The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester.  HarperPerennial, 1998.  242 pp.  978-0-06-083978-9.

… in which we learn about how the Oxford English Dictionary was created with the help of an Oxford professor and an inmate in an asylum for the criminally insane.

At first glance, this is simply the story of the writing of the English language’s most important reference book: the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).  However, in the hands of Simon Winchester, this seemingly dull story takes on a great deal of heart and life.  The OED spans twelve volumes, defines 414,825 words, and contains 178 miles of text.  As a point of comparison, the average fluent English speaker knows about 20,000 words. 

From its inception to the completion of the first edition of the OED, 70 years elapsed, and in those seven decades a group of dedicated scholars ponderously worked their way through all the words in the English language.  Their strategy was simple: read books, and write down every word they read.  Since this is obviously a gargantuan task, they enlisted the help of interested volunteers in English-speaking countries around the world.  In charge of the project was Professor James Murray, a man of humble origins who had attained his place at Oxford University through self-education (he never formally completed grammar school).  Over time, he found that over ten thousand of the OED’s definitions were submitted by a single volunteer: one Dr. William Chester Minor, who apparently lived a mere forty miles from Oxford.  Professor Murray took it upon himself to visit this prolific contributor to the dictionary, only to find that Dr. Minor was an American Civil War veteran who had murdered a man in London and was then found to be insane and was locked away for life in an insane asylum.  What followed from this shocking discovery was a friendship and an extremely productive partnership that would last for the remainder of their lives.

Through the Language Glass, by Guy Deutscher

Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, by Guy Deutscher.  Metropolitan Books, 2010.  304 pp.  978-0-8050-8195-4.

... in which we learn about how perception is affected by linguistics.

Psychologists, linguists, and anthropologists have long stood together in denouncing a possible link between culture/language and a person's perception of the world.  Originally, scientists and politicians would use a culture's "less evolved" language to indicate that the people themselves were also "less evolved."  Deutscher, a linguist, defends his dissenting opinion without coming across as condescending or superior.  The majority of the book focuses on differences in color perception across cultures.  For example, Homer used the phrase "wine-dark sea" to describe the ocean in The Iliad, but it is difficult to believe that the ancient Greeks could not distinguish between wine red and sea blue.  Some cultures consider blue to be part of the "green" section of the color spectrum.  A plethora of other color-related examples are packed into the first half of this book, which demonstrates that the linguistic differences are markers of how cultures divide up their color groups, or how many names they give to different shades of a color, is not necessarily a reflection of their ability to see colors. 

Another section of the book focuses on linguistic differences in directions (north, south, left, right, front, back, etc).  For example, some languages (like English) make it easier to indicate locations relative to the speaker... ie, the book is to my right.  In other languages, it is more common to use common geocentric directions... ie, the book is south of me.  In many of the cultures that prefer to use the cardinal NSEW directions, the people are much more aware of which direction is North.

Overall, Guy Deutscher is a very good writer.  The book is engaging and full of good explanations and amusing witticisms.  It's obviously a very well researched book, with almost 50 pages of end notes and citations.  For the most part, the book doesn't drag, and it's easy for someone not familiar with the intricacies of linguistics to keep up. The book includes several pages of colored panels with diagrams illustrating many of the different concepts; these diagrams definitely add a great deal to the book.  (Note to e-book readers: Apparently the e-book version of this book does not include the color diagrams, which makes it extremely difficult to follow some of the discussions on color.)

My main complaint about the book is that the majority of it is devoted to the discussion of color, from various angles.  Four or five of the nine chapters in the book are devoted to color-related topics.  I suppose that's the easiest topic to discuss from many angles, and it's one of the easier topics to illustrate.  There was one chapter on the spectrum of language complexity ("primitive" vs "developed" or "modern" languages), but it would have been edifying to have more discussion of that, or more of an exploration of the anthropology or psychology side. 

4/5 stars.