New theory why languages don’t all have the same number of terms for colors
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher.
TL;DR: no, language doesn't determine how you see the world. There might be one notable exception - there's a tribe somewhere (forgot the details) that doesn't use front, behind, left, right, but the cardinal directions (they'll actually say, "oh, there's an ant on your northern leg"). As they grow up with this, they have an uncanny sense of where north is wherever they are, even in buildings etc.
> that doesn't use front, behind, left, right, but the cardinal directions
I can't remember where I saw this (maybe Language Log, consider this "citation needed"), but apparently there are some Polynesian Islanders that use a language with different direction concepts (inwards/outwards maybe?).
It's really a zombie/cockroach meme (to use Paul Krugman's terminology) - it's dead, but keeps coming back, just like the Eskimos and their 100 words for snow etc.
But isn't color names one of the last refuges of Sapir-Whorf, one of the places where the weakest form of Sapir-Whorf might be having some sort of effect, because color names are one tool (out of many) that we can use to consciously distinguish colors?
As an example, these Munsell tiles are supposed to be perceptually uniform, so just based on the mechanisms of vision, each tile would be as easy to distinguish from its neighbors as all the others. If you showed me tile A5, then later showed me C5 and asked if it's the same color, I would know it isn't. One is red and the other is orange.
But I'd have a much harder time with K3 and M3, or J6 and L6 -- and these are colors that the article points out are harder to distinguish in words.
Yes, if I knew I were being tested on this, I could invent a description to try to remember what K3 looks like. But I don't have to invent anything to recognize the difference between red and orange.
But maybe jacobolus is right that this is just an effect of RGB monitors and not of language. These tiles are in the cyan range, which RGB screens don't display faithfully, so maybe the actual difference between the tiles is more obvious when you're looking at them.
http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/images/jrus-20100531/wcs-c...
You can’t get a complete idea of what the original color chips looked like, as quite a few of them are outside the sRGB gamut (so what you get in this picture is a less colorful representation of the same lightness/hue). But it should give you a reasonable impression.
Here’s a more continuous picture of the full sRGB gamut in Munsell space, along with some points of interest:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ed/Color-map-2.p...
(For example you can see that the ISCC–NBS labels for sRGB primaries are “reddish orange”, “greenish yellow”, and “purplish blue”, respectively)
If you actually look at a chart where a bunch of Munsell color chips of different hues are all presented at the same lightness (value) and chroma, and you have standard color vision, then they should look pretty well equally spaced. (Or the same story for holding any pair of attributes constant and varying the third.)
One significant problem with trying to glance at and interpret these kinds of more limited hue–value charts (i.e. not the full set of Munsell chips) is that the chroma varies from one part of the chart to another, and chroma differences are often more salient than hue differences.
But some named categories are certainly larger and fuzzier than others.
The main reason it still hangs on is that it is used by people to try to support the left-wing ideological idea that human nature is entirely a product of socialization, and so can be formed to produce a perfect socialist society. And let me add that, as Marxist writer Norman Geras explains in his book Marx and Human Nature, this is not at all what Marx himself thought.
Could you please not take HN threads on generic ideological tangents? Those are against the HN guidelines (regardless of which ideology, of course) because such discussions are so repetitive. They're black holes from which no light emerges.
When I learn words for colors - what "fuchsia" or "teal" or the like actually mean - I mentally distinguish them from similar shades in day-to-day life whereas before I didn't. (And it's not just "hey, new word, let's use that!"; I learned both of those colors about halfway through my life.) When I learn a specialized term in a field that chunks a bunch of complex concepts together in a particular way, I can think about that topic more fluently (letting me go further with those thoughts), but only if I accept the particular chunking of that term.
Sure, I have some thoughts which are more visual or spatial or musical and don't involve words as semantic pointers-to-structures-of-meaning. But not _all_ of them.
(It's also possible I'm simply fundamentally misunderstanding Sapir-Whorf.)
[Edited to fix italics.]
In that sense, language gives us a way to approximate concepts that we already have, to varying extents. But it's extremely useful, because we can then manipulate those approximations to generate novel concepts. I don't believe anybody would suggest that that's not the case. But strong Sapir-Whorf would suggest that this is how all thought originates.
