Through the Language Glass, Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

from a beastlike state.

Geiger possessed almost unparalleled erudition. As a seven-year-old boy, he declared to his mother that he would like to learn “all languages” one day, and in the course of his short life-he succumbed to heart disease at the age of forty-two-he managed to come closer to this ideal than perhaps anyone else. But what made him stand out as a thinker was the combination of this phenomenal learning with a seemingly inexhaustible stream of bold original theories, particularly on the development of language and the evolution of human reason. And it was on such an evolutionary theme that he addressed the men of science who gathered in his hometown in September 1867. His lecture started with a provocative question: “Has human sensation, has perception by the senses, a history? Did everything in the human sense organs thousands of years ago function exactly as it does now, or can we perhaps show that at some remote period these organs must have been partly incapable of their present performance?”

Geiger’s curiosity about the language of color had been piqued by Gladstone’s discoveries. While most contemporaries wrote off Gladstone’s claims about the rawness of Homer’s colors out of hand, Geiger was inspired by what he read to examine the color descriptions of ancient texts from other cultures. And what he discovered there bore uncanny resemblances to the oddities in Homer. Here, for instance, is how Geiger described the ancient Indian Vedic poems, in particular their treatment of the sky: “These hymns, of more than ten thousand lines, are brimming with descriptions of the heavens. Scarcely any subject is evoked more frequently. The sun and reddening dawn’s play of color, day and night, cloud and lightning, the air and the ether, all these are unfolded before us over and over again, in splendor and vivid fullness. But there is only one thing that no one would ever learn from those ancient songs who did not already know it, and that is that the sky is blue.” So it was not just Homer who seemed to be blue-blind, but the ancient Indian poets too. And so, it would appear, was Moses, or at least whoever wrote the Old Testament. It is no secret, says Geiger, that the heavens play a considerable role in the Bible, appearing as they do in the very first verse-“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”- and in hundreds of places after that. And yet, like Homeric Greek, biblical Hebrew does not have a word for “blue.” Other color depictions in the Old Testament also show deficiencies remarkably similar to those in the Homeric poems. Homer’s oxen are wine-colored-the Bible mentions a “red horse” and a “red heifer without spot.” Homer tells of faces “green with fear”-the prophet Jeremiah sees all faces “turned green” with panic. Homer raves about “green honey”-the Psalms rove not far away, on “the wings of a dove covered with silver, and her feathers with green gold.” [1] So whatever condition caused the deficiencies in Homer’s descriptions of color, it seems that the authors of the Indian Vedas and of the Bible must have had it too. In fact, the whole of humanity must have languished in that condition over the course of millennia, says Geiger, for the Icelandic sagas and even the Koran all bear similar traits.

But Geiger is only just beginning to gather momentum. Widening Gladstone’s circle of evidence, he now dives into the murky deep of etymology, an area that he had made entirely his own, navigating it with more confidence than perhaps anyone else at the time. He shows that the words for “blue” in modern European languages derive from two sources: the minority from words that earlier meant “green” and the majority from words that earlier meant “black.” The same coalescing of blue and black, he adds, can be seen in the etymology of “blue” in languages further afield, such as Chinese. This suggests that at an earlier period in the history of all these languages, “blue” was not yet recognized as a concept in its own right and was subsumed under either black or green.

Geiger proceeds to plumb successively deeper into the etymological past, to layers that lie beneath the pre-blue stage. Words for the color green, he argues, extend a little further back into antiquity than for blue, but then disappear as well. He posits an earlier period, before the pre-blue stage, when green was not yet recognized as a separate color from yellow. At an even earlier time, he suggests, not even “yellow” was what it seems to us, since words that later come to mean “yellow” had originated from words for reddish colors. In the pre-yellow period, he concludes, a “dualism of black and red clearly emerges as the most primitive stage of the color sense.” But even the red stage is not where it all starts, for Geiger claims that with the aid of etymology one can reach further back, to a time when “even black and red coalesced into the vague idea of something colored.” [2]

On the basis of a few ancient texts and supported only by inspired inferences from some faint etymological traces, he thus reconstructs a complete chronological sequence for the emergence of sensitivity to different prismatic colors. Mankind’s perception of color, he says, increased “according to the schema of the color spectrum”: first came the sensitivity to red, then to yellow, then to green, and only finally to blue and violet. The most remarkable thing about it all, he adds, is that this development seems to have occurred in exactly the same order in different cultures all over the world. Thus, in Geiger’s hands, Gladstone’s discoveries about color deficiencies in one ancient culture are transformed into a systematic scenario for the evolution of the color sense in the whole human race.

Geiger went further than Gladstone in one other crucial respect. He was the first to pose explicitly the fundamental question on which the whole debate between nature and culture would center for decades to come: the relation between what the eye can see and what language can describe. Gladstone had simply taken it as read that the colors on Homer’s tongue matched exactly the distinctions his eye was able to perceive. The possibility never even crossed his mind that there could be any discrepancy between the two. Geiger, on the other hand, realized that the relation between the perception of color and its expression in language was an issue in need of addressing. “What could be the physiological state of a human generation,” he asked, “which could describe the color of the sky only as black? Can the difference between them and us be only in the naming, or in the perception itself?”

His own answer was that it is highly unlikely that people with the same eyesight as us could nevertheless have made do with such strikingly deficient color concepts. And since it is so unlikely, he suggests that the only plausible explanation for the defects in the ancients’ color vocabulary must be an anatomical one. Geiger thus rounds off his lecture by throwing down the gauntlet to his audience and challenging them to find the explanation: “The fact that color words emerge according to a definite succession, and that they do so in the same order everywhere, must have a common cause.” Now you naturalists and physicians go figure out the evolution of color vision.

As we shall see a little later, clues from an unexpected source started cropping up shortly after Geiger’s lecture, which-if anyone had taken notice-should have pointed to an entirely different way of explaining Gladstone’s and Geiger’s discoveries. There are some tantalizing hints in Geiger’s own notes that suggest he had become aware of these trails and was beginning to realize their importance. But Geiger died in media vita, only three years after delivering his lecture, while still in the thick of his research into the language of color. The clues went unheeded, and instead the following decades would be spent in pursuit of a bright red herring.

The person who decided to take up Geiger’s challenge was an ophthalmologist by the name of Hugo Magnus, a lecturer in eye medicine at the Prussian university of Breslau. A decade after Geiger’s lecture, in 1877, he published a treatise, On the Historical Evolution of the Color Sense, which claimed to explain exactly how the human retina developed its sensitivity to color over the course of the last few millennia. Magnus may not have been a thinker of Gladstone’s or Geiger’s stature, but what he lacked in genius he made up for in ambition, and it is largely to his credit that the question of the ancients’ color sense came into the public eye. His campaign to promote his ideas was greatly helped by a train of events which had nothing to do with any philological preoccupations but which nevertheless brought the subject of defective color vision into the public arena with a resounding great crash.

On the night of November 14, 1875, two Swedish express trains collided on the single-track main line between Malmo and Stockholm. The late-running northbound train was due to make an unscheduled stop at a small station to let the southbound train pass. The train slowed on approach to the station, but then, instead of obeying the red stop light and coming to a complete halt, it suddenly sped out of the station again, ignoring the lineman who ran after it frantically waving a red lamp. A few miles later, near the small village of Lagerlunda, it collided head-on with the southbound express, causing nine deaths and many injuries. Such disasters on the fledgling railway system were a matter of great horrified fascination, and the accident was widely reported in the press. After an inquiry and trial, the stