--- product_id: 48453374 title: "Through the Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages" price: "129.98 DT" currency: TND in_stock: true reviews_count: 8 url: https://www.desertcart.tn/products/48453374-through-the-language-glass-why-the-world-looks-different-in store_origin: TN region: Tunisia --- # 4.4/5 average rating Explores 100+ languages & cultures 33,310 Best Seller Rank Through the Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages **Price:** 129.98 DT **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Summary > 🌐 See the world differently—one language at a time! ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** Through the Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages - **How much does it cost?** 129.98 DT with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.tn](https://www.desertcart.tn/products/48453374-through-the-language-glass-why-the-world-looks-different-in) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Key Features - • **Engaging & Accessible:** Academic rigor meets warm, witty storytelling—no jargon, all intrigue. - • **Cross-Cultural Insights:** Dive into linguistic mysteries from Greek epics to remote tongues. - • **Endorsed by Stephen Fry:** Join the intellectual elite who swear by this captivating read. - • **Perfect for Curious Minds:** Ideal for linguists, managers, and global professionals craving fresh perspectives. - • **Unlock the World Through Language:** Discover how language shapes perception and culture like never before. ## Overview Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher is a bestselling, critically acclaimed exploration of how language influences thought and perception. With a 4.4-star rating from over 1,000 readers, this book blends academic insight with engaging storytelling, examining linguistic diversity across cultures and its impact on cognition, color perception, and social interaction. ## Description Buy Through the Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages 1 by Deutscher, Guy (ISBN: 8601404302152) from desertcart's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders. Review: Fascinating study of how our language shapes how we see the world - This isn't the usual sort of book that I review - Language & Linguistics is a bit more upmarket than the usual romance or vampire novels that I tend to read. However, I was browsing in a bookshop in Berlin and among the `Englische Bücher' I saw this book featured. It had an endorsement on the front by Stephen Fry so I thought I'd give it a go. I'm really glad I did as reading this book opened up a whole new way of looking at things. Guy Deutscher looks in detail at how the language we speak may colour our view of the world - focusing on colour and how we name/see it (from the Greek Iliad and the wine-dark sea to how Russians react to different shades of blue) and how position of objects can be described in different ways depending on how your culture marks out place. There was so much packed into this book that I found myself hooked, reading it until late in the night and going back to read some sections again. The language examples are from a vast array of languages - modern European ones with which we may be familiar to some of the much less well-known tongues from the antipodes and further. Although the author is an academic this book was fun, engaging, warm and in no way dry and dusty. I also think it worth mentioning that the quality of the writing was absolutely excellent. Deutscher's English is lovely, with a great turn of phrase. All the more amazing when you discover that his mother tongue is Hebrew and so English is a second language to him. I was really impressed by the way that he could express himself in English whilst explaining how something may seem to him as someone who sees the world through a Hebrew mind. I heartily recommend this book to anyone with the faintest of interest in language, linguistics, colours and more. Review: A worthwhile read, though with its flaws - In general I found this a useful and interesting read, though perhaps not quite up to “The unfolding of language”. I didn’t find the book particularly overlong nor Deutscher’s language too verbose (I’ve come across far worse), and perhaps there was too much on colour and not enough on gender or other language differences. That said, the journey was perhaps more interesting than the destination. Of course our language affects the way we think: language is part of our culture and our culture certainly has an impact on our social mores. The converse is also true: changes in our culture will effect changes in our language. Foreign words are adopted to discuss new ideas, the uses of gender are modified, new words are created by the “pop” generation, new poetries are invented. Investigation of the impact of language on culture could be investigated by studying bilingual children, for instance do they choose which language to use for a specific task? Deutscher thinks we should be surprised that the English concept of “we” can have multiple words in other languages. I don’t find this surprising as “we” is so often ambiguous: does it or does it not include the person being spoken to? Multiple words for “I” might be more interesting. Homer’s use of colour is superficially strange, but we also use colour in very poetic ways: from Coleridge’s Rime of the ancient mariner we have “All in a hot and copper sky, The bloody Sun at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the