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

England and Germany but in Russia. Imagine that a nineteenth-century Russian anthropologist, Yuri Magnovievitch Gladonov, goes on an expedition to the remote British Isles off the northern coast of Europe, where he spends a few months with the reclusive natives and conducts detailed psychological tests on their physical and mental skills. On his return, he surprises the Royal Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg with a sensational report. It turns out that the natives of Britain show the most curious confusions in their colorterminology in the
siniy
and
goluboy
area of spectrum. In fact, the aboriginal population of those cloud-swept isles does not distinguish between
siniy
and
goluboy
at all and calls them by the same name! At first, Gladonov says, he assumed the natives had a defect in their vision, perhaps because of lack of sufficient sunlight during most of the year. But when he tested their eyesight, he found that they could distinguish perfectly well between
siniy
and
goluboy
. It was just that they insisted on calling both these colors “blue.” If pressed to explain the difference between these two colors, they would say that one was “dark blue” and the other “light blue.” But they insisted it was “ridiculous” to call these two shades different colors.
    Now, when the mirror is turned on our own linguistic vagueness, the idea that our “defective” color vocabulary has anything to do with defective eyesight immediately appears ludicrous. Of course English speakers can see the difference between navy blue and sky blue. It’s simply that their cultural conventions regard these as shades of the same color (even though the two colors actually differ by wavelength just as much as sky blue does from green, as can be seen in the picture of the spectrum in figure 11 ). But if we can bring ourselves to view the spectrum through Russian eyes and look at
siniy
and
goluboy
as two separate colors, it might also become a little easier to empathize with those clueless primitives who do not separate “blue” from “green,” for instance. Just as English lumps
goluboy
and
siniy
under one “blue” concept, other languages extend this lumping principle to the whole green-blue range. And if you happened to grow up in a culture where this chunk of the spectrum has just one label, let’s say “grue,” wouldn’t it seem silly that some languages treat leaf grue and sea grue as two separate colors rather than as two shades of the same color?

     
    The second thought experiment may require less imagination than the first, but it needs some precious equipment. Rivers did not have children of his own, but it is tempting to think that if he had examined Western children’s struggles with color, he might not have been soflummoxed by the Torres Strait islanders. Scientists have long been aware that children’s acquisition of color vocabulary is remarkably slow and laborious. And yet the acuteness of the difficulties never fails to amaze. Charles Darwin wrote that he had “attended carefully to the mental development of my young children, and with two, or as I believe three of them, soon after they had come to the age when they knew the names of all common objects, I was startled by observing that they seemed quite incapable of affixing the right names to the colours in coloured engravings, although I tried repeatedly to teach them. I distinctly remember declaring that they were colour-blind, but this afterwards proved a groundless fear.” Estimates of the age at which children can reliably name the major colors have dropped considerably since the earliest studies a century ago, which reported the incredibly high figures of seven to eight years of age. According to modern surveys, children learn to use the main color words reliably a lot earlier, in their third year. Nevertheless, what seems so strange is that by an age when children’s linguistic ability is already fairly developed, they are still entirely thrown by