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

Magnus’s explicit reliance on the Lamarckian model: Magnus 1877b, 44, 50.

Criticism of Magnus: The earliest and most vocal critic of Magnus’s theory was Ernst Krause, one of Darwin’s first followers and popularizers in Germany (Krause 1877). Darwin himself felt that Magnus’s scenario was problematic. On June 30, 1877, Darwin wrote to Krause: “I have been much interested by your able argument against the belief that the sense of colour has been recently acquired by man.” Another vocal critic was the science writer Grant Allen (1878, 129-32; 1879), who argued that “there is every reason to think that the perception of colours is a faculty which man shares with all the higher members of the animal world. In no other way can we account for the varied hues of flowers, fruits, insects, birds, and mammals, all of which seem to have been developed as allurements for the eye, guiding it towards food or the opposite sex.” But the argument about the bright colors of animals was weakest exactly where it was most needed, because the coloring of mammals, as opposed to birds and insects, is extremely subdued, dominated by black, white, and shades of brown and gray. At the time, there was precious little direct evidence about which animals can see colors: bees and other insects had been shown to respond to color, but the evidence petered out when it came to the higher animals and especially to mammals, whose sense of color was shown (see Graber 1884) to be less developed than that of man. See also Donders 1884, 89-90, and, for a detailed account of the debate, Hochegger 1884, 132.

“we see in essence not with two eyes”: Delitzsch 1878, 267.

A short visit to the British museum: Allen 1879, 204.

“it does not seem plausible to us”: Magnus 1877c, 427. See also Magnus 1880, 10; Magnus 1883, 21.

Passersby in the elegant Kurfürstendamm: Since 1925 this part of the street has been called Budapester Strasse.

Nubian display: Rothfels 2002, 84.

Nubians’ sense of color: Virchow 1878 (Sitzung am 19.10.1878), and Virchow 1879.

“rude populations inhabiting foreign lands”: Gatschet 1879, 475.

“apologized once that he couldn’t find a bottle”: Bastian 1869, 89-90.

Relevance of the “savages”: Darwin, for instance, suggested in a letter to Gladstone (de Beer 1958, 89) that one should ascertain whether “low savages” had names for shades of color: “I should expect that they have not, and this would be remarkable for the Indians of Chilee and Tierra del Fuego have names for every slight promontory and hill-even to a marvellous degree.”

“the color of any grass, weed or plant”: Gatschet 1879, 475, 477, 481.

Almquist’s reports: Almquist 1883, 46-47. If pressed, the Chukchis also produced other terms, but these seemed to be variable. In Berlin, Rudolf Virchow reached a similar conclusion about the color terminology of some of the Nubians (Virchow 1878, 353).

Nias in Sumatra: Magnus 1880, 8.

None of the Nubians failed to pick the right colors: Virchow 1878, 351n1.

Ovaherero: Magnus 1880, 9.

Magnus’s revised theory: Magnus 1880, 34ff.; Magnus 1881, 195ff.

Rivers’s life and work: Slobodín 1978.

“goodbye my friend-I don’t suppose we shall ever meet again”: Whittle 1997.

“Galileo of anthropology”: Lévi-Strauss 1968, 162.

“For the first time trained experimental psychologists”: Haddon 1910, 86.

“lively discussions were started”: Rivers 1901a, 53.

“seemed almost inexplicable, if blue”: Rivers 1901b, 51. See also Rivers 1901b, 46-47.

“certain degree of insensitiveness to blue”: Rivers 1901a, 94. Rivers also tried to show experimentally, using a device called a Lovibond tintometer, that the thresholds at which the natives could recognize very pale blue glass were higher than those of Europeans. The serious problems with his experiments were pointed out by Woodworth 1910b, Titchener 1916, Bancroft 1924. Recently, two British scientists (Lindsey and Brown 2002) proposed a similar idea to Rivers’s, suggesting that people closer to the equator suffer from stronger UV radiation, which causes their retina to loose sensitivity to green and blue. The severe problems with this claim were pointed out by Regier and Kay 2004.

“One cannot, however, wholly”: Rivers 1901a, 94.

page 68 Siniy and goluboy in Russian: Corbett and Morgan 1988.

“attended carefully to the mental development”: C. Darwin to E. Krause, June 30, 1877.

Acquisition of colors by children: Pitchford and Mullen 2002, 1362; Roberson et al. 2006.

Bellona: Kuschel and Monberg 1974.

Reviews of Rivers: Woodworth 1910b, Titchener 1916, Bancroft 1924.

“The life of yesterday”: Lambert 1960, 244. The actual copy of this tablet is late, from Ashurbanipal’s library (seventh century BC). But while no earlier copies of this particular proverb have so far been found, the Sumerian proverbs in general go back at least to the Old Babylonian period (2000-1600 BC).

“What is said is just repetition”: Parkinson 1996, 649.

“Perish those who said our things before us”: Donatus’s phrase was mentioned by his student St. Jerome in Jerome’s commentrary on Ecclesiastes (Migne 1845, 1019): “Comicus ait: Nihil est dictum, quod non sit dictum prius, unde et præceptor meum Donatus, cum ipsum versiculum exponeret, Pereant, inquit, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.”

“The physical types chosen for representation”: Francis 1913, 524.

“We are probably justified in inferring”: Woodworth 1910a, 179.

Suggestion that Geiger’s sequence may have been just a coincidence: Woodworth 1910b.

“Physicists view the color-spectrum as a continuous scale”: Bloomfield 1933, 140.

“arbitrarily sets its boundaries”: Hjelmslev 1943, 48.

“there is no such thing as a ‘natural’ division”: Ray 1953; see also Ray 1952, 258.

Bellonese color system: Kuschel and Monberg 1974.

Claims of arbitrariness in accounts before 1969: See Berlin and Kay 1969, 159-60n1.

“It seems no exaggeration to claim”: Sahlins 1976, 1.

page 85 “Only very occasionally is a discovery”: Newcomer and Faris 1971, 270.

Tzeltal foci: Berlin and Kay 1969, 32. Further detail (from Berlin’s unpublished ms.) in Maclaury 1997, 32, 258-59, 97-104.

Alleged universality of the foci: Berlin and Kay’s claims about the universality of the foci soon received a boost from the Berkeley psychologist Eleanor Rosch Heider (1972), who argued that the foci have a special status for memory, in that they are remembered more easily even by speakers of languages that do not have separate names for them. However, Rosch’s interpretation of her results has been questioned, and in recent years researches failed to replicate them (Roberson et al. 2005).

Foci that stray from Berlin and Kay’s predictions: Roberson et al. 2000, 2005; Levinson 2000, 27.

majority of languages conform to Geiger’s sequence or to the alternative of green before yellow: Kay and Maffi 1999.

Continued debate on whether color concepts are determined primarily by culture or by nature: Roberson et al. 2000, 2005; Levinson 2000; Regier et al. 2005; Kay and Regier 2006a, 2006b. A related debate about infant color categorization: Özgen 2004; Franklin et al. 2005; Roberson et al. 2006.

Model for natural constraints: Regier et al. 2007; see also Komarovaa et al. 2007. In a few areas of the color space, especially around blue/purple, the optimal partitions, according to Regier, Khetarpal, and Kay’s model, deviate systematically from the actual systems found in the majority of the world’s languages. This may be due either to imperfections in their model or to the override of cultural factors.