Moon”. And there’s a wonderful line from Tom Jones’s Delilah, “Her golden lips like cherries”. In discussing colours Deutscher perhaps misses a trick: colour has a well-defined scientific meaning, however I think a popular language definition of colour would be difficult. Does “colour” have the same meaning in all languages? I found it interesting that some colours were named before others, with “blue” being relatively recent and I’m dying to ask my grandchildren if they can identify the sky as blue. Deutscher states that the bible makes no direct mention of blue, however the colours turquoise (techelet, (תכלת, purple, and scarlet are mentioned in Exodus 25:4 and in many of the following verses. Also in Numbers 15:38 is the commandment to wear turquoise “tzizit” (fringed garment). There is an interesting Wikipedia article on techelet: the exact colour of techelet is not known and might be any colour from midnight blue to turquoise. My guess is that detailed colour naming happens on demand, for instance when people start to use pigments for dying clothes or in art. Ascribing names to colours by hue is only one option. Even in English we use value and saturation: brown is orange with a lower colour value, and white through grey through black represents a change in value. Pink, on the other hand, is a desaturated red. The appendix provided a useful primer on colour vision: I hadn’t realised how close the frequency responses of the “red” and “green” cones were to each other and how much they overlapped. I like Deutscher’s argument that whilst any language can be used to express any idea (Turing complete, anyone?), languages vary in what they require is expressed. Take the sentence “a neighbour visited him”: French and many other languages would reveal the sex of the neighbour. Hungarian (and Finish) and other languages would not reveal the sex of the subject (male in this example). In Chinese the tense can be omitted so we would have no notion of when the visit happened. In the Matse language the tense reveals how recently the visit occurred and how certain the reporter was about the event. Deutscher clarifies the distinction between gender and sex. The former just means type or genus, and is used to classify nouns; the latter reflects an animal’s physical characteristics (technically the female animal provides eggs, the male provides sperm: with the difference between egg and sperm being solely a matter of the cell size). Why does English not have gendered nouns? In general language simplification is a consequence of invasion resulting in Pidgin and then a Creole. English did have three genders, but these were lost following the Norman conquest. Overall, a useful book. ## Features - New Store Stock ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | 33,310 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) 5,526 in Social Sciences (Books) | | Customer Reviews | 4.4 out of 5 stars 1,031 Reviews | ## Images ![Through the Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71cslaX-yYL.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Fascinating study of how our language shapes how we see the world *by H***X on 3 April 2011* This isn't the usual sort of book that I review - Language & Linguistics is a bit more upmarket than the usual romance or vampire novels that I tend to read. However, I was browsing in a bookshop in Berlin and among the `Englische Bücher' I saw this book featured. It had an endorsement on the front by Stephen Fry so I thought I'd give it a go. I'm really glad I did as reading this book opened up a whole new way of looking at things. Guy Deutscher looks in detail at how the language we speak may colour our view of the world - focusing on colour and how we name/see it (from the Greek Iliad and the wine-dark sea to how Russians react to different shades of blue) and how position of objects can be described in different ways depending on how your culture marks out place. There was so much packed into this book that I found myself hooked, reading it until late in the night and going back to read some sections again. The language examples are from a vast array of languages - modern European ones with which we may be familiar to some of the much less well-known tongues from the antipodes and further. Although the author is an academic this book was fun, engaging, warm and in no way dry and dusty. I also think it worth mentioning that the quality of the writing was absolutely excellent. Deutscher's English is lovely, with a great turn of phrase. All the more amazing when you discover that his mother tongue is Hebrew and so English is a second language to him. I was really impressed by the way that he could express himself in English whilst explaining how something may seem to him as someone who sees the world through a Hebrew mind. I heartily recommend this book to anyone with the faintest of interest in language, linguistics, colours and more. