Colour #3: Assigning Names

How does one check whether language reflects reality? Or if it is a lens that affects what we perceive and register? At this point, Europeans realized none of their languages could help answer the question – they were too similar, and had intermixed too much. So they began to pay attention to the languages of far off places, including the so-called “primitives”, writes Guy Deutscher in Through the Language Glass.

“The deficiencies that Gladstone and Geiger had uncovered were replicated exactly in living languages all over the world… (for example) red was always the first of the prismatic colours to receive a name.”

 

On the other hand, the eyesight data contradicted the idea of “defective colour vision” – no tribe was found that couldn’t make out the difference among colours. What had seemed impossible was now a reality – even if people could notice a difference, they didn’t always bother to assign it a word.

 

Magnus now tweaked his theory. Agreed, he said, everyone could see the colours, but perhaps they didn’t see it with the same level of clarity. Maybe that was why they didn’t bother assigning names to those colours, he suggested.

 

WHR Rivers went and spent time among the natives of Australia. He used an improved version of the wool skein test to test the colour differentiation skills of the natives. He found they could easily differentiate colours for which they had no name. Even more, they could differentiate shades of the same colour, even if they had no name for that colour. Therefore, he concluded, one cannot infer from the language what a set of people may be able to see.

 

But he was still foxed by how/why a tribe could have the same colour name for what we call black and blue? Aren’t they really separate colours, so why a single word? This is hard for many to imagine even today. Aren’t the two colours obviously different? Not because we gave them two different names?

 

Deutscher gives a great counter-example. Russian has different names for dark blue and light blue – they are not shades of the same colour. To a Russian, it would appear weird why English speakers don’t have different names (after all, a Russian would say, English speakers can see that navy blue is different from sky blue, yet they call them both blue. Why would they do that?).

 

In fact, young kids, even at age 3, when they have a decent vocab, still struggle with several colour names. That too is a (weak) “proof” that several colours (not all) are cultural constructs, not natural ones.

 

Not convinced? Take tastes. Isn’t it but inevitable that any region would only assign words for tastes of things available (or cooked) in that place? Even if you stumble upon a new taste, would you assign a word for it if nothing else tastes like that and you’re not likely to experience it often?

“Just replace ‘taste’ with ‘colour’ and you’ll see the parallel is quite close.”

Think of that a bit more: we have a refined vocabulary for colour but a vague vocabulary for taste. But we hardly give it any thought and consider it “natural”. From there, it’s not too hard to imagine a culture that might assign far more precise words for various tastes and would find our limited taste related words as weird and constraining as Gladstone found Homer’s.

 

Culture seemed to be the basis of far more things in language than imagined.

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