Skip to main content

Guy Deutscher – Four Way Interview

Guy Deutscher read Mathematics at Cambridge and went on to do a doctorate in Linguistics.
Formerly a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, and of the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Languages in the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, he is an honorary Research Fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures in the University of Manchester. His books include The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention and Through the Language Glass.
Why Linguistics?
For scientists, the two biggest questions are how the world works and how it came to be the way it is now. For me, language has always been the particular aspect of the world that cried out for explanation. Language is mankind’s greatest invention – except, of course, that it was never invented. And it is exactly this paradox that has been at the core of my fascination with language ever since I started thinking about it as a child. Language is an incredibly refined instrument. With the most meagre tools – a few dozen morsels of sound – it allows us to convey unlimitedly sophisticated thoughts, and I always wanted to know: how does it manage this? And how could such a clever system ever come into being if it wasn’t designed on an architect’s table?
Why this book?
No matter what aspect of language you are trying to look into, there is one fundamental question that you can hardly avoid: the question of innateness. How much of language is the bequest of nature and how much is influenced by culture? How much is hardwired and determined directly by the genes, and how much is cultural convention? In my previous book on the evolution of language (The Unfolding of Language), I tried very hard not to be sucked into this controversy too directly, although my approach clearly suggested that culture has much more to offer than what it is generally given credit for today. In Through the Language Glass, which is a kind of sequel, I decided to make the case for culture more explicit, and show how cultural conventions have the power to shape some of the most fundamental aspects of language, even those that common sense would have sworn must simply be natural and universal. This debate has as a natural corollary another great controversy, the question of the mother-tongue’s influence on the way we think and perceive the world. So this time, I decided to attack these two bitter controversies head on.
What’s next?
I’m toying with different ideas. One question I find particularly interesting, but couldn’t incorporate into this book, is how politeness and other conventions of social interaction are both mirrored in language, and how they may be affected by language. Another area of interest goes beyond language, to explore ideas about heredity in the past and their relation to ideology. But these are early days for that.
What’s exciting you at the moment?
The other great invention of mankind – music. I’m learning eighteenth century harmony together with my daughter.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are
Post a Comment
Read more

Space Oddities - Harry Cliff *****

In this delightfully readable book, Harry Cliff takes us into the anomalies that are starting to make areas of physics seems to be nearing a paradigm shift, just as occurred in the past with relativity and quantum theory. We start with, we are introduced to some past anomalies linked to changes in viewpoint, such as the precession of Mercury (explained by general relativity, though originally blamed on an undiscovered planet near the Sun), and then move on to a few examples of apparent discoveries being wrong: the BICEP2 evidence for inflation (where the result was caused by dust, not the polarisation being studied),  the disappearance of an interesting blip in LHC results, and an apparent mistake in the manipulation of numbers that resulted in alleged discovery of dark matter particles. These are used to explain how statistics plays a part, and the significance of sigmas . We go on to explore a range of anomalies in particle physics and cosmology that may indicate either a breakdown i
Post a Comment
Read more

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re
Post a Comment
Read more