Gender thus provides our second example of how the mother tongue influences thought.

When one hears about acts of extraordinary bravery in combat, it is usually a sign that the battle has not been going terribly well. For when wars unfold according to plan and one’s own side is winning, acts of exceptional individual heroism are rarely called for. Bravery is required mostly by the desperate side.

Noam Chomsky has famously argued that a Martian scientist would conclude that all earthlings speak dialects of the same language.

Much of a language’s complexity is not necessarily for effective communication.

Why should color, of all things, be at the center of so much crossfire? Perhaps because in meddling with such a deep and seemingly instinctive area of perception, culture camouflages itself as nature more successfully there than in any other area of language. There is nothing remotely abstract, theoretical, philosophical, hypothetical, or any other -cal, so it seems, about the difference between yellow and red or between green and blue.

Really, it is unfair to say that English spelling is not an accurate rendering of speech. It is – it’s only that it renders the speech of the 16th century.

To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.

Franz Delitzsch, who put it most memorably when he wrote in 1878 that “we see in essence not with two eyes but with three: with the two eyes of the body and with the eye of the mind that is behind them. And it is in this eye of the mind in which the cultural-historical progressive development of the color sense takes place.

and people believed that swearing falsely by a god would bring the terrible wrath of that god upon them.

Language is mankind’s greatest invention – except, of course, that it was never invented.