Color perception is a subject that's fascinated me for a long time. Humans are visually rather unique, as unlike most other mammals we are able to see beyond yellow into the orange and red spectral range.
That's probably attributable to trichromacy, having three classes of retinal cones. The article points this out and correctly notes the complexity of visual circuitry without giving much detail. That's OK, the layers involved in translating retinal impulses, the exquisitely intricate slicing and dicing visual information into encodings for shape, motion, texture, surface, depth as well as color are truly mind-boggling.
That suggests to me that trying to ascertain linguistic influences on the visual system may be a form of "premature optimization". Of course it will be no surprise to find out there are cultural effects on verbal color description and communication conventions. OTOH it's also plausible to suppose that humans of various cultures can distinguish colors equally well when color naming is not demanded.
Artists who care about color don't care about the names colors are called by. What is important is being able to distinguish subtly different colors in order to be able to produce results. On the web #ff8844 doesn't have to have a name, it does the same thing anyway.
At the end of the day it's important to determine if language really changes what we see, or only the modes of communication, styles, fashions and all the layers piled on top of actual sensory experience.
Perhaps in everyday activity who cares if a shade is "orange" vs. "tangerine". When fine color discrimination really counts, in art, engineering, medicine, color names are secondary if necessary at all.
Want to know something freaky? Violet doesn't contain any red. I'm talking about the deep shade of blue on the rainbow. When your eyes see light with a frequency beyond blue, they start detecting phantom red. Literally, when your blue cones detect that frequency, your red cones also get activated. This effect is replicated in digital cameras, so that the pictures you take with your phone look right.
Actually I haven't heard of any camera where it is replicated.
I used to own a purple backpack that appeared bright blue under every single digital camera I tried, including fancy ones. Combinations of red and blue will appear purple in cameras, but real purples won't.
I did the test but found it entirely un-illuminating. I got '19' where '0' is perfect, but I have no idea where that puts me in the distribution (top 10%? bottom 10%? bang on the median?).
I got a form that said "To see how your results compare to those of others, please provide the information below."
There was not really much more information, but it said 99 is "low".
> At the end of the day it's important to determine if language really changes what we see, or only the modes of communication, styles, fashions and all the layers piled on top of actual sensory experience.
This study seems to show that language plays a role:
"The Himba tribe from northern Namibia, for instance, does not classify green and blue separately, the way Westerners do, but it does differentiate among various shades of what we call green. And when tested, members of the tribe, who are likely to have trouble with blue-green distinctions that most Westerners make easily, readily distinguish among greens that tend to look the same to Western eyes."[0]
Color me skeptical, I have some doubts about that NYT piece. I did take a look, and indeed I had trouble with telling shades of green as presented.
However, the image of color patches was quite blurry, color mottled and totally ambiguous. The RBG explication was interesting, showing three greens, 80/186/15, 80/187/15, 97/192/4. To make sense of it, in a paint program I made patches with these RGB values.
Seeing a difference between 97/192/4 and the others was easy, but telling 80/186/15 vs. 80/187/15 wasn't really possible. I have serious doubts anyone could reliably do so, regardless of ethnic background.
But it's no surprise. Is a typical computer display reliably capable of rendering that small a difference in green representation? Furthermore, in a printed format, how reliably can inks/dyes reproduce such a small color distinction, let alone the variables introduced by ink thickness, paper characteristics and so on.
To my mind, it's not convincing, there are just too many inadequately controlled variables. Determining the "nature vs. nurture" factors implicated in behavior as complex as color perception and discrimination capabilities requires a great deal more study to even know what it is we are studying.
Huh, I checked out the RGB values in the linked Boingboing post[0] too, and didn't notice that one had green 187. I very much doubt that was intentional or what they were testing for. Interesting that you found the larger difference to be easy to spot--I saw the difference but only after looking carefully.
What I found most fascinating was the screenshot in the Boingboing post of the person looking at green squares with one aqua. I suppose they could have a very high incidence of tritanopia, blue light insensitivity, and in fact the spectrum shown here[1] matches up rather nicely with what's in the screenshot. I'd be surprised if this wasn't taken into account, though.
Took the test and got a 0, but strange thing I noticed during the test was that "wiping" the cursor over the colored blocks during the test seemed to increase the saturation of the blocks, making the test much easier.
I noticed I had to spend a lot of time in the bottom two rows near the ends--in the purples, for instance, it was near-impossible for me to tell the last three tiles apart.
It is amusing that 'salmon' shows up on the male side of the gender comparison chart. The only time I've ever seen that used for a color is in Halo. Wonder how much that biased the results.
> Kay and Berlin took these commonalities as evidence that our conception of colors is rooted, not in language, but in our shared human biology.
The legacy of the 20th century is the belief that we are nearly completely creatures of culture rather than biology. We're slowly learning that it isn't true.
