was not considered large enough to include, and instead considered as a human race - it is an elephant.The problem is not where to find more examples, but in stopping in time.

Why do illogical gender categories develop in so many languages? We do not know much about the infancy of the generic systems, because in most languages ​​the origin of generic indicators is completely shrouded. gloom Generic indicators are elements that indicate the gender of a noun. Sometimes they can be endings with the noun itself, as in Italian ragazz-o - "boy" and ragazz-a - "girl". Otherwise, the generic mark may appear with adjectives that modify the noun, or with the definite and indefinite article. In Danish, for example, the nouns themselves dag - "day" and hus - "house" cannot be determined that they belong to different genders, but the difference is manifested through the indefinite article and the adjective: en kold dag - "cold day", but et koldt hus - "cold house". Gender can often be expressed in a verb: in Slavic languages ​​such as Russian or Polish, the ending -а is added to past tense verbs when the object is feminine. (Ed.) And in some Semitic languages, as in Maltese, the prefix t- indicates that the subject of the verb is feminine (tikteb - “she writes”), and the prefix j- indicates that the subject is masculine (jikteb - “ he's writing").... But the scraps of information that we do have make the ubiquitous irrationality of mature categories of genus especially strange, because, apparently, in the beginning the category of genus was completely logical. In some languages, especially in Africa, the feminine indicator looks like a contracted form of the word "woman", and the inanimate indicator resembles the word "thing". Likewise, the plant generic indicator in some Australian languages ​​is quite similar to the word ... "plant." Consequently, common sense dictates that gender markers came to life as generic nouns such as "woman", "man", "thing" or "plant." If so, it seems plausible that they originally applied only to women, men, things, and plants, respectively. But over time, generic indicators could spread to nouns outside of their original norm, and through a series of such splashes, the gender system quickly collapsed. In kurr-kony, for example, the vegetable genus began to include the noun "airplane" in a completely natural way: the original "vegetable" generic index first had to expand in general to plants, and then to all wooden objects. the natural step was to also include them in the vegetable genus. Since canoes were the main means of transport for the curr-koni speakers, the vegetable genus expanded to include vehicles in general. And so, when the borrowed word "erriplen" entered the language, it was quite natural attributed to the vegetable, that is, vegetable, genus Each step in this chain was natural and made sense in its local context, but the end result seems completely random.

Indo-European languages ​​could also start with a transparent generic system. But suppose, for example, that the moon was included in the masculine gender because it was personified by a male deity. Later, from the word moon came month - "month", meaning a length of time, and it is quite natural that if the moon was "he", then the month too "he" In Russian, there are the words “moon” of the feminine gender and “month” of the masculine, referring to the same astronomical object at different phases.... But if so, then the words for units of time, such as "day", also had to be included in the masculine gender. Although every step in this chain of extensions could be completely natural in itself, after two or three steps the original logic is eclipsed, and therefore the masculine or feminine gender is assigned to a multitude of inanimate objects for no intelligible reason.

The worst thing about this loss of transparency is that it is a self-sustaining process: the less consistent a system becomes, the easier it is to confuse it further. When enough nouns with a random gender accumulate in it, children learning the language can no longer expect to find reliable rules based on the real properties of objects, so they look for other kinds of clues. For example, they can guess what kind of a noun it sounds like (if X sounds like Y and Y is feminine, then X is probably feminine too). Incorrect children's assumptions are initially perceived as errors, but if over time such errors become fixed, then in this way all traces of the original logic will be lost pretty soon.

Finally, the irony of fate is that when a language loses one genus out of three, the result even increases the confusion in the system, rather than diminishes it. Spanish, French and Italian, for example, lost the original neuter gender of their Latin progenitor when the neuter gender merged with the masculine. But as a result, all inanimate nouns were randomly added to the masculine or feminine gender.

