Guy Deutscher - Through the Language Glass, Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

So what happens to children who grow up not in a culture that shoves brightly colored plastic toys before their eyes and stuffs color names down their ears but rather in a culture where artificially manufactured colors are scarce and color is of very limited communicative importance? Two Danish anthropologists who had once immersed themselves in the society of a Polynesian atoll called Bellona described their surprise at how rarely the Bellonese talked about color with their children. When explaining the differences between objects such as fruits or fish, which to our mind would be most easily classified by their color, the Bellonese hardly ever seemed to mention color at all. The anthropologists could not resist asking why, but the only answer they got was “we don’t talk much about color here.” Without such coaching in colors, it is perhaps not so surprising that Bellonese children end up being quite content with a very “defective” inventory of color names.

As it so happened, I started researching this book just as my elder daughter was learning to speak, and my obsession with color meant she was trained intensely and so learned to recognize color names relatively early on. Since there was one particular “failure” that struck Gladstone, Geiger, and above all Rivers so forcefully, I decided to conduct a harmless experiment. Gladstone could not conceive how Homer failed to notice that “most perfect example of blue,” the southern sky. Geiger spent pages marveling at the absence of the sky’s blueness in ancient texts, and Rivers could not get over the natives’ designation of the sky as black. So I wanted to test how obvious the color of the sky really was to someone who had not yet been culturally indoctrinated. I decided never to mention the color of the sky to my daughter, although I talked about the color of all imaginable objects until she was blue in the face. When would she hit upon it herself?

Alma recognized blue objects correctly from the age of eighteen months, and started using the word “boo” herself at around nineteen months. She was used to games that involved pointing at objects and asking what color they were, so I started occasionally to point upwards and ask what color the sky was. She knew what the sky was, and I made sure the question was always posed when the sky was well and truly blue. But although she had no problems naming the color of blue objects, she would just stare upwards in bafflement whenever I asked her about sky, and her only answer was a “what are you talking about?” look. Only at twenty-three months of age did she finally deign to answer the question, but the answer was… “white” (admittedly, it was a bright day). It took another month until she first called the sky “blue,” and even then it had not yet become canonically blue: one day she said “blue,” another day “white,” and on another occasion she couldn’t make up her mind: “blue,” then “white,” then “blue” again. In short, more than six months had passed from when she was first able to recognize blue objects confidently until she named the blueness of the sky. And it seems that her confusions were not entirely over even by the age of four, because at this age she once pointed at the pitch-black sky late at night and declared that it was blue.

Now consider how much easier her task was compared with Homer’s or the Murray Islanders’. After all, Alma had been actively trained to recognize blueness in objects and had been explicitly taught that blue was a different color from white or black or green. The only things she was required to do, therefore, were first to recognize that the sky had a color at all, and then to work out that this color was similar to the numerous blue objects she was surrounded with, rather than to black or white or green objects. Nevertheless, it still took her six months to work it out.

It is hard to say for certain where exactly the difficulty lay. Was it primarily the unfamiliar notion that a vast empty space, rather than a tangible object, can have a color at all? Or was it that the pale unsaturated blue of the sky is actually very different from the highly saturated blues of artificial objects? Perhaps my anecdotal evidence will inspire others to examine this question more systematically. But even without the benefit of such research, the mere fact that Alma found this particular blueness so challenging makes it easier to imagine why people who may never have clapped eyes on blue objects do not lose much sleep over the color of the sky. If that quintessence of azurity, that “most perfect example of blue,” is actually far from obvious even under conducive circumstances, then it seems far less surprising that people who have never seen an object with a color similar to the sky fail to find a special name for this great expanse of nothingness. And if they are nevertheless pressed to give some answer by a nagging anthropologist, is it not natural that they would choose the closest color label in their limited palette and say “black” or “green”?

The final exercise that can help to demonstrate the power of cultural conventions is a bit of science fiction fantasizing. Imagine we are sometime in the distant future when every home is equipped with a machine that looks a bit like a microwave but in fact does far more than merely warm food up. It creates food out of thin air-or rather out of frozen stock cubes it teleports directly from the supermarket. Put a cube of fruit stock in the machine, for example, and at the touch of a few buttons you can conjure up any imaginable fruit: one button gives you a perfectly ripe avocado, another button a juicy grapefruit.

But this is an entirely inadequate way to describe what this wonderful machine can do, because it is by no means limited to the few “legacy fruits” that were available in the early twenty-first century. The machine can create thousands of different fruits by manipulating the taste and the consistency on many different axes, such as firmness, juiciness, creaminess, airiness, sliminess, sweetness, tanginess, and many others that we don’t have precise words to describe. Press a button, and you’ll get a fruit that’s a bit like an avocado in its oily consistency, but with a taste halfway between a carrot and a mango. Twiddle a knob, and you’ll get a slimy lychee-like fruit with a taste somewhere between peach and watermelon.

In fact, even coarse approximations like “a bit like X” or “halfway between Y and Z” do not do justice to the wealth of different flavors that will be available. Instead, our successors will have developed a rich and refined vocabulary to cover the whole space of possible tastes and consistencies. They will have specific names for hundreds of distinct areas in this space and will not be bound by the few particular tastes of the fruit we happen to be familiar with today.

Now imagine that an anthropologist specializing in primitive cultures beams herself down to the natives in Silicon Valley, whose way of life has not advanced a kilobyte beyond the Google age and whose tools have remained just as primitive as they were in the twenty-first century. She brings along with her a tray of taste samples called the Munsell Taste System. On it are representative samples of the whole taste space, 1,024 little fruit cubes that automatically reconstitute themselves on the tray the moment one picks them up. She asks the natives to try each of these and tell her the name of the taste in their language, and she is astonished at the abject poverty of their fructiferous vocabulary. She cannot comprehend why they are struggling to describe the taste samples, why their only abstract taste concepts are limited to the crudest oppositions such as “sweet” and “sour,” and why the only other descriptions they manage to come up with are “it’s a bit like an X,” where X is the name of a certain legacy fruit. She begins to suspect that their taste buds have not yet fully evolved. But when she tests the natives, she establishes that they are fully capable of telling the difference between any two cubes in her sample. There is obviously nothing wrong with their tongue, but why then is their langue so defective?