Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

by Guy Deutscher

  Nonetheless, a few eminent Darwinists, not least Darwin himself, felt that Magnus’s scenario was problematic on other grounds, principally because of the very short time span it assumed for the development of color vision. It seemed implausible to these scientists that such a complex anatomical mechanism could have evolved so radically in the span of just a few millennia. Critical reviews of Magnus’s scenario were thus not long in coming.

  But if—as the critics argued—vision itself had not changed in historical times, how could one explain the deficiencies in ancient languages that Gladstone and Geiger had uncovered? The only solution was to reconsider the question that Geiger had raised in the previous decade: Is it possible that people who could perceive colors just as we do still failed to distinguish in their language even between the most elementary of colors? For the first time, the question was now being thrashed out in earnest. Are the concepts of color directly determined by the nature of our anatomy—as Gladstone, Geiger, and Magnus believed—or are they merely cultural conventions? The debate over Magnus’s book was thus the start of the open war between the claims of nature and of culture on the concepts of language.

  The opinion of Magnus’s critics was that since vision could not have changed, the only explanation must be that the deficiencies in ancient color descriptions were due to “imperfections” in the languages themselves. Their argument, in other words, was that one cannot infer from language which colors the ancients were able to perceive. The first person who made this point explicitly was Ernst Krause, one of Darwin’s earliest German disciples. But it was a biblical scholar, Franz Delitzsch, who put it most memorably when he wrote in 1878 that “we see in essence not with two eyes but with three: with the two eyes of the body and with the eye of the mind that is behind them. And it is in this eye of the mind in which the cultural-historical progressive development of the color sense takes place.”

  The problem for the critics—whom we can dub somewhat anachronistically as the “culturalists”—was that their proposed explanation seemed just as implausible as Magnus’s anatomical scenario, perhaps even more so. For how can one imagine that people who saw the difference between purple and black, or green and yellow, or green and blue, simply could not be bothered to differentiate these colors in their language? The culturalists tried to make the idea more appealing by pointing out that even in modern languages we use idioms that are rather imprecise about color. Don’t we speak of “white wine,” for instance, even if we can see perfectly well that it is really yellowish green? Don’t we have “black cherries” that are dark red and “white cherries” that are yellowish red? Aren’t red squirrels really brown? Don’t the Italians call the yolk of an egg “red” (il rosso)? Don’t we call the color of orange juice “orange,” although it is in fact perfectly yellow? (Check it next time.) And another example that would not occur to people in the nineteenth century: would race relations between the “dark browns” and “pinkish browns” have been as tortured as between “blacks” and “whites”?

  But a few haphazard idioms are still a long way off from the consistent “defects” of the ancient texts, so by itself this argument was not very convincing. The culturalists thus sought supporting evidence from a different direction: not from language itself but from material facts that would show that the ancients saw all colors. Indeed, one ancient culture seemed to offer such evidence in plentiful supply. As one of the culturalists explained, a short visit to the British Museum is enough to demonstrate that the ancient Egyptians used blue paint. As it happens, Lazarus Geiger had already admitted in his lecture of 1867 that the Egyptians were an exception to the near-universal blue blindness of the ancients. He acknowledged that the Egyptians had a much more refined vocabulary of color than other ancient cultures and that their language had words for “green” and “blue.” But that only showed, he argued, that the progressive refinement of color vision started much earlier in Egypt than elsewhere. For after all, “who would want to take the architects of the temple in Karnak as representatives of the state of humanity in a primitive stage?”

  A more precious piece of evidence was lapis lazuli, a gemstone from the mountains of Afghanistan that was highly prized throughout the ancient Near East. The Babylonians, for example, referred to it as “the treasure of the mountains” and valued it so highly that they would petition their gods with the words “may my life be as precious to you as lapis lazuli.” Archaeological excavations from the palace in Mycenae, from a period much earlier than Homer’s, proved that the Greek royalty were also in possession of small quantities of this gemstone. And while many other precious stones are at least partly transparent and thus can show various reflection effects, lapis lazuli is entirely opaque. Its main claim to beauty is its magnificent deep blue color. But if the dwellers of the Mycenaean palace could not see blue, why should they have bothered about a stone that would have appeared to them just like any other polished pebble?

  All these arguments, however, hardly impressed Magnus and his followers. In his replies to the culturalists, Magnus seemed merely to be summing up the commonsense view when he asserted that “it does not seem plausible to us that a language which, like Homer’s, possessed such a rich vocabulary for the most varied and subtle effects of light should not have been able to create for itself words for the most important colors.”

  The culturalists needed more, an argument clincher. They needed incontrovertible proof that someone who saw all colors could still call honey and gold “green,” horses and cows “red,” and sheep “violet.” And so they finally hit upon the idea of turning to the “savages.”

  * Most Bible translations smooth over oddities such as “green gold” (Psalms 68:13) and render the adjective as “yellow.” But the etymology of the word derives from plants and leaves, just like Homer’s chlôros.

