Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (12 page)

At the last hurdle, then, Rivers’s imagination simply lost its nerve and balked at the idea that “blue” is ultimately a cultural convention. He could not bring himself to concede that people who saw blue just as vividly as he did would still find it natural to regard it as a shade of black. And in all fairness, it is difficult to blame him, for even with the wealth of incontrovertible evidence at our disposal today, it is still very hard for us to muster the imagination needed to accept that blue and black seem separate colors just because of the cultural conventions we were reared on. Our deepest instincts and guttest of feelings yell at us that blue and black are
really
separate colors, as are green and blue, whereas navy blue and sky blue, for instance, are
really
just different shades of the same color. So before we continue with the final episode of the quest for the origin of the color sense, we can take a short break from the historical narrative and embark on three thought experiments that might help to make the power of cultural conventions sink in.

The first experiment is an exercise in counterfactual history. Let’s imagine how the color-sense debate might have unfolded had it been conducted not in England and Germany but in Russia. Imagine that a nineteenth-century Russian anthropologist, Yuri Magnovievitch Gladonov, goes on an expedition to the remote British Isles off the northern coast of Europe, where he spends a few months with the reclusive natives and conducts detailed psychological tests on their physical and mental skills. On his return, he surprises the Royal Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg with a sensational report. It turns out that the natives of Britain show the most curious confusions in their color
terminology in the
siniy
and
goluboy
area of spectrum. In fact, the aboriginal population of those cloud-swept isles does not distinguish between
siniy
and
goluboy
at all and calls them by the same name! At first, Gladonov says, he assumed the natives had a defect in their vision, perhaps because of lack of sufficient sunlight during most of the year. But when he tested their eyesight, he found that they could distinguish perfectly well between
siniy
and
goluboy
. It was just that they insisted on calling both these colors “blue.” If pressed to explain the difference between these two colors, they would say that one was “dark blue” and the other “light blue.” But they insisted it was “ridiculous” to call these two shades different colors.

Now, when the mirror is turned on our own linguistic vagueness, the idea that our “defective” color vocabulary has anything to do with defective eyesight immediately appears ludicrous. Of course English speakers can see the difference between navy blue and sky blue. It’s simply that their cultural conventions regard these as shades of the same color (even though the two colors actually differ by wavelength just as much as sky blue does from green, as can be seen in the picture of the spectrum in
figure 11
). But if we can bring ourselves to view the spectrum through Russian eyes and look at
siniy
and
goluboy
as two separate colors, it might also become a little easier to empathize with those clueless primitives who do not separate “blue” from “green,” for instance. Just as English lumps
goluboy
and
siniy
under one “blue” concept, other languages extend this lumping principle to the whole green-blue range. And if you happened to grow up in a culture where this chunk of the spectrum has just one label, let’s say “grue,” wouldn’t it seem silly that some languages treat leaf grue and sea grue as two separate colors rather than as two shades of the same color?

The second thought experiment may require less imagination than the first, but it needs some precious equipment. Rivers did not have children of his own, but it is tempting to think that if he had examined Western children’s struggles with color, he might not have been so
flummoxed by the Torres Strait islanders. Scientists have long been aware that children’s acquisition of color vocabulary is remarkably slow and laborious. And yet the acuteness of the difficulties never fails to amaze. Charles Darwin wrote that he had “attended carefully to the mental development of my young children, and with two, or as I believe three of them, soon after they had come to the age when they knew the names of all common objects, I was startled by observing that they seemed quite incapable of affixing the right names to the colours in coloured engravings, although I tried repeatedly to teach them. I distinctly remember declaring that they were colour-blind, but this afterwards proved a groundless fear.” Estimates of the age at which children can reliably name the major colors have dropped considerably since the earliest studies a century ago, which reported the incredibly high figures of seven to eight years of age. According to modern surveys, children learn to use the main color words reliably a lot earlier, in their third year. Nevertheless, what seems so strange is that by an age when children’s linguistic ability is already fairly developed, they are still entirely thrown by colors. It is surprising to see how children who would effortlessly find a circle or square or triangle when asked to point at it, still react with complete bemusement when asked to pick out the “yellow one” from a group of objects, and reach completely at random for whatever is closest at hand. With intense training, children in their second year can produce and use color words accurately, but the dozens of repetitions required for learning the concept of color as an attribute independent of particular objects contrast dramatically with the effortless ease with which children learn the names for the objects themselves—usually after hearing the names for them just once.

So what happens to children who grow up not in a culture that shoves brightly colored plastic toys before their eyes and stuffs color names down their ears but rather in a culture where artificially manufactured colors are scarce and color is of very limited communicative importance? Two Danish anthropologists who had once immersed themselves in the society of a Polynesian atoll called Bellona described their surprise at how rarely the Bellonese talked about color with their children. When explaining the differences between objects such as
fruits or fish, which to our mind would be most easily classified by their color, the Bellonese hardly ever seemed to mention color at all. The anthropologists could not resist asking why, but the only answer they got was “we don’t talk much about color here.” Without such coaching in colors, it is perhaps not so surprising that Bellonese children end up being quite content with a very “defective” inventory of color names.