On another anecdotal note, I used to consider my internal monologue to be me, full-stop, and I have always thought of it as being a stream of words. But I've come to realize that it's not actually real words. Furthermore, at best, its the version of me when I'm under zero stress. However, if I'm upset or threatened, it's clear that "linguistic me" only has illusory control of my behavior, or even my thoughts. In fact, I have realized I often behave first, and then come up with the narrative to understand my own behavior.
I posit that this is universal. I think we shape our thoughts to conform to much more primeval motivations, which are surprisingly complex in nature. The entire media industry exists to try to give us linguistic narratives to explain and shape these urges. And I say "shape" because it's not a one way process. I think we train our own behaviors with our thoughts, and when unstressed, we can even exercise linguistic self-control.
(Though the rider can, slowly over time, train the elephant in certain things. But that's not in-the-moment control.)
IIRC - it's been a while since I read it - part of the book's point is that the whole system of elephant + rider is "us", even though the conscious POV is just the rider.
https://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Hypothesis-Finding-Modern-A...
> But there is more to the effects of a geographic language, for the sense of orientation has to extend further in time than the immediate present. If you speak a Guugu Yimithirr-style language, your memories of anything that you might ever want to report will have to be stored with cardinal directions as part of the picture. One Guugu Yimithirr speaker was filmed telling his friends the story of how in his youth, he capsized in shark-infested waters. He and an older person were caught in a storm, and their boat tipped over. They both jumped into the water and managed to swim nearly three miles to the shore, only to discover that the missionary for whom they worked was far more concerned at the loss of the boat than relieved at their miraculous escape. Apart from the dramatic content, the remarkable thing about the story was that it was remembered throughout in cardinal directions: the speaker jumped into the water on the western side of the boat, his companion to the east of the boat, they saw a giant shark swimming north and so on. Perhaps the cardinal directions were just made up for the occasion? Well, quite by chance, the same person was filmed some years later telling the same story. The cardinal directions matched exactly in the two tellings. Even more remarkable were the spontaneous hand gestures that accompanied the story. For instance, the direction in which the boat rolled over was gestured in the correct geographic orientation, regardless of the direction the speaker was facing in the two films.
The rat then tries to get the treat. 50% of the time it goes straight to the correct side of the room, and 50% of the time it goes to the wrong side first.
If instead of an all white room you do it in a room where one of the long walls is painted blue--the results are the same. Half the time the rat goes to the correct corner first, half the time it goes to the wrong corner first.
That's interesting because other experiments show that rats can recognize blue vs. white and can recognize left vs. right. But apparently they cannot put the concept of blue vs. white and concept of left vs. right together to remember that something is on the left side of the blue wall.
If you try this with human adults, they of course go right to the treat almost every time. We have no trouble remembering the goody is on the left side of the blue wall.
Babies, though...nope. No better than rats. Two year olds...still no better than rats. Same for three and four and five year olds. It isn't until a human is around six years old that they can go straight for the treat.
The scientists in the story I heard on the radio talking about this (probably on Radiolab on NPR) had a hypothesis about what is going on.
Before around six the spatial language used by kids is not very sophisticated. They would not say that something is "on the left side of the blue wall". Around six their language is developed enough that they would say something like that, and that is the same time they start being able to beat rats in the experiment.
The scientists suspect that the rats and the younger kids have the concepts of color and of relative position in their brains and they can apply them, but there are no links between them. When the kids get sophisticated enough that they start composing phrases like "left of the blue wall" that links the relative position concepts and the color concepts, and then they can use the combination of color and position to remember things.
This is not quite like Sapir-Whorf, because it doesn't necessarily mean that the kids can start thinking about "left of the blue wall" BECAUSE their language has developed to the point it can express it. It could just as easily be the other way around--they add that capability to their language BECAUSE they became able to think about it.
See Regier & Xu (2017) or Cibelli et al. (2016)
That said, thank you so much for not sharing Boroditsky's work.
Interesting to see Guy Deutscher's name come up in this context. I mostly know him as Alma Deutscher's father.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/tomchivers/no-the-inuit-dont-have-1...
Sorry about the source URL, but it is actually a good article. I live in the mountains of Maine. We don't have enough words for snow. We do have lots of phrases to describe the many different types of snow, however.
And there are lots of types of snow, both as it is falling, how it is as it lands, and how it reacts after the storm. I love the stuff and can probably come up with accurate descriptive phrases for hours.