  * Geiger seems somewhat confused about whether black and white should be considered real colors and about how they relate to the more general concepts of dark and bright. In this one respect, his analysis is a step backward from Gladstone’s masterly account of the primacy of dark and bright in Homer’s language.

  3

  The Rude Populations Inhabiting

  Foreign Lands

  Passers-by in the elegant Kurfürstendamm in Berlin on the morning of October 21, 1878, would have come across rather a funny sight. There, in front of the entrance to the zoo, was a large group of eminently bearded scientists waiting for a private tour. These gentlemen were the distinguished members of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory, and they had a special appointment to watch the hottest show in town. On display that day were not the stars of the regular menagerie or Knut the cuddly polar bear cub, but even more exotic creatures, never before exhibited in Europe. They had been imported by the circus impresario and animal dealer Carl Hagenbeck and had been put on view in zoos across the country, causing a sensation wherever they went. In Berlin alone, some sixty-two thousand people had come to watch the show in a single day.

  What the throngs of wildly excited spectators flocked to see was a group of about thirty dark-skinned savages and their strange costumes (or lack thereof). They were called the “Nubians” and were in fact a group of men, women, and children from the Sudan. Naturally, the anthropological society did not wish to share its business with hoi polloi, so Herr Hagenbeck kindly offered them a private viewing. And so it was that on this autumnal Monday morning the bearded gentlemen, armed with measuring tapes, rulers, and colored skeins of wool, arrived at the zoo to slake their scientific curiosity. As practitioners of what would now be known as physical anthropology, the scientists were primarily interested in measuring sizes of noses and earlobes, shapes of genitals, and other such vital statistics of the rare specimens on display. But the other thing they were all agog to examine was the Nubians’ sense of color. For the controversy over Magnus’s book was now in full swing, and it had finally dawned on the scientific community that the “rude populations inhabiting foreign lands,”
as one American ethnologist put it, could hold the key to the mystery.

  As it so happens, there had been clues lying around for almost a decade that suggested that ethnic groups from around the world could resolve the question of the ancients’ color sense. In 1869, two years after Geiger had revealed the remarkable parallels between the color vocabularies of different ancient cultures, the newly established German Journal of Ethnology published a short note by Adolf Bastian, an anthropologist and best-selling travel writer. Bastian argued that oddities in the description of colors were not confined to ancient epics, since there were nations around that still marked the border between green and blue differently from Europeans. His servant in Burma, he wrote, “apologized once that he couldn’t find a bottle that I called blue (pya), because it was in fact green (zehn). In order to punish him by making him the object of ridicule of his peers, I reproached him in the presence of the other servants, but quickly noticed that the object of ridicule wasn’t he but myself.” Bastian also argued that Tagalog speakers in the Philippines had not even distinguished between green and blue until the arrival of the Spanish colonizers, because the Tagalog words for “green” and “blue” were clearly recent borrowings from Spanish verde and azul. And he claimed that the language of the Teda tribe in Chad still did not distinguish green from blue at all.

  Back in 1869, no one took much heed of Bastian’s stories. But once the debate over Magnus’s theory had flared up, the relevance of this information became apparent to the culturalists, and so suggestions were made that more information should be collected from peoples in remote corners of the globe. And thus it was that Rudolf Virchow, the founder and chairman of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory, took up the challenge by leading his entire society on the arduous trek across the Tiergarten to the Berlin Zoo, in order to check the Nubians firsthand. More intrepid scholars were extending the research beyond the confines of the zoo to examine the sense of color of primitive peoples in situ. The first such investigation was carried out in the same year, 1878, by Ernst Almquist, a doctor on board a Swedish expedition ship that was ice-locked in the Polar Sea. As the ship was forced to winter just off the Chukchi Peninsula in eastern Siberia, Almquist made the most of the opportunity by testing the color sense of the Chukchis, the nomadic reindeer herdsmen and seal hunters who inhabited the area. The Americans had it easier, because they had so many savages living right under their noses. Army doctors were instructed to test the color sense of the Indian tribes with whom they came in contact, and their evidence was compiled into a detailed report by Albert Gatschet, the ethnologist of the U.S. Geological Survey. In Britain, the science writer Grant Allen devised questionnaires to be sent to missionaries and explorers requesting that they provide data on the color sense of the natives they encountered. And finally, faced with this direct challenge to his claims, Magnus himself decided to conduct a survey of his own and sent questionnaires accompanied by color charts to hundreds of consulates, missionaries, and doctors all over the world.

  When the results started coming in, they constituted—in one sense—the most spectacular confirmation of Gladstone’s and Geiger’s perspicacity. No one could any longer just brush off their findings as the overreaction of overly literal philologists, and no one could dismiss the peculiarities in the color descriptions of ancient texts as merely instances of poetic license. For the deficiencies that Gladstone and Geiger had uncovered were replicated exactly in living languages from all over the world. The Nubians that Virchow and his colleagues probed in the Berlin Zoo had no word for “blue” at all. When they were shown a blue skein of wool, some of them called it “black” and others called it “green.” Some of them didn’t even distinguish between yellow, green, and gray, calling all three colors by the same word.