The interesting part is why we want to believe it. When you believe that human nature is mostly culture, you feel that you can change it with social action, education, and legislation. The surprises come when people realize that change is not as easy as we would like to think.
afaik, part of the "legacy of the 20th century" includes the eugenics beliefs and experiments carried out throughout the world, including the holocaust.
I'd say that the actual, scientific development of "nature vs. nurture" carries on healthily in academic spheres, while online you find plenty of hardcore zealots for either camp, from otherkin to racists talking about "human biodiversity" and advocating for gender roles.
The 20th century contains thouse beliefs and experiments. The legacy of the 20th century is much more strongly defined by the Holocaust, which poisened the idea of eugentics in a way that we are only now begining to undo, and only in the limited (and somewhat controversial) practice of of pre-birth genetic testing for known diseases.
It almost looks like the broad consensus went from one extreme to the other over the course of the 20th century. Maybe we are currently returning to some middle ground.
A bit OT, but wrt cross-linguistic similarities - I've always imagined this list [1] would be the resource for language origin studies, and I have dug out absolutely no research to that effect. I'm sure there is some - this list was compiled - but not nearly as much as I hoped.
In particular, this could explain many similarities that are usually ascribed to genetics, but are actually only there because of commonalities in environment.
I enjoyed this article, but the dispute feels a bit contrived. It seems obvious that:
1. Language shapes perception.
2. Biology shapes perception.
3. External reality shapes language.
4. External reality shapes perception.
I'm sure the precise form and extent of each of those "shapes" varies, and I can see why there might be a lot of dispute about those details. But while I can imagine some people wanting to strengthen some of those "shapes" to "determines", I don't see how anyone can reasonably deny any of those statements. (Yes, I think positions like "There is no, objective, external reality" are unreasonable.)
And so yeah, I learned a good bit from this article. And empirical study of words for colours is fascinating and should definitely be pursued. And I wouldn't have guessed that the range of basic colours is so wide. But I found precisely none of the results reported in that article surprising or worldview-shaking.
Welsh (notable for these purposes in coming from a single root which is about 4k years old, and having branched off along with Gaelic and the other Brittonic languages around a similar period), uses the same groupings. I'm not sure at what point they turn up, but they're currently:
black – du
white – gwyn
grey – llwyd
red – coch
yellow – melyn
blue – glas
green – gwyrdd
brown – gwinau (brown to auburn shades) or cochddu (brown to the dark reddish blacks)
purple – porffor (also cochlas, which is a reddish blue)
pink – pinc or gwyngoch (for white-ish reds or pale reds)
orange – oren or melyngoch (for yellowish reds; a slight evolution from the conjunction of melyn-coch)
I'd suspect that oren and pinc are more recent evolutions in the lexicon, with gwyngoch and the associated red spectrum names, and gwyngoch and its cousins more tightly defining those parts of the spectrum, rather than having an all encompassing grouping for them. That's assumption and not based on evidence beyond my own knowledge of British linguistic evolution though, so take it with a pinch of salt.
It'd be interesting to look at common Brittonic and its modern descendants though and see if and when they change, and whether that has broader implications, similar to the point on "wine-dark".
I know nothing about Welsh. With white - gwyn and
red - coch, gwyngoch looks like it's basically "light red". Similarly melyngoch (with melyn=yellow) looks like it's basically "yellow-red", and a few others (cochddu, gwinau?) look "suspicious" as well. Would these be considered basic color terms [1]? Apparently the differente views have different definitions. [2]
It could also be a desire for linguistic purity: pinc may have been borrowed first but then someone though it wasn't "Welsh enough" so they coined (the rather logical) gwyngoch.
Welsh occasionally does things similar to German, where things end up squished together to make a new thing. Other examples would be Aberystwyth (aber - river mouth, Ystwyth - the river in question), rhagddodiad and olddodiad (prefix and suffix), trosgais (a converted try in rugby) and so on. So yes, it's a compounding of two other words, but that's kinda how it's done. Not entirely sure if that makes it an argument for or against what you're saying though.
I don't know if any language lacks compound words. Your first example is shard with English: (River) Dart + mouth -> Dartmouth (also Plymouth), Dart + moor -> Dartmoor.
The difference is English compound words were historically actually separate words, which got compounded together through common usage. Brittanic and German style languages intentionally compound words to form new ones.
I always thought it was interesting that the Russian word for red is красный (krasnyy) and the words for beautiful are прекрасный (prekrasnyy) and красивый (krasivyj) (though I never understood the difference). So "Red Square" in Moscow is not "Red" as in the color or "Red" as in communism, it's "Beautiful Square".
Russian word "krasnyy" did mean "beautiful" before 14-16 centuries, and Old Russian language used other words for the hues of red (including the word derived from worms in other Slavic languages, discussed in other thread here). It is unclear how "krasnyy" came to mean "red". Some say it is because female beauty was associalted with blush, bu no one knows for sure.
