I've always thought that was a bit odd, but I couldn't put my finger on why. I never challenged it, but neither did I ever hear any evidence for it. I have repeated it myself, when my mother, a dedicated teacher, but also with some old fashioned ideas, announced that "English is the most complicated language in the world". I disagreed - I'm sure that I would find Mandarin or a Native American language far harder. I suspect that my mother said it to encourage learners not to give up, a sort of "Look how well you are doing, don't expect it to be easy, it's the most difficult language in the world". But I also had a feeling that we were being told it to stop racist ideas of 'primitive people speak primitive language'.
Another thing that was dismissed in very short order back when I started studying was the infamous "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis". This is the idea, expressed first in the 1920s, that a speaker's native language determines their perception of the world. In its most extreme form it suggests that the speaker's language is a mind-prison filtering their ideas, and not permitting them to think ideas outside the straight-jacket of their language. This is clearly nonsense, any idea can be expressed in any language. Our language does not prevent us from thinking certain things.
In this book the author demolishes the idea that all languages are equally complex, then he looks again at how our native language may affect our thoughts. It turns out that we can have our ideas steered in certain limited directions by our languages. Specifically, this may happen in two different scenarios. Firstly, in languages with gendered nouns, and secondly, in the assignment of the spectrum to different colour names.
Language Complexity
The first part of this book looks at different languages, and yes, they do differ considerably in complexity. Vocabulary is very much larger in literate cultures. In the first world we have borrowed words from the languages around us, because we have writing we are reminded of the words that have been used by generations before us. Speakers of languages in more isolated and illiterate societies have a much reduced vocabulary. On the other hand, there is an inverse correlation between the complexity of a society and the complexity of word structure - the morphology. Broadly speaking, in less complex societies more information is encoded into the word.
How Gender affects our Thoughts
In English we don't use gender for inanimate objects (except in a few very specific situations, boats, for example, are feminine), but most languages do use gender for inanimate objects. French, Spanish, and Welsh have masculine and feminine nouns. German adds neuter to these. These are not assigned in any obviously logical way (although they may once have been) and are seemingly random. Gender in linguistics doesn't even have to refer to sex, it just means 'type'. Some languages have a gender distinction between animate and inanimate objects, or between human and non-human animals. My favourite example was the Australian aboriginal language with 15 different genders, including two for spears - depending upon size and material.
However, it turns out, through very careful experimental design, that the genders of objects in our native language can affect our perception of that object. Speakers show differences in the attributes that they associate with an object because of the gender of that object in that language. So that German speakers will associate feminine adjectives (slender, graceful, beautiful, elegant, etc.) with a bridge while Spanish speakers will associate masculine adjectives (strong, sturdy, towering, big, etc.) with the same bridge - matching the gender of bridges in those languages. There is plenty of evidence for how this affects the thoughts of speakers of gendered languages. Obviously, it doesn't force the speaker to be unable to reason, but it does affect how they think about things.
How our Language can affect our Classification and Perception of Colour
The other way that language can affect how we perceive things is the names of colours. Deutscher explains how it came to be realised that ancient societies did not have the same descriptions of colour as we do today. They could see the same colours, but they had a much reduced range of descriptive terms for the colour spectrum, leading to what we would consider as some strange descriptions. Homer's "the wine-dark sea", for example. Rather weirdly this was noticed by Gladstone (yes, later Prime Minister), who had an obsession about Homeric poetry. For a long time there was a great deal of discussion about whether the Greeks had reduced colour vision. Finally it was found that less complex cultures also have a limited number of colour names, there is no problem with perception of colour, it's just whether your society needs to give that colour a name yet. That is hard for us to understand, in our society where colour is taught from an early age, dinning the colours of things into our children, telling them that the sky is 'blue'. The spectrum is not discrete, different cultures divide it up into different boundaries, which affects our ease at matching the colours, especially near the boundaries between each colour.
Speakers find it easier to match colours when the colours have a recognised name in their language. Thus Russian speakers, who divide the colour 'blue' into two different colours siniy and goluboy - light and dark, have faster reaction times when matching colours than English speakers do, who see these colours as one.
An interesting book for updating my Linguistics knowledge.
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