Nonetheless, accidental birth syndrome is not always an incurable disease for the tongue. As the history of the English language can attest, when a language manages to lose not one genus, but two, the result can be a thorough revision that completely eliminates the entire messy system. Until the 11th century, English had a complete system of three genders, just like German. English speakers in the 11th century would not have understood what Mark Twain mourned in his Tale of the Fisherwoman and His Woeful Fate, because for them wife (wif) - "woman" - was "it", fish (fisc) was "he "While fate (wyrd) was" she. " But in the XII century, all this changed.

The breakdown of the Old English birth system had little to do with raising the standards of sexuality education. The reason was rather that the gender system was completely dependent on the case endings system, and that was doomed. Initially, English had a complex case system, the same as in Latin, where nouns and adjectives get different endings, depending on their function in the sentence. Nouns of different genders had a different set of endings, so by the endings it was possible to judge what kind of a noun. But the system of endings quickly disintegrated in the first century after the Norman conquest, and as soon as the endings disappeared, a new generation of native speakers lost the clue how to tell which gender a noun should belong to. Growing up with a language that didn't give them enough clues to decide whether to refer to carrots as “her” or “him,” these new native speakers settled on a radical and highly innovative idea by calling it “it.” So, in just a few generations, the original incomprehensible genus system was replaced by a new one, with understandable rules, according to which (almost) all inanimate objects began to be referred to simply as "it".

Still, a few insidious nouns, especially feminine ones, have managed to avoid mass sterilization. Mark Twain, who was beside himself with the femininity of the German turnip, would have been surprised to learn that the same custom was still practiced in England just three hundred years ago. In London in 1561, the medical manual The Most Excellent and Perfect Home Pharmacy, or Home Healer for All Tissues and Diseases of the Body, was published, proposing the following composition against hoarseness: fire, until it turns black, then cleanse it and eat it as hot as it can endure. "

In dialects of English, the gender of some nouns lasted much longer, but in standard language, the influx of the neuter has flooded the world of inanimate objects, leaving only a few individual nouns to dangle in their femininity. The slow but sure "ononization" of English, one might say, anchored on March 20, 2002. To the sea, that day seemed like nothing more remarkable than any other. Lloyds List, the shipbuilding industry newspaper, published its daily report of incidents, accidents and attacks by sea pirates. Among other things, the newspaper mentioned the ferry "Baltic Jet", en route from Tallinn to Helsinki, which "had a fire in its left engine compartment at 8:14 local time", the tanker "Hamilton Energy", which left the docks of PortWeller in Canada after “Repairs carried out on the damage suffered by her in the collision. The accident caused a crack in the steering column and drove its propeller shaft into the gearbox and crushed the engine through. " Somewhere else in Canada, a shrimp trawler was stuck in the ice, but the owner said it was "likely to start and run under its own engine." In short, a day is like a day.

The real news that shook the ocean was reported on another page, in the editorial column. Punned by a muse, the editor announced under the headline “She won't be tomorrow today,” that “we must make a simple but significant decision to change our style and, from the beginning of next month, mention ships in neuter gender rather than feminine. This will bring our newspaper to the level of other most respected international business publications. "The public reaction was violent, and the editorial office was inundated with letters. One angry Greek reader wrote:" Sir, only a bunch of callous, out of touch with the life of arrogant Englishmen can change what we've been talking about ships “she” for thousands of years. Get out of there and get out of there and huddle your gardens and hunt foxes, you arrogant fools. Yours sincerely, Stefan Comianos. " , and in April 2002 “she” landed on the pier.

Gender and thinking

Languages ​​that treat inanimate objects as "him" and "her" force their speakers to speak of these objects in the same grammatical forms that apply to men and women. an inanimate noun and one of the sexes is heard by native speakers every time they are told the name of this object, and the same association comes out of their mouths every time they themselves have the opportunity to mention his or her name. kind, will tell you that once a custom has taken root and a masculine or feminine association with an object has been established, it is very difficult to get rid of it. I feel “she’s too soft.” She remains feminine all the way from the lungs to the glottis and becomes neuter when she reaches the tip of the tongue.