  In America, Albert Gatschet wrote that the Klamath Indians in Oregon were happy to use the same term for “the color of any grass, weed or plant, and though the plant passes from the green of spring time and summer into the faded yellow of autumn, the color-name is not changed.” The Sioux from Dakota used the same word, toto, for both blue and green. This “curious and very frequent coincidence of green and yellow, and of blue and green” was common among other American Indian languages as well.

  Similar stories emerged from the questionnaires sent back by missionaries and travelers from other parts of the world. When they spoke about colors, many of the savages—or “nature peoples,” as the Germans kindly called them—betrayed exactly the same confusions that Gladstone and Geiger found in ancient texts. Even Geiger’s bold evolutionary sequence, which he had deduced from the faintest etymological scraps of evidence, received a dramatic corroboration. Just as Geiger had anticipated, red was always the first of the prismatic colors to receive a name. Indeed, it transpired that there were peoples around even in the nineteenth century who had not yet progressed beyond the red stage. Ernst Almquist, the doctor of the Swedish expedition to the Polar Sea, reported that the Chukchis in Siberia were quite content with using just three terms—black, white, and red—to describe any color. Nukin, the word for “black,” was used also for blue and all dark colors, as long as they did not contain a trace of red; nidlikin was used for white and all bright colors; and tschetlju for red and anything with a trace of reddish tint.

  Further languages were discovered that corresponded exactly to the subsequent stages of development that Geiger had predicted: the inhabitants of the island of Nias in Sumatra, for example, were reported to use only four basic color words: black, white, red, and yellow. Green, blue, and violet were all called “black.” And some languages had black, white, red, yellow, and green, but no blue, just as Geiger had assumed.

  Geiger, who had died in 1870, was not allowed to bask in posthumous glory, however. And no one was queuing up to pat the septuagenarian Gladstone on the back either. In fact, Geiger, Gladstone, and especially Magnus came under heavy fire, for it turned out they were as shortsighted as they were perspicacious. Their philological insights may have been vindicated, for languages across the world were behaving exactly as predicted. But the reports about the eyesight of the natives directly contradicted the assumption that defective vocabulary reflected defective color vision, for no tribe was found that failed to see the differences between the colors. Virchow and the gentlemen of the Berlin Anthropological Society administered a Holmgren color test to the Nubians and asked them to pick from a pile of wools those matching in color to a master wool. None of the Nubians failed to pick the right colors. The same picture emerged with other ethnic groups. Admittedly, some reports about various tribes mentioned much greater hesitation in differentiating the cooler colors compared with reds and yellows. But no population, be they ever so rude, was found to be blind to these distinctions. The missionary who lived among the Ovaherero in Namibia, for instance, wrote that they could see the difference between green and blue but simply thought it was ridiculous that there should be different names for these two shades of the same color.

  What had seemed almost impossible to contemplate a few years before turned out to be a plain fact: people can spot the difference between different colors but can still fail to give them separate names. And surely, if that was the case with primitive tribes in the nineteenth century, it must have been the same with Homer and all the other ancients. The only possible conclusion was that, had Homer been administered a Holmgren test, he would have been able to spot the difference between green and yellow, just as he would have been able to tell apart purple wools from brown ones, had he been asked to do so by a German anthropologist.

  But why then did he call his honey “green” and his sheep “purple”? The culturalists may have had their proof that the ancients could distinguish all colors, but they were less successful in formulating a convincing alternative explanation, for culture’s assault on the concepts of color still crashed against a solid wall of disbelief. Magnus now modified his counterargument and declared that it was implausible that those primitive peoples pe
rceived all colors just as vividly as Europeans. Instead of conceding colors to culture, therefore, Magnus offered a revised anatomical explanation. He admitted that the ancients and the natives of his own day could spot the difference between all colors, but he argued that the cooler colors still appeared to them duller than to modern Europeans (see figure 3 for an illustration of his revised theory). This lack of vividness, he said, would account for their lack of interest in finding separate names for such colors, and it would also explain the reports from the respondents to his questionnaires, which frequently mentioned the greater hesitation among the natives in distinguishing the cooler colors for which they had no names.

  At the time, it was impossible to confirm or to disprove such claims empirically, for while it is easy to test whether someone can spot the difference between two colors or not, it is far more difficult to devise experiments that can tell exactly how vividly this distinction appears to different people. Certainly it was impossible to decide the question on the basis of the available evidence, which was mostly gathered from questionnaires. As no decisive new evidence was forthcoming, the heated discussion gradually subsided over the following years and the question of the color sense remained in limbo for almost two decades, until the first attempt to conduct sophisticated experiments on the mental traits of natives in situ. Substantial progress had to wait for the 1898 Cambridge anthropological expedition to the Torres Straits, and for a remarkable man who finally swung established consensus in favor of culture—much against his better judgment.