As it so happened, I started researching this book just as my elder daughter was learning to speak, and my obsession with color meant she was trained intensely and so learned to recognize color names relatively early on. Since there was one particular “failure” that struck Gladstone, Geiger, and above all Rivers so forcefully, I decided to conduct a harmless experiment. Gladstone could not conceive how Homer failed to notice that “most perfect example of blue,” the southern sky. Geiger spent pages marveling at the absence of the sky’s blueness in ancient texts, and Rivers could not get over the natives’ designation of the sky as black. So I wanted to test how obvious the color of the sky really was to someone who had not yet been culturally indoctrinated. I decided never to mention the color of the sky to my daughter, although I talked about the color of all imaginable objects until she was blue in the face. When would she hit upon it herself?

Alma recognized blue objects correctly from the age of eighteen months, and started using the word “boo” herself at around nineteen months. She was used to games that involved pointing at objects and asking what color they were, so I started occasionally to point upwards and ask what color the sky was. She knew what the sky was, and I made sure the question was always posed when the sky was well and truly blue. But although she had no problems naming the color of blue objects, she would just stare upwards in bafflement whenever I asked her about sky, and her only answer was a “what are you talking about?” look. Only at twenty-three months of age did she finally deign to answer the question, but the answer was . . . “white” (admittedly, it was a bright day). It took another month until she first called the sky “blue,” and even then it had not yet become canonically blue: one day she said “blue,” another day “white,” and on another occasion she couldn’t make up her mind: “blue,” then “white,” then “blue” again. In short, more
than six months had passed from when she was first able to recognize blue objects confidently until she named the blueness of the sky. And it seems that her confusions were not entirely over even by the age of four, because at this age she once pointed at the pitch-black sky late at night and declared that it was blue.

Now consider how much easier her task was compared with Homer’s or the Murray Islanders’. After all, Alma had been actively trained to recognize blueness in objects and had been explicitly taught that blue was a different color from white or black or green. The only things she was required to do, therefore, were first to recognize that the sky had a color at all, and then to work out that this color was similar to the numerous blue objects she was surrounded with, rather than to black or white or green objects. Nevertheless, it still took her six months to work it out.

It is hard to say for certain where exactly the difficulty lay. Was it primarily the unfamiliar notion that a vast empty space, rather than a tangible object, can have a color at all? Or was it that the pale unsaturated blue of the sky is actually very different from the highly saturated blues of artificial objects? Perhaps my anecdotal evidence will inspire others to examine this question more systematically. But even without the benefit of such research, the mere fact that Alma found this particular blueness so challenging makes it easier to imagine why people who may never have clapped eyes on blue objects do not lose much sleep over the color of the sky. If that quintessence of azurity, that “most perfect example of blue,” is actually far from obvious even under conducive circumstances, then it seems far less surprising that people who have never seen an object with a color similar to the sky fail to find a special name for this great expanse of nothingness. And if they are nevertheless pressed to give some answer by a nagging anthropologist, is it not natural that they would choose the closest color label in their limited palette and say “black” or “green”?

The final exercise that can help to demonstrate the power of cultural conventions is a bit of science fiction fantasizing. Imagine we are
sometime in the distant future when every home is equipped with a machine that looks a bit like a microwave but in fact does far more than merely warm food up. It creates food out of thin air—or rather out of frozen stock cubes it teleports directly from the supermarket. Put a cube of fruit stock in the machine, for example, and at the touch of a few buttons you can conjure up any imaginable fruit: one button gives you a perfectly ripe avocado, another button a juicy grapefruit.

But this is an entirely inadequate way to describe what this wonderful machine can do, because it is by no means limited to the few “legacy fruits” that were available in the early twenty-first century. The machine can create thousands of different fruits by manipulating the taste and the consistency on many different axes, such as firmness, juiciness, creaminess, airiness, sliminess, sweetness, tanginess, and many others that we don’t have precise words to describe. Press a button, and you’ll get a fruit that’s a bit like an avocado in its oily consistency, but with a taste halfway between a carrot and a mango. Twiddle a knob, and you’ll get a slimy lychee-like fruit with a taste somewhere between peach and watermelon.

In fact, even coarse approximations like “a bit like X” or “halfway between Y and Z” do not do justice to the wealth of different flavors that will be available. Instead, our successors will have developed a rich and refined vocabulary to cover the whole space of possible tastes and consistencies. They will have specific names for hundreds of distinct areas in this space and will not be bound by the few particular tastes of the fruit we happen to be familiar with today.