For serious research, however, my supposed feelings about beds are unlikely to pass as reliable evidence. The problem is not in the anecdotal nature of this information, but in the fact that I have not provided a single proof that the sensation of the bed as “her” arises deeper than in language, that is, it is not just a grammatical tradition. The automatic association between an inanimate noun and a gender-assigned pronoun does not in itself indicate that gender has a deeper influence on the thoughts of a native speaker. In particular, this does not mean that speakers of Hebrew or Spanish, in which the bed is feminine, actually ascribe some feminine properties to the beds.

Over the past century, various experiments have been carried out to test: can the grammatical gender of inanimate objects affect the associations of speakers? Probably the first such experiment was performed at the Moscow Psychological Institute in pre-revolutionary Russia in 1915. Fifty respondents were asked to imagine each day of the week as a person, and then describe the result for each day. It turned out that all participants saw for themselves Monday, Tuesday and Thursday as men, but Wednesday, Friday and Saturday as women. Why would that? When asked to explain their choice, few were able to provide a satisfactory answer. But the researchers concluded that the answer cannot but depend on the fact that in Russian Monday, Tuesday and Thursday are masculine, and Wednesday, Friday and Saturday are feminine.

In the 1990s, psychologist Tosi Konisi conducted an experiment comparing the gender associations of speakers of German and Spanish. In these languages, several inanimate nouns are of opposite genders. In German, air is feminine (die Luft), but el aire in Spanish is masculine; die Brücke ("bridge") is also feminine in German, but el puente in Spanish is masculine; and the same with watches, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, sun, peace and love. On the other hand, der Apfel (apple) in German is masculine, and la manzana in Spanish is feminine, and the same is true for chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain, and rubbish.

Konishi Sensei handed a list of such nouns with a gender mismatch to the speakers of German and Spanish and asked the participants to express their opinion on the properties of these nouns: they are weak or strong, small or large, and so on. On average, nouns that were masculine in German but feminine in Spanish (chairs and keys, for example) received higher grades for strength from the Germans, while bridges and clocks, for example, which are masculine in Spanish, and in German feminine, on average, were stronger among Spanish speakers. The simplest conclusion to be drawn from such an experiment is that Spanish speakers have more masculine connotations for bridges than German speakers. However, one could argue that it is not the bridge itself that carries such connotations - perhaps the whole point is that the noun follows the masculine article el or un. Then it turns out that when the speakers of Spanish and German just look at the bridge, these associations are not born in their minds, and only at the moment of pronouncing, only through the act of pronouncing or listening to the generic mark, the speaker has fleeting associations with masculine or feminine.

Therefore, it would be necessary to check whether the feminine and masculine associations work for inanimate nouns, even when generic indicators are not explicitly mentioned in the respective language. Psychologists Lera Boroditsky and Lorin Schmidt tried to do this by repeating a similar experiment with native speakers of Spanish and German, but this time they communicated with the participants in English, not their native languages. Although the experiment was conducted in a language that treats all inanimate objects as "it", the speakers of Spanish and German still differed markedly in the attributes they chose for their respective objects. German speakers tended to describe bridges as beautiful, elegant, fragile, peaceful, lovely, and slender; the Spaniards spoke of big, dangerous, long, sturdy, sturdy, billowing bridges.

A more radical way around the problem was developed by psychologist Marie Cera and her colleagues, who compared the reactions of speakers of French and Spanish, but used images instead of words. Two closely related languages, French and Spanish, mostly agree on gender, but there are still quite a few nouns that they disagree on: a fork, for example, will be in French la fourchette (f.), But el tenedor ( m. r.) in Spanish, and the same machine (la voiture fr., f., but el carro sp., m.) For the convenience of the Russian reader, the language and gender of the corresponding words are indicated in brackets. (Ed.) and bananas (la banane fr., f., but el pla`tano isp., m.); on the other hand, French beds are masculine (le lit), and Spanish beds are feminine (la cama), and the same is true for clouds (le nuage fr., m.p., but la nube sp., f.) and butterflies (le papillon fr., m. p., but la mariposa sp., f. p.). In this experiment, participants were asked to help prepare a movie that would bring common objects to life. Their task was to choose the right voice for each object in the film. They were shown a series of pictures and asked to choose between a male or a female voice for each shot. Although the names of the objects were not mentioned at all, when the French see a fork in the picture, most want it to speak in a female voice, while the Spaniards more often chose a male voice for this item. The picture of the bed was the opposite.

