Comment by Daub
5 months ago
Add to that the idea that some cultures have fewer color terms than others. This actually impacts upon their perception of color.
Check out "Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution" by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay.
It does not affect perception. This is one of those early anthro/cogsci results that said more about the authors' cultural bias than it did about the people being studied, up there with "Eskimos have a thousand words for snow".
It affects communication. People can still discern the difference between colors, they just don't have an easy way to communicate this difference to others.
The Japanese language until relatively recently didn't have a clear verbal distinction between what we call green and blue in English. That doesn't mean Japanese people can't tell the difference between green and blue. It just means that there is a kind of "blue" that is the sky and a kind of "blue" that is for traffic control lights, and in context nobody is confused.
The same issue can occur within a language between people with differing levels of study of color. A graphic designer might say a particular shade of green is "chartreuse" that his boss instead might call "yellowish green".
> up there with "Eskimos have a thousand words for snow".
Bad example. It seems that there is still a lot of disagreement on this matter, much of it rooted in what constitutes a word.
A well-balanced article on the subject here:
https://linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/inuit-words-for-snow/
Edit…
Also, from that article, a fascinating study: ‘Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination’
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0701644104
This article says almost the exact same things I said in my post. I also don't see where it definitely says the Inuit language has a richer vocabulary for snow than other languages. It just ends with a joke about how such a thing might come to pass. A casual observer here who doesn't bother reading the link might take it as a refutation from your wording, but it actually very strongly supports what I had to say.
As for the "Russian blue" study, I find it strange that the article is so skeptical of unreplicated results in linguistics and yet seems to accept the "Russian blue" study uncritically. I can see at least one glaring flaw: all of the Russian speakers were bi-lingual with English, with at least some of them being so since they were young children. They also discarded 16% of their test data because they deemed responses "too slow", with this discarding more heavily weighted towards the Russian speakers.
Wonder how this applies to animals since their color discrimination would not be impacted by language. Did humans evolve linguistic abilities that alter sensory processing? Seems odd that animals would be able to discriminate colors their eyes can see just fine, but humans would need words to do so.
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