In April 2002, the great journal Lloyd's List gave shipping a sex change, switching the nautical pronoun to "it". According to Guy Deutscher, "'she' fell by the quayside." There, in half a sentence, ...

Guy Deutscher is that rare beast, an academic who talks good sense about linguistics, his chosen field. In his new book, Through the Language Glass (Heinemann), he fearlessly contradicts the ...

Using language himself in a lively and engaging way, Deutscher, an expert in Semitic languages at the University of Leiden in Holland, identifies two principles—the desire to create order out of ...

This fascinating pop-linguistics study contends that how we talk influences how we think about the world, from the way we give directions to the colors poets see. Drawing on everything from classics ...

Judging from how the Times magazine’s excerpt from Guy Deutscher’s new book has been one of the most read pieces in the paper for over a week now, the book is on its way to libating readers ever eager ...

Guy Deutscher continues a tradition of blaming Benjamin Whorf for the “strong” linguistic determinism hypothesis (“language constrains thought”). But Whorf never made that claim. He argued for the ...

A RECENT Sunday Magazine article by the linguist Guy Deutscher seemed to fascinate readers, moving quickly onto The Times’s “most e-mailed” list and staying there for several days. It is easy to ...

But, while puncturing the myth of a linguistic golden age, Deutscher does point us back to something akin: the Proto-Indo-European tongue, from which almost all languages from the Celtic fringe to the ...

The cover blurbs for Guy Deutscher’s “The Unfolding of Language” (Metropolitan Books, 320 pages, $26) imply a Richard Attenborough-style tour through the variety among the world’s languages, peeking ...