The person who sent me this article added, "This is very dubious. Of COURSE earlier people could see blue, the human eye hasn't changed in a very long time, and only a few can't tell blue from green.
As to linguistic difference in color naming, it's been a hot topic among anthropologists for decades."
Hubski, what do you think about the "Can you see shades of green" test half-way down the article?
It's somewhat akin to the 1000-words-for-snow myth. OK, 50 then, or 43, or 120 depending on how you count.
It's still a fascinating article, particularly the part about the colour blue in Homer'sOdyssey and the way ancient Greeks described colours. mk
Ancient Sumerians used lapis lazuli rather often and ancient Greek mosaics used blue tiles consistently (in that they don't use blue and green interchangeably, they don't mix blue and other colors for which they lacked distinct terminology). I think the difference in terminology just has to do with different systems of categorizing the same colors. Here's a good paper that responds specifically to the Himba experiment and that I think is on the right track: http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/schuh/lx001/Discussion/d01_Himba_color_perception_critique.pdf As far as the green squares go, I successfully identified the tile that is a different shade but I certainly don't have a separate word to describe that square. I can't even come up with a good way to distinguish it from the other squares using words. It just looks slightly different.
Thanks for the link to the critique of the Himba experiments! As this recent discussion points out, the experiments to date have still not been published in any form: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17970
At first I was also doubtful of early human "not seeing" blue, but then I started thinking about all the different shades of colors we have now. I've seen men commonly refer to pastel pink as "purple", so it isn't that far fetched to believe that if the brain hasn't taken the time to distinguish two similar things, it processes them as the same. Being able to identify blue from green would have had no real-world benefit until blue paints and dyes became available for art. Blue plants are rare and even if you came across one in the woods, your brain would still see it as "plant."
I've been doing a lot of math education in the past few years with 0-6 year olds. We encourage the use of words to describe location and placement ... up down next to under behind higher far near through in... etc etc. Kids who learn these concepts at a young age perform way better in mathematics years later, not even just on spatial tests but on non-spatial as well (see "Big, Little, Tall and Tiny: Learning Spatial Terms Improves Children’s Spatial Skills, Science Daily (Nov. 9, 2011)) Using language with young kids is one of the best and easiest ways to boost their early learning, and I believe it has to do with chunking concepts together into a word and then our brains can think using that word and save a whole lot of energy. No word for something and it is just too costly to think about. With one group of 4-5 year olds we taught them to name patterns, an AB-pattern for example to describe a simple alternating pattern like red-blue-red-blue-red-blue, etc. Their teacher was sceptical that learning to name a pattern would be meaningful for so young a child. The next week he came to us with his mouth agape -- saying these kids were seeing patterns everywhere and naming them. One boy made a tower from cups stacked upright and upside down. "Look!" he said. "I made an AB-pattern!" I think when we have names for concepts, we are much easier able to think about them. I think I do a lot of my reasoning verbally, I talk inside my head and can hear myself. (Interesting aside: I very often think in Norwegian now, and some concepts are difficult for me to think about in English). It makes sense to me that having more words for colors make it easier to think about colors. Having more words about anything makes it easier to think about those things. Language and the brain... cool stuff.
hi Mike and veen. I'm glad this topic is being revisited. I was thinking today why they chose the word "spectrum" to describe conditions. Spectrum originally referred to the colours that a ray of light can separate into. And speaking of colours, I suddenly want to own a complete set of 120 CRAYOLA crayons and all 34 retired colours.Having more words about anything makes it easier to think about those things.
This is so true -- psychological and medical terms made it easier to think about illnesses. At the same time, as soon as we make things easier and have words for things, we become inclined to see the word as descriptive, when it could be more general like "blue". If only we could talk about "depression" in shades. Then there are the many shades of Aspergers which itself is a shade of Autism, but very unlike Autism as it is often understood.