The above experiments are undoubtedly suggestive. It would seem that they clearly show that the grammatical gender of an inanimate object affects the properties that carriers associate with this object. Or at least these experiments demonstrate that gender influences responses when speakers are actively asked to use their imagination and name associations that arise about a particular gender. But this last point actually has a serious weakness. All the experiments described so far suffer from one basic problem, namely, that they force the participants to strain their imaginations. A skeptic might argue (quite rightly) that these experiments only prove that gender influences associations when participants are forced to invent unnatural properties for various inanimate objects. In the worst case, something like the following happens in the participant's head: “They ask me all sorts of stupid questions. Now they want me to come up with the properties of the bridge - oh Lord, what will happen next? Okay, I'll think of something, otherwise they will never let me go. I’ll say, perhaps, this and that ”. Under these circumstances, the first association that comes to mind for a Spanish speaker will indeed be masculine rather than feminine. In other words, if you force Spanish speakers to become poets here and now, forcing them to describe bridges, then the gender system will, of course, affect which epithets they choose. But how do we know if the masculine gender influences the wearer's spontaneous notion of bridges, without such exercises in custom poetry?

In the 1960s, linguist Susan Erwin tried to experiment with native speakers of Italian in such a way as to minimize the element of creativity. She proceeded from the fact that the Italian language is rich in dialects, which means that even a native speaker will not be too surprised to find completely unfamiliar words in a foreign dialect. Erwin compiled a list of meaningless words that sounded like they were dialectal names for different objects. Some of them ended in -o (masculine), while others ended in -a (feminine). She wanted to test what associations the native speakers of Italian would have, but so that the participants did not realize that they were being asked to turn on their creative imagination. So she told them that they would see a list of words from the Italian dialect that they did not know, and made them think that the purpose of the experiment was to test whether people could correctly guess the properties of words just by their sound. Participants were more likely to ascribe to words with the ending -o properties that are usually inherent in men (strong, large, ugly), while words in -and were more likely described by definitions more inherent in women (weak, small, cute). Erwin's experiment showed that gender influenced associations even when the participants did not know that they were being forced to think creatively and believed that the question posed to them had the right solution. This experience took several steps towards overcoming the problem of subjective judgments, but still did not completely solve it: although the participants did not know that they were forced to issue associations on demand, in fact they were required to do just that.

In fact, it is difficult to imagine how an experiment can be set up in such a way as to completely eliminate the influence of subjective judgments. For such a task requires no less than well-fed wolves and whole sheep: how can you experimentally establish whether the grammatical gender affects the associations of speakers without clarifying their associations? A few years ago, Lera Boroditsky and Lorin Schmidt found a way to do just that. They asked a group of Spanish speakers and a group of German speakers to participate in a memory game (which was conducted entirely in English to avoid explicit mention of gender). Participants were given a list of two dozen inanimate objects, and for each of these objects they had to remember a human name. For example, the name "Patrick" was assigned to "apple", and "bridge" was called "Claudia". Participants were given a certain amount of time to memorize the names of the objects, and then checked how well they did it. Statistical analysis of the results showed that they remembered names better if the gender of the object coincided with the gender of the name, and names with a mismatch of gender and gender were remembered worse. For example, native speakers of Spanish found it easier to remember the name associated with an apple (la manzana, f) if it was Patricia and not Patrick, and it was easier for them to remember the name of the bridge if it was Claudio and not Claudia. Since Spanish speakers found it objectively more difficult to match a bridge with a woman than with a man, we can conclude that when inanimate objects are masculine or feminine, associations with masculinity or femininity for these objects are present in the minds of Spanish speakers, even when they are actively discussed. do not ask and do not ask participants to speak up on such questions as “are bridges more powerful than slender?” and even if they speak English.

