In his book German shows on the one hand, that language may have rules that go beyond the scope European-influenced voice ideas loose. These partly very short digressions (eg about the number of sounds Namibian languages or epistemological versions of Amazon languages) I found extremely instructive. On the other German would explore how language influences thought. To this end, he grabs a few topics out:
The first half of the book is devoted to the development of the color on the times and cultures. The realization that black and white (and light and dark) dominate in ancient texts as long as color could not break away from their substrate (ie, when you could not even dye fabrics) is recovered quickly; find that the first color red and the last blue a popular name, is quick conclusion. But German depicts the history of the linguistic development of this aspect in my opinion exemplifies the development of the discipline of the history of language itself; for me this was very enlightening historicizing with all its progress and setbacks since 1850 - in many ways it mirrors so the history of the whole linguistics resist.
Then discussed German egocentric versus geographic systems of orientation; instead of left / right using some Australian languages only North / South / West / East. This is followed by an excursion to the natural and grammatical gender; here was German for me too much on superficial effects of which clearly have the native English speaker as the main readers in its sights - the German knows only the natural sex, whereas, for example, the German knows only grammatical gender, which for English speakers a Graus is to learn the German language. Here was German of my expectations; in which little linguistic history, which I had learned while studying, I have more about the background of sex experienced in languages as in this book.
Overall, it seemed to me that German has clamped together in this volume several academic works of different depths; a very detailed first part has rather the depth of a master's thesis or a dissertation abstract, whereas the other parts are more reminiscent of depth and volume, to essays for journals. Therefore, I can understand the criticism of some reviewers that the book seems cobbled together. Also I'm not sure if German has really shown whether language influences thought - it seemed to me it usually the other way around. Because it's still enjoyable and instructive, 4 stars!