1. How long have you been waiting to use that in a sentence?
2. German has a word for everything. "My car misfires when I am in second gear and accelerating in a corner that is greater than 45° and on an incline." There is a German word for exactly that.
Anyhow, we really could use more words for snow. I've seen stuff falling from the sky that there are no words for. Some of it doesn't defies even simple phrases.
As I've said before, I love snow. I do live here for a reason.
There are no words for this slush-like substance that falls from the sky, sometimes as small clumps but other times in clumps large enough that you can hear them hit the ground. This happens usually when the air temp is just a bit above freezing, it is warmer down in the valley than it is here, and the higher air remains pretty warm until there is a cut-off a few thousand feet above you and the air gets much colder. Also, it tends to be high ambient moisture content to the point where you have a moderately dense fog.
There's probably a German word for that, but there's none in English and I doubt the Inuit people have one either.
Seriously, there is a lot of different types of snow. I didn't realize there were this many until I retired and moved here. Now I know...
By the way, the locals would call that 'the start of a good old fashioned New England shit-storm.' It often ends with frozen rain or sleet. I could go on for hours about the different types of snow. 100 words wouldn't even begin to cut it.
I don't think there is a German word for that? What is that word?
This is the first search result for one search:
http://www.fluentu.com/blog/german/weird-german-words-vocabu...
Joining or concatenating two nouns or a noun and an adjective form “a new word”, but the meaning is of course based upon the two other words.
So if I were to construct a word about the car, I could go like: anden-gears-sving-fejltænding. (Literally, second gear turn misfire). Typically hyphens are omitted, but they are optional.
Is that a new word? Not in Danish, it is just four other written with no spaces in between. Written together they describe a specific situation/concept. But there is no new word.
For example, "football stadium" is written in two words in English. In German it _must_ be written as "Fußballstadien" -- making it look like German has a lot of "special" "words". They are just concatenations to form nouns.
One of my best mates is a speech pathologist with a love of language. She throws out that word with a casual flair... :)
It reminds me, at times, of my university days. That may not seem like a compliment, but it is absolutely meant to be. See, I have a Ph.D., in Applied Mathemstics - from MIT.
HN sometimes reminds me of those university experiences. I find it comforting to not be the smartest person in the room. It makes me feel honored to be here.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge.
That sounds like what we call "räntä" in Finland, which, according to Wikipedia, is called "sleet" in Commonwealth countries.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_and_snow_mixed#Terminolog...
> other times in clumps large enough that you can hear them hit the ground.
... Just for (very) wet snow.
I'm not really sure what to call it?
Picture nearly melted snowflakes, on the verge of melting - so that they are almost translucent. Now, clump them together, somewhere in the atmosphere. Sometimes, the clumps will have a diameter of as many as six centimeters, but that's pretty rare. Usually, they are only two to four centimeters.
Those fall out of the sky. Usually, I will see that just a couple of times per season. Some years, I don't see it at all. It really depends and it only happens when the conditions are just right.
My elevation is about 925 meters. I'm a bit above the 45°, the meridian. I usually get about 3.75 meters of snow, per season,
(I converted it to metric for you.)
I've never seen snow quite like it elsewhere. I'm sure it exists elsewhere, but I've never seen it.
As a boring compound there is Schneeregen (snow-rain), but there is the shortened "Schnegen". Although the latter isn't used as a noun often, more commonly as a verb ("es schnegnet")
Or as my math professor friend likes to say, “German is closed under concatenation” (and “Latin under permutation”)
That looks exactly like my google maps' navigator. "Head north" it says, like I have any idea where the north is
And perhaps connections with toxicity in fungi (i.e. Amanita muscaria) and plants (e.g. European yew and bittersweet nightshade).
I can tell you that the grid is more physically uniform than perceptually uniform. It is well known that humans are physiologically less capable of distinguishing hues of blue than of most other broad categories. This property is encoded in most colorimetric systems, such as CIEDE 2000.
Update: I read a paper some years ago which I can no longer find an English copy of[0]. The author used Isomap to project the mutual perceptual distances (as modeled by CIEDE 2000) of physically-uniform colors onto a two and three dimensional euclidean space, with very interesting results (toward the end of the PDF).
If they're Munsell colors, as the article suggests, they should be close to perceptually uniform. The Munsell system was specifically designed around perceptible color differences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell_color_system
It's pretty old, so it predates any of the modern standardized color systems you'd typically use in software today.
https://theconversation.imgix.net/files/186280/original/file...