Of course, one could argue that this memorization task was rather artificial and somewhat distant from everyday life, in which one does not often need to remember whether apples and bridges are called Patrick and Claudia. But psychological experiments are often forced to rely on such narrowly defined tasks to reveal statistically significant differences. The importance of the results is not that they say about a specific task as such, but that they allow us to learn about the influence of genus in general, namely, that male or female associations of inanimate objects are strong enough in the minds of speakers of Spanish and German languages affect their ability to remember information.

In psychological experiments, of course, there is always room for improvement and improvement, and those described here are no exception. But the evidence to date leaves little doubt that the characteristics of the birth system have a significant impact on the thinking of native speakers. When language treats inanimate objects as men and women, in the same grammatical forms or with the same pronouns "he" and "she," then grammatical habits can spill over into thinking habits that go beyond grammar. The grammatical connection between the object and the genus affects children from a very early age and grows stronger thousands of times over the course of life. This constant work influences the associations that the hosts develop in relation to inanimate objects, and can endow these objects with imaginary feminine or masculine traits. Apparently, gender-related associations are not only created on demand, but are present even when not actively asked about them.

Thus, gender provides us with a second pattern of how mother tongue influences thinking. As before, the essential difference between languages ​​with and without a generic system is not what they allow their native speaker to express, but what they involuntarily force him to say. There is no reason to assume that gender affects someone's ability to think logically. Native speakers of gendered languages ​​perfectly understand the difference between gender and syntax and do not fall under the delusion that inanimate objects have a biological gender.

German women rarely confuse their husbands with hats (although their hat is masculine), the Spaniards are not noticed that they confuse the bed with the one who lies in it, and, presumably, animism is not more common in Italy or Russia than in Anglo -Saxony. Conversely, there is no reason to suspect that speakers of the Hungarian, Turkish or Indonesian languages, where there are no generic differences even in pronouns, are somehow limited in understanding the subtle aspects of the life of birds and bees.

However, even if gender does not restrict anyone's ability to reason, it does not make its consequences less severe for those imprisoned in a mother tongue with a gender system. For the system of childbirth can be almost like a prison, the walls of which are made of associations. Chains of associations generated by a genus in a language cannot be ignored.

But if you native English speakers feel tempted to sympathize with those who are under the heavy burden of an irrational ancestral system, think again. I would never trade with you. My mind may be burdened with a random and illogical set of associations, but my world has so much that you are completely deprived of, because the landscape of my tongue is much more fertile than your dry desert of the middle race.

Needless to say, the gender system is a gift of language to poets. The courageous Heine cedar suffers over the feminine palm; "My sister is life" by Boris Pasternak works only because "life" in Russian is feminine; Charles Baudelaire's English translations of Man and the Sea (L "homme et la mer), no matter how inspired, do not even come close to conveying the storm of rapprochements and contradictions that the author awakens between" him "(man) and" her "(sea); and English cannot do justice to Pablo Neruda's "Ode to the Sea", in which el mar ("sea", m. r.) hits a feminine stone (una piedra), and then "he caresses her, kisses her, drowns her, hits on your chest, repeating your name "- the English" it caresses it "- is not the same thing.

Needless to say, the genus category also enlivens the daily lives of mere mortals. Genus can be a nightmare for foreign language learners, but it doesn't seem to be too difficult for native speakers and makes the world more expressive. How boring it would be if the bee was not "she", and the moth was not "he", if no one could step from the feminine road to the masculine path, if twelve courageous months did not live inside feminine years, if it were impossible give a proper greeting to Mr. Cucumber and Mrs. Cauliflower. I would never want to lose the birth of my tongue. Together with Aunt Augusta, I could tell the English language that losing one family is a misfortune; lose both - looks like negligence Losing one parent can still be seen as a misfortune, but losing both, Mr. Worthing, is like negligence. (O. Wilde, “The Importance of Being Earnest.” Translated by I. Kashkin.).

