Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher Page A

for their ability to distinguish colors, subjecting them to rigorous tests. He used an improved and extended version of the Holmgren wool test and devised a series of experiments of his own to detect any sign of inability to perceive differences. But he did not find a single case of color blindness. Not only were the islanders able to distinguish between all primary colors, but they could also tell apart different shades of blue and of any other color. Rivers’s meticulous experiments thus demonstrated beyond any possible doubt that people can see the differences between all imaginable shades of colors and yet have no standard names in their language even for basic colors such as green or blue.
    Surely, there could have been only one possible conclusion for such an acutely intelligent researcher to draw from his own findings: the differences in color vocabulary have nothing to do with biological factors. And yet there was one experience which struck Rivers so forcefully that it managed to throw him entirely off track. This was the encounter with that weirdest of all weirdnesses, a phenomenon which philologists could infer only from ancient texts but which he met face to face: people who call the sky “black.” As Rivers points out with amazement in his expedition reports, he simply could not grasp how the old men of Murray Island regarded it as quite natural to apply the term “black” (
golegole
) to the brilliant blue of the sky and sea. He mentions with equal disbelief that one of the islanders, “an intelligent native,” was happy to compare the color of the sky to that of dark dirty water. This behavior, Rivers writes, “seemed almost inexplicable, if blue were not to these natives a duller and a darker colour than it is to us.”
    Rivers thus concluded that Magnus was right in assuming that the natives must still suffer from a “certain degree of insensitiveness to blue (and probably green) as compared with that of Europeans.” Being such a scrupulous scientist, Rivers was not only aware of the weaknesses of his own argument but careful to air them himself. He explains that his own results proved that one cannot deduce from language what the speakers can see. He even mentions that the younger generation of speakers, who have borrowed the word
bulu-bulu
for “blue,” use it withoutany apparent confusion. And still, after acknowledging all such objections, he parries them with one fact, as if it were sufficient to undermine everything else: “One cannot, however, wholly ignore the fact that intelligent natives would regard it as perfectly natural to apply the same name to the brilliant blue of the sky and sea which they give to the deepest black.”
LEGACY FRUIT AND OTHER THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS
     
    At the last hurdle, then, Rivers’s imagination simply lost its nerve and balked at the idea that “blue” is ultimately a cultural convention. He could not bring himself to concede that people who saw blue just as vividly as he did would still find it natural to regard it as a shade of black. And in all fairness, it is difficult to blame him, for even with the wealth of incontrovertible evidence at our disposal today, it is still very hard for us to muster the imagination needed to accept that blue and black seem separate colors just because of the cultural conventions we were reared on. Our deepest instincts and guttest of feelings yell at us that blue and black are
really
separate colors, as are green and blue, whereas navy blue and sky blue, for instance, are
really
just different shades of the same color. So before we continue with the final episode of the quest for the origin of the color sense, we can take a short break from the historical narrative and embark on three thought experiments that might help to make the power of cultural conventions sink in.
    The first experiment is an exercise in counterfactual history. Let’s imagine how the color-sense debate might have unfolded had it been conducted not in