Through the Language Glass summary

In 1867, philologist Lazarus Geiger claimed that the evolution of humankind could be traced through language. This is because, like Homer’s poems, other ancient texts, such as the Indian Vedas and the Bible, also treat color strangely.

Geiger’s postulation is significant because it transformed Gladstone’s discovery about a color deficiency in one ancient culture into an explanation of the evolution of color sense in the entire human race.

The triumph for culturalists came with expeditions. When W. H. R. Rivers, in 1898, went to Murray Island at the northern tip of the Great Barrier Reef, it was finally proved that a lack of color terms wasn’t due to a lack of perception.  

Many of the Islanders’ color names were vague. For example, the word mamamamam (derived from mam, the Islanders’ word for “blood”) was used to describe red, pink and brown.

As we saw in the last blink, the culturalists had some convincing arguments.

Nevertheless, Lazarus Geiger’s question as to why color words developed in the same order in many of the world’s languages, and why there are so many similarities among languages’ use of color words, was forgotten. It resurfaced a century later with the 1969 publication of Brent Berlin’s and Paul Kay’s Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution.

Color perception is not the only way that culture is reflected through language. Another way is through the complexity of a language’s grammatical structures.

All languages are complex, but that doesn’t mean that all languages are equally complex. Unfortunately, comparing degrees of complexity is difficult. For instance, which language is more complex: one with more vowel sounds or one with more verb tenses? There’s no real answer.

In the 1930s, the work of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf thrust forward the idea that our native language determines the way we think about and perceive the world.

À la Einstein, Sapir called this “linguistic relativity.” Unfortunately, Whorf’s and Sapir’s theories were largely pseudoscientific; nonetheless, they had a profound impact on the way that scholars thought about the interaction between language and mind. For one, people largely stopped believing that language could influence our thoughts.

Let’s start with a riddle: Why can Spanish speakers remember an apple named Patricia but not one named Patrick? The answer has everything to do with language.

Gendered nouns affect the thought processes of speakers of gendered languages. For example, the female gender of the German word for “bridge” (die Brücke) affects how Germans think of bridges (like other speakers of Europe’s gendered languages).

A striking example of how our native language affects the way we think can be found in the Guugu Yimithirr aboriginal language in Australia, which has a unique way of describing spatial relations.

Their language makes absolutely no use of egocentric coordinates (left and right), thus demonstrating that the egocentric system is not a universal feature of human language, as was once thought.

In the first four blinks we saw how language can reflect a culture’s perception of color. However, language actually plays a much larger role in color perception; specifically, it can influence how speakers of different languages perceive colors themselves.

In 1984, Paul Kay and Willett Kempton asked English speakers to choose the odd one out among three colored chips across the blue-green spectrum.