🎨 The colours you don’t see

Book of TREE 3.102

There are insights you are primed to understand because of the language you speak and the culture you inherited. There are also things that are difficult to know because they don’t exist in your language.

Numbers and colours seem like definite objective fact. But the way you understand colour depends on the words you have for describing it. You know about blue and green, but some languages don’t distinguish these colours. It’s all ‘grue’. If you speak Greek, Turkish or Russian, you know that what English calls blue is actually two different colours. (In Greek they are γαλάζιο and μπλε.)

The Warlpiri people of Australia don’t have colour words at all. Instead they have ‘a rich vocabulary referring to texture, physical sensation and functional purpose’.

Numbers now. You understand quantities because you have number words to work with. Not all languages do.

Without numbers, healthy human adults struggle to precisely differentiate and recall quantities as low as four. In an experiment, a researcher will place nuts into a can one at a time, then remove them one by one. The person watching is asked to signal when all the nuts have been removed. Responses suggest that anumeric people have some trouble keeping track of how many nuts remain in the can, even if there are only four or five in total.

This and many other experiments have converged upon a simple conclusion: When people do not have number words, they struggle to make quantitative distinctions that probably seem natural to someone like you or me. While only a small portion of the world’s languages are anumeric or nearly anumeric, they demonstrate that number words are not a human universal.

It is worth stressing that these anumeric people are cognitively normal, well-adapted to the environs they have dominated for centuries. As the child of missionaries, I spent some of my youth living with anumeric indigenous people… who live along the sinuous banks of the black Maici River. Like other outsiders, I was continually impressed by their superior understanding of the riverine ecology we shared.

Your language interprets reality in ways that are invisible to you unless you get outside it.

‘If we are to truly understand how much our cognitive lives differ cross-culturally, we must continually sound the depths of our species’ linguistic diversity.’

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The ideas and quotes in today’s post come from Aina Casaponsa’s and Panos Athanasopoulos’ article about language and colour and Caleb Everett’s article about numberless people. They are worth reading.

—Jeff

Makes me think of Pocahontas’, “Can you paint with all the colors of the wind”.

Grow slowly
Skyler