15:44 - REGNUM Non / fiction has passed, and this year's list of novelties is especially rich in books for teenagers. It can be comics or adventures (real, in their classic sense), familiar modern plots or the modest charm of retro, but one trend is visible to the naked eye. Pictures or stickers from a girl's diary, a trade catalog of the early 20th century, an old clock or a typewriter on which a great ape is tapping the truth - the voice of things sounds on a par with the voices of heroes. And this is understandable: life is too dynamic, and they know how to tell things without unnecessary words.

A touching philosophical comic about growing up. Viola is thirteen, and almost every passer-by knows who she is, better than her. The indications contradict each other. How, how, how to put it all together? What is true and what is nonsense, air damage? What is important and what is nonsense, shouldn't you worry? A girl's album tells about all this: drawings, diary entries, photographs, thoughts and a thousand cute little things like badges or stickers. Which, by the way, are not at all trifles. The language of things in this book is no less expressive than the voice of the author.

In a word, this is the book that will become a close friend to any teenager. Even if he is a boy. Adults will also find it useful to read it in order to remember themselves and understand their teenager.

An exciting adventure-adventure story in the present (and almost forgotten) understanding of it. Just a few years, as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, and this time - in America it is called the "era of zero-zero" - striking, brilliant, enchanting, dramatic, and most importantly: incredibly reminiscent of our days. Progress has changed life completely and irrevocably. At every step, advertising, things - a sea of ​​things! - make you a human or an outcast. Money rules the world, and four orphans from a village somewhere in the swamps of Louisiana understand this especially well. Their life is bitter, but here between the lines one can clearly hear a cheerful motive in the spirit of ragtime. Something about the fact that with friends you can survive everything and cash in on your ... head a lot of adventures. And, of course, the famous Walker & Down catalog. The one that allows people to order things wherever they live!

Everything will start with him, it will continue and end with him. The second ragtime, which will reach us through the lines, will be about love: the old story of two adults sounds shrill against the background of the story of four children who are rapidly growing up.

Well, an adult reader (to whom we can safely recommend this book) will more than once find greetings to his beloved classic:. And not only to him.

Expected at "Samokat"

Evgeny Rudashevsky. Insomnia

Evgeny Rudashevsky- traveler and adventurer. The most real, such as the heroes of Jack London, Kerouac or Obruchev, only in our days. It is not for nothing that the hero of "Insomnia", a Moscow student sent to study in Chicago, mentions that he is reading Kerouac's "On the Road". The hero of "Insomnia" also tells something very similar to travel notes and also does it much deeper, sharper, more philosophical than the genre requires. The desire for freedom here is not so much emotion as probing the rules of the game, searching for reasons for misunderstanding, a desperate desire to cross the line beyond which the son of his parents ends and an adult man begins. Anyone who has caught some parallels with Salinger will not be mistaken. The hero reflects on his tastes, desires, acceptance and rejection, and this is the case when the disagreements between the reader and the hero (or his author?) Do not cause irritation, but meet with lively interest. One of the undisputed merits of the book is its language. Flexible, clean, natural, exhilarating. Who thinks clearly, clearly states.

Marked 16+, but great for thinking teenagers from 13 years old.

"Compass Guide"

The third part of the tetralogy "Through the Mirrors" - a fantasy novel by a French woman Christelle Dabo, from the first book beloved by the Russian reader. Babylon is featured here for a reason. Earthly continents have become separate arks, the gods who govern them have lost their memory, and in fact in the past they were all one family. Suffering themselves, the gods make people suffer, and the hand of the invisible God with all its might prevents the return of this memory.

Ophelia, the heroine of this large-scale narrative, knows how to read things, but is completely not adapted to the world around her. She would rather talk to things than people. Just like Thorne, cold and incomprehensible. It's simple: things don't lie.