.png)
One of my favourite reads of last year was the fantastic book 'Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages' by linguist Guy Deutscher. The book considers the question that many of us who work with multiple languages or live in multicultural environments have asked ourselves: does the language we speak affect the way we think? The answer is not as straightforward as we might expect.
The author makes this point quite compellingly by dedicating more than half of the book to the case of colour in the evolution of language. This analysis of colour as it is expressed in different languages has important ramifications for translation, especially in the fields I work in – fashion, beauty, shoes and handbags – where colour descriptions not only abound, but are absolutely crucial for consumers to be able to correctly visualize the final product. This article provides a short summary of the study of colour words as presented in the book.
Why is the sea in ancient Greece not blue but wine-coloured?
This is the question that William Ewart Gladstone first asked in his 1858 book called Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age. Gladstone noticed that Homer's grasp of colour in the great Greek epics seemed to be a bit off. He used the word "green" to describe honey and wood, "violet" to describe iron, and most famously described the blue ocean as a "wine-dark sea." Many literary critics had put down these odd choices to a simple matter of poetic licence, but Gladstone dared to challenge this explanation.
He noted that not only were the attributions of colour strange (by modern standards), but there was also a sheer paucity of colour descriptions overall. Fruits, animals and other natural phenomena like the sky or fields of grass would most naturally be described by their colour today, but this was not the case in the Iliad or Odyssey, where many were either not given any colour attribution at all OR were described in shades of black and white.
The question was puzzling, and not many had given it more than a cursory thought. Hadn't the sky always been blue? Yet Homer did not use the Greek word 'kuaneos' to describe the sky or the sea but only for the eyebrows of Zeus or a dark cloud. How could that be? Gladstone's answer to the conundrum was radical: he suggested that the ancient Greeks were universally colour blind, because they lived so far before us that their eyes had not "evolved" to see the full range of colours as we do.
The organ was given to Homer only in its infancy, which is now full-grown in us. Painters know that there is an education of the eye for colour in the individual. The proposition which I desire to suggest is that this education subsists also for the race.
Why do all ancient languages seem to display this deficiency?
Those of us who have grown up in India may be familiar with this confusion between blue and shades of black that Homer displayed, for in Indian mythological texts, the dark gods are often described as having "blue skin" and have been depicted as such in visual representations. Surely enough, a decade after Gladstone, a scholar called Abraham Geiger combed through Ancient Indian texts, Hebrew texts like the Old Testament, old Icelandic sagas and even the Koran and noted similar cases of colour misattribution, especially with respect to describing the sky or the sea as blue. He says of the Vedas, for instance:
These hymns, of more than ten thousand lines, are brimming with descriptions of the heavens. But there is only one thing that no one would ever learn from those ancient songs who did not already know it, and that is that the sky is blue.
Widening his circle of evidence, Geiger traced a pattern in the etymological development of colour words. Words for blue in modern European languages seem to derive either from previous words for green or black; a similar coalescing of blue and black is found in Chinese. In an even earlier stage of language development green was not distinguished from yellow through separate words, and prior to that yellow and red were one. In the earliest stage even red and black were a vague dark colour. He argued that this indicated a progressive refinement of mankind's colour perception over the centuries and concluded that the only explanation could be our biological evolution.
Could it be that human eyes only evolved to see the full range of colour only recently?
A decade after Geiger, an opthalmalogist by the name of Hugo Magnus published a treatise called the Historical Evolution of the Colour Sense, in which he argued that the perception of the ancients was akin to what modern eyes see at twilight, where colours fade, bright objects appear grey and the sky appears black rather than blue. He further claimed that the reason for Geiger's chronological order of emergence starting with black, red, yellows then proceeding to greens and blues was because of a decreasing intensity, and that the retina had only very recently learned to see the blue part of the spectrum. By his logic, all it would take for humans to "see" ultra-violet was a few generations of further evolution.
At the time, it was thought that animals evolve by a process of acquiring characteristics in their lifetime and then passing these traits down to the next generation. Not unlike the children's story where giraffes stretch and stretch to end up with such long necks! It wasn't until Darwin arrived on the scene that this theory was disproved and evolution through natural selection became the accepted norm. In light of Darwin's new theory and later understanding that red is in fact the coolest of all lights compared to blue, Magnus' theory did not hold any water.
So why do different languages describe colour differently?
So if the evolution of human organs is not the cause of these linguistic developments or differences then what is? Think about the languages you speak and consider the question. In Marathi, which is one of my native languages, for instance, there are words for colours but not for shades. For instance, there is a word for "blue" and "green" respectively, but nothing for "teal" or "turquoise". In French, there are many words for different kinds of brown, where English may have only one word, or need prefixes to separate these colours. Russian separates light blue from navy blue with two separate colour words, while many European languages will just see them as two shades of the same colour blue, and so on.
Do these differences arise from different cultures seeing colour differently? We know now that that is not the case. But the first person to prove this concretely was the anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers, who conducted a study of the Torres Straits people and discovered that just like the ancient Greeks, they did not differentiate between blue and black. Their native word for black was golegole, which they equally applied to things that were black, blue or violet. Unable to make sense of this, Rivers conducted a colour blindness test to check if their colour vision was the same as ours.
Not only were the islanders able to distinguish between all primary colours, but they could also tell apart different shades of blue and of any other colour.
In short, all races see colour in more or less the same way as far as their eyes are concerned, save for certain individuals who may suffer from deficiencies like colour blindness.
Are colour words an example of language being completely arbitrary?
From the examples above, it should be clear that the reason languages describe colour differently is because they divide up the colour spectrum differently, choosing to create names for colours that hold value for them or where the difference is significant enough to invent a different word. In fact, by the early 30s, linguists like Leonard Bloomfeld thought this process was completely arbitrary and fully determined by culture:
Physicists view the colour spectrum as a continuous scale, but languages mark different parts of this scale off quite arbitrarily.
It turns out they were wrong. If you take English for example, there are separate colour words for yellow, green and blue. This distinction is found in many other languages, including the ones that don't have separate words for green and blue, but still recognize yellow as separate from green or blue. Languages that would divide this part of the spectrum into three words like "grellow" (green + yellow), "turquoise" and "sapphire" simply don't exist.
It turns out that our biology does play a role in how we divide up colour. We know for instance that the human eye has three different colour-sensing cones tuned for red, green and blue light each. We also know, through Geiger's analysis of colour development over multiple ancient languages described above, that almost all of the world's languages followed a similar order of colour development:
black and white > red > yellow/green > blue
Scientists have still not worked out why this development is universal, even across cultures that may be exposed to some colours over others. What we do know is that almost all languages first developed a word for red because it is the colour of excitability and of blood. We also know that a mutation in primates have made us specially sensitive to yellow in order for us to detect ripe fruit against a background of green foliage. Blue is an extremely rare colour in nature, which might explain the later development of blue colour words. All of these are merely theories, but the consistent development of colour words across languages shows that while languages carve up the colour spectrum differently, they do so within certain universal constraints. In short, whether your language has a name for a colour or not is not evidence of it being inferior or more sophisticated to other languages: it is simply an indication of cultural emphasis. Given all of us see colour in the same way, we can find ways to describe an infinite range of colours by adding prefixes, borrowing words or even inventing new ones if need be. A good example of this in English (and many other languages) is the word orange. Indeed, before English borrowed this word from the word for the fruit, orange-coloured things were called saffron or red. A difference reflected in many Indo-European languages like Marathi, where the word narangi directly derives from the Spanish word naranja, used to describe the same fruit. There is, indeed more to colour, and to language, than meets the eye!
Comments