8: SEX AND SYNTAX
The significance of the genders in Heine’s poem: Vygotsky 1987, 253, Veit 1976; and Walser 1983, 195–96.
“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem”: Heine quotes these lines in a letter to Moses Moser (Jan. 9, 1824) written not long after the poems were published: “Verwelke meine Rechte, wenn ich Deiner vergesse, Jeruscholayim, sind ungefähr die Worte des Psalmisten, und es sind auch noch immer die meinigen” (Heine 1865, 142).
“I also am a man of importance”: Bage 1784, 274.
Supyire: Carlson 1994.
Ngan’gityemerri: Reid 1997, 173.
Manambu: Aikhenvald 1996.
Underlying regularities in the distribution of genders in German: Köpcke and Zubin 1984.
The origin of gender systems: Claudi 1985; Aikhenvald 2000; and Greenberg 1978.
Loss of the genders in English: Curzon 2003.
“He that is become hoorse lately”: Brunschwig 1561, 14b–15a.
page 207 Dialectal uses of feminine nouns: Beattie 1788, 139, and Peacock 1877.
Femininity of “ship”: Strangely enough, “ship” is a relative newcomer on the gender ocean, for in Old English a scip was actually neuter, not feminine. So the use of a gendered pronoun here seems to be an actual case of personification, not just an old relic.
Experiment at the Moscow Psychological Institute: Jakobson 1959a, 237, and Jakobson 1972, 108.
German and Spanish comparisons: Konishi 1993.
French and Spanish comparisons: Sera et al. 2002.
Italian nonsense words: Ervin 1962, 257.
Boroditsky and Schmidt’s memory experiment: Boroditsky et al. 2003, but detailed results of the experiment based on Boroditsky and Schmidt (unpublished).
9: RUSSIAN BLUES
page 217 Japanese traffic lights: Conlan 2005. The official Japanese standard for green traffic lights shown in figure 7 is taken from Janoff 1994, and from the Web site of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Lighting Research Center (http://www.lrc.rpi.edu/programs/transportation
/LED/LEDTrafficSignalComparison.asp). The official American standard is taken from Institute of Transportation Engineers 2005, 24.
Kay and Kempton’s experiment: Kay and Kempton 1984. More sophisticated experiments of this nature were carried out by Roberson et al. 2000, 2005.
Russian blues: Winawer et al. 2007.
The border between siniy and goluboy: This border (and for English speakers, the border between light and dark blue) was determined after the experiment for each participant separately. Each participant was shown twenty different shades of blue and asked to say whether each one was siniy or goluboy. English speakers were asked whether each shade was “light blue” or “dark blue.”
Left and right visual fields experiments: Gilbert et al. 2006. The results of this experiment inspired a spate of adaptations by different teams in different countries. See Drivonikou et al. 2007; Gilbert et al. 2008; and Roberson et al. 2008. All the subsequent tests corroborated the basic conclusions.
Broca’s area as a seat of language: Broca 1861. For a history, see Young 1970, 134–49.
MRI experiment: Tan et al. 2008.
EPILOGUE: FORGIVE US OUR IGNORANCES
Influence of language on thought can be considered significant only if it bears on genuine reasoning: See, e.g., Pinker 2007, 135.
APPENDIX: COLOR: IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
Color sensation in the brain: For further details on the anatomy of color vision, see Kaiser and Boynton 1996 and Valberg 2005.
“with only a little exaggeration”: Mollon 1995, 134. On the evolution of color vision, see also Mollon 1999 and Regan et al. 2001.
Memory affects perception of color: Hansen et al. 2006.
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