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ A worthwhile read, though with its flaws *by D***N on 7 January 2022* In general I found this a useful and interesting read, though perhaps not quite up to “The unfolding of language”. I didn’t find the book particularly overlong nor Deutscher’s language too verbose (I’ve come across far worse), and perhaps there was too much on colour and not enough on gender or other language differences. That said, the journey was perhaps more interesting than the destination. Of course our language affects the way we think: language is part of our culture and our culture certainly has an impact on our social mores. The converse is also true: changes in our culture will effect changes in our language. Foreign words are adopted to discuss new ideas, the uses of gender are modified, new words are created by the “pop” generation, new poetries are invented. Investigation of the impact of language on culture could be investigated by studying bilingual children, for instance do they choose which language to use for a specific task? Deutscher thinks we should be surprised that the English concept of “we” can have multiple words in other languages. I don’t find this surprising as “we” is so often ambiguous: does it or does it not include the person being spoken to? Multiple words for “I” might be more interesting. Homer’s use of colour is superficially strange, but we also use colour in very poetic ways: from Coleridge’s Rime of the ancient mariner we have “All in a hot and copper sky, The bloody Sun at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the Moon”. And there’s a wonderful line from Tom Jones’s Delilah, “Her golden lips like cherries”. In discussing colours Deutscher perhaps misses a trick: colour has a well-defined scientific meaning, however I think a popular language definition of colour would be difficult. Does “colour” have the same meaning in all languages? I found it interesting that some colours were named before others, with “blue” being relatively recent and I’m dying to ask my grandchildren if they can identify the sky as blue. Deutscher states that the bible makes no direct mention of blue, however the colours turquoise (techelet, (תכלת, purple, and scarlet are mentioned in Exodus 25:4 and in many of the following verses. Also in Numbers 15:38 is the commandment to wear turquoise “tzizit” (fringed garment). There is an interesting Wikipedia article on techelet: the exact colour of techelet is not known and might be any colour from midnight blue to turquoise. My guess is that detailed colour naming happens on demand, for instance when people start to use pigments for dying clothes or in art. Ascribing names to colours by hue is only one option. Even in English we use value and saturation: brown is orange with a lower colour value, and white through grey through black represents a change in value. Pink, on the other hand, is a desaturated red. The appendix provided a useful primer on colour vision: I hadn’t realised how close the frequency responses of the “red” and “green” cones were to each other and how much they overlapped. I like Deutscher’s argument that whilst any language can be used to express any idea (Turing complete, anyone?), languages vary in what they require is expressed. Take the sentence “a neighbour visited him”: French and many other languages would reveal the sex of the neighbour. Hungarian (and Finish) and other languages would not reveal the sex of the subject (male in this example). In Chinese the tense can be omitted so we would have no notion of when the visit happened. In the Matse language the tense reveals how recently the visit occurred and how certain the reporter was about the event. Deutscher clarifies the distinction between gender and sex. The former just means type or genus, and is used to classify nouns; the latter reflects an animal’s physical characteristics (technically the female animal provides eggs, the male provides sperm: with the difference between egg and sperm being solely a matter of the cell size). Why does English not have gendered nouns? In general language simplification is a consequence of invasion resulting in Pidgin and then a Creole. English did have three genders, but these were lost following the Norman conquest. Overall, a useful book. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Fascinating stuff *by D***R on 19 October 2010* Well, what a extremely pleasant surprise this book turned out to be! I work as a teacher in advertising so language is quite logically one of my interests, and in a way very much the basis of everything I discuss with my students. Brilliant advertising strategies and original creative concepts will still get you nowhere if the language doesn't appeal to the target group. But alas, many books on language (regardless whether they focus on advertising or not) are, how shall I put this?, not very engaging. Not so with 'Through the language glass'! In fact, this book had me enthralled from the very start and is as gripping reading as some of the very best detective novels. It's insightful, Deutscher argues his case (that the language you grow up with can and does indeed colour - in more than a literal sense of the word - the way your mind works) very convincingly and eloquently, and on top of that it's absolute fun to read. If only all books on communication and language were this good! Absolutely must-read, and not just for language teachers! After all, whatever field you're active in, language is what we all use to reason with and express ideas in so if - as Deutscher convinced me is effectively the case - language can colour the way your mind works this surely is of interest to all of us. --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.tn/products/48453374-through-the-language-glass-why-the-world-looks-different-in](https://www.desertcart.tn/products/48453374-through-the-language-glass-why-the-world-looks-different-in) --- *Product available on Desertcart Tunisia* *Store origin: TN* *Last updated: 2026-05-31*