Russian has a word for a color that is phonetically close to "red" (or even close to the french "rouge"), but it means what in English is called "ginger" and is used predominantly for hair color.
Also, learning French and English in my childhood that these languages do not have a special widely used word for "light blue" as in Russian.
Thanks for clarifying. I am generally not a good student of languages, so I don't typically get very far into any particular one to learn details like this.
But as for the "light blue" issue, what sort of shade are you referring to? Is it голубой (goluboj)? There is Azure--a Latin-root word that came to English through French--or Cyan--a word of Greek origin.
"Grue" referenced in the article as a colour encompasing green and blue reminded me of a Radiolab Episode [1] on the order in which words are established for colours; Across all cultures words for colors appear in stages - Blue being the last colour to be named.
Rakta: Sanskrit ( an Indo-Aryan language )
Chomapeh: Malayalam (A Dravidian language )
Lal: Hindi / Urdu / Punjabi ( three related Indo-Aryan languages)
Interesting to read this article on different monitors to see the colors be rendered so the greens and the blues can be barely told apart on the one monitor and are clearly different on another. I wonder if that was taken into account during the study but it would seem to me to be pretty important since 'red' appears to be rendering mostly correct on all of them.
That really depends on what you think of as "red". I tend to categorize automatically into "scarlet" and "crimson" (too many hours spent with oil paints and pastels over too many decades), rarely ever seeing anything as "merely red", and that division is sometimes blurred by monitor calibration (or, rather, the lack of same). It's not so much that I see different things than other people with good colour vision, just that I have learned to do a primary categorization of "red" with two buckets instead of one.
Proposal: the following observations: humans chunk color even as infants, language controls the experience of color, make sense together if you stop treating language as a confounding factor and treat it as the goal.
Humans evolved color chunking to be able to talk about it.
Reading this article, I found it fascinating how endemic prejudice is to the human experience. I don't mean prejudice in the negative sense, but in the sense of unreasonable bias.
"His professors and textbooks taught that people could only recognize a color as categorically distinct from others if they had a word for it."
"Scientists had no reason to suspect that cultures divvied it up in similar ways."
And then, the conclusion:
"Cultures seemed to build up their color vocabularies in a predictable way."
As humans, we make things up. There is no getting away from it, due to our limited perspective. Sometimes I muse on the fact that we once thought the Earth was flat because at some point, someone essentially "lied".
> He noticed that the ancient Greek poet Homer used colors in a very strange way (for instance: “wine-dark sea”)
It could also be the case that Homer was using a complex metaphor that related the mystery of alcohol, and maybe it's brooding hangover to the dark color of the liquid, and linked that to the dark quality of the sea at times, for example before a storm when the sky is overcast.
<q> We may never know for sure, but one peculiar fact casts the mystery in an interesting light: there is no word for “blue” in ancient Greek.
Homer’s descriptions of color in The Iliad and The Odyssey, taken literally, paint an almost psychedelic landscape: in addition to the sea, sheep were also the color of wine; honey was green, as were the fear-filled faces of men; and the sky is often described as bronze.
It gets stranger. Not only was Homer’s palette limited to only five colors (metallics, black, white, yellow-green, and red), but a prominent philosopher even centuries later, Empedocles, believed that all color was limited to four categories: white/light, dark/black, red, and yellow. Xenophanes, another philosopher, described the rainbow as having but three bands of color: porphyra (dark purple), khloros, and erythros (red).</q>
Yes. The author suggests the categorizations are either cultural or biological; another possibility is that they're defined due to common human experiences that transcend cultures.
That's probably attributable to trichromacy, having three classes of retinal cones. The article points this out and correctly notes the complexity of visual circuitry without giving much detail. That's OK, the layers involved in translating retinal impulses, the exquisitely intricate slicing and dicing visual information into encodings for shape, motion, texture, surface, depth as well as color are truly mind-boggling.
That suggests to me that trying to ascertain linguistic influences on the visual system may be a form of "premature optimization". Of course it will be no surprise to find out there are cultural effects on verbal color description and communication conventions. OTOH it's also plausible to suppose that humans of various cultures can distinguish colors equally well when color naming is not demanded.
Artists who care about color don't care about the names colors are called by. What is important is being able to distinguish subtly different colors in order to be able to produce results. On the web #ff8844 doesn't have to have a name, it does the same thing anyway.
At the end of the day it's important to determine if language really changes what we see, or only the modes of communication, styles, fashions and all the layers piled on top of actual sensory experience.
Perhaps in everyday activity who cares if a shade is "orange" vs. "tangerine". When fine color discrimination really counts, in art, engineering, medicine, color names are secondary if necessary at all.
BTW if anyone wants to informally test their own color discrimination ability, I'd recommend looking here: http://www.xrite.com/online-color-test-challenge