A lot of people underestimate the way language shapes how you think. Especially if you've never mastered a second language. I have a couple of friends who are at a similar level of English as I and we often use English words in Dutch sentences, simply because it encapsulates the message we're trying to communicate better. There's no Dutch verb that has the same meaning and association that cringe has. Or something like l'espirit de l'escalier. Creating words can also help to verbalize an issue or a feeling. It's a theme in (Dutch) urban planning to give every phenomenon or idea its own word, a practice which leads to silly words like verpaarding (lit. horsification), used pejoratively to describe the increased amount of horses in the rural landscape.I think when we have names for concepts, we are much easier able to think about them.
davidbriggs, I was wondering if you would care to weigh in? I enjoyed your thoughts around color/perception in the past.
Thanks for thinking of me! I've just finished writing out a few thoughts which I'll repost here: "Most people would probably read Kevin Loria's provocative title as claiming that human colour vision changed in modern times to enable the perception of blue for the first time, which would be quite mad (our blue - yellow opponent signal is as old as colour vision itself!). But up until he starts talking about the Himba claims (see previous post), Loria is only saying that most ancient languages didn't have a term for "blue", which is partly right. Ancient Greek does have a term for dark blue - "kuanos" or "kyanos", and classical Latin adopted "cyaneus" from Greek and added other blues including "caeruleus" (sky blue) and "lividus" (bruise-coloured or "black and blue"). But like many ancient and medieval colour terms, these words refer to a combination of hue, lightness and/or colour-strength properties rather than hue alone. So it's true that Greek and Latin don't have a general term covering all blues, just as we don't have a general English name covering all colours of an orange hue. Looking at my polished pine desk I see it as orange in hue because I am used to thinking in terms of the Munsell dimensions of hue, value and chroma, but most people would call it brown and would have to think for a while to decide what Munsell hue it is. I expect that, not being clear on the concept of hue, a Roman might similarly have had to think for a while to see that cyaneus, caeruleus and lividus had something in common, but that doesn't mean that he saw these colours differently in the usual sense of the word. "
Preliminary looking at the shades of green image suggests to me that I can distinguish in the moment between the shades, but have trouble remembering which shades go where since I don't have a linguistic marker to attach to each distinct perception. It seems to me this is perhaps the most likely explanation: that words for different colors help us keep them separate in our memories (or perhaps just in our brains) but don't affect our actual responses to stimuli.
Interesting. Is this some sort of of revelation about language. Seems plausible in some ways. My wife is a Speech and Language Pathologist and as an educator myself, we've had similar conversations about human perception and language. Not about colors exactly, but in language acquisition, some children with language delays have inexplicable difficulty with prepositional phrases and actually hearing language subtleties that so many of us take for granted. We joke about how a simple initial screening for students could consist of asking two questions. Question 1. Ask about the February holiday when people give gifts to loved ones. Children that reply ValenTIME's Day, even after being corrected, send up a red flag. Question 2. Ask a child to describe a time where they were playing a game against an opponent. Encourage the use of "versus". The use of versus as a verb is also a red flag. "I was VERSING my best friend in a game of checkers". Even when corrected, students with language difficulties will repeatedly make these same mistakes, as if they are interpreting the world differently than most of us.
It's not that you physically can't see it. Rather, you don't have a mental distinction for it. Two different greens are more or less the same color. So there's no real need to distinguish. If you have words for two different greens, you'll distinguish between them. Green and "Forest Green" are clearly two different colors. But if you never used forest green, you'd simply call it green, and not make a fuss about the difference. The japanese can clearly see green/blue. But they call them both 'green'. As such, in early anime/manga, you can see streetlights drawn as blue, even though they call it green (and the japanese streetlights IRL are green). Similarly, this distinction business doesn't just go for colors, but everything. You don't distinguish between a Macbook Air and Macbook Pro, they are just "a mac". Because you don't have a need to distinguish them. You don't distinguish between different distros of linux, they are just 'linux'. You don't distinguish between different levels of consciousness, they are just 'consciousness'. There's certainly different levels of consciousness/awareness. As any lucid dreamer can tell you. There's 'not present, but remembered', 'present, but didn't remember', 'present and remember (lucid)', and 'not present, didn't remember'. There's almost certainly 'levels' between those. But most people don't care to distinguish. And most people don't even realize there's a difference between being lucid and not being lucid. Is there a need to distinguish between british and american english? For some, yes. I use the spelling interchangeably because there's no real need to distinguish between the two. They are both 'english'.