My two monitors display the grids a bit differently, but A3 is pretty obviously red, B4 is orange, E7 is the best yellow, H4 is the best green. None of the blues look like the primary color blue though.
I took a sample of the blue colors in a paint program and they all seemed pretty far away from a proper blue. The hue is off. N4, which was presented in the article as blue, is RGB (35, 131, 172). A3 red by comparison is (190, 27, 50) and H4 green is (42, 144, 48).
As an additional test, I edited the grid, drawing rectangles of red (255, 0, 0) and blue (0, 255, 0) over each of the proximate color squares. Pure red is fairly close to A3 whereas pure blue is very different from all blue-like squares on the grid.
It feels to me that something is off about this grid, like it doesn't cover enough of the color space to encompass a proper primary blue, but I don't know enough about color theory to characterize what's wrong with it.
I think this chart would definitely have an impact on the results of this study, though I suspect they have some reasoning. I'm not sure how seriously I take the results if this is the chart.
https://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/its-not-easy-s...
Then I follow the link to the original [2] chart, which claims RGB values of 80/186/15, except for the odd one which is 97/192/4. But my color picker is showing the same as before: everything is 0/199-206/0.
Something is not right here.
Edit: Here are the two colors he intended, based on the labeling of [2]. I can tell them apart.
https://www.webpagefx.com/web-design/color-picker/50BA0F
https://www.webpagefx.com/web-design/color-picker/61C004
[1] In Mac OS X you can pull up the "digital color picker" from spotlight search.
[2] had to to change to http from https ... should be safe for this context: http://origin.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ring...
Those aren't the same colors. They're both greens, but different in both exact hue and in brightness. This has nothing to do with words, but with the precision of the human eyeball.
isn't quite the same as
is able to discriminate among shades of green that basically look the same to us
Also, from the actual Himba study (by the way,the study was conducted and published) "Himba participants show categorical perception only for their own linguistic categories and not for either the supposed universal categories of English" Roberson et al., 2005 (full citation in another comment)
Roberson, D., Davidoff, J., Davies, I. R., & Shapiro, L. R. (2005). Color categories: Evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis. Cognitive psychology, 50(4), 378-411.
On top of that there is also Berinmo tribe that " marks a color boundary that is absent in English (i.e., a boundary within the English green category), but also fails to mark other boundaries that are found in English (e.g. the boundary between blue and purple (Roberson, Davidoff, Davies, & Shapiro, 2005)"
Native Danish speaker, and I really only acknowledge eight true colours: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, and gray. Perhaps tellingly, all those that come with solid, earthy, Germanic names. Orange and purple are clearly much later imports, and while I do of course use the words, I cannot help regarding those two as constructs - blends of yellow/red and blue/red. Pink is such a recent import, it has only really become a term in my lifetime. It is not a word I would normally use, except in a sort of ironic context. I would always default to "light red".
My no nonsense daughter, in her twenties, insists that pink is definitely its own colour - not the same as light red. But then, as I understand it, female eyes can see further along the infrared spectrum than male ones. I assume women have a richer perception of most things reddish than the rest of us.
If you say "I can make magenta by mixing white and red light," I'll come back and say "OK, what do you call the color you get when you subsequently filter out green?"
It's also something of a linguistic constant that red is most basic "chromatic" colour to distinguish, after making the the distinction between white and black. Perhaps because blood is red?
The science of colour and colour perception is an incredibly fascinating subject, that even Goethe had a hand in shaping. I really recommend you to read at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision
They are rouge/orange/rouge in French (translation: green/orange/red).
Some languages perceive the middle color as yellow, some as orange. Because this is deeply buried in the brain since childhood, adult friends from different countries can disagree on the true color of the middle light for ages...
I am wondering if this difference can lead to different taste/connotation regarding colors in different country.
The middle light is "amarillo" (yellow) in spanish, while it's "orange" in French.
My French is nonexistent, but there's a typo here, right? Should that be vert/orange/rouge?
http://www.cram.com/flashcards/scottish-gaelic-basic-words-c...
Scottish Gaelic speakers share a country with English speakers, and they all also speak English, yet Gaelic colour names don't map at all well onto English colour names.
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japan-green-traffic-lig...
Vert
If something is dark green in the morning but light green at noon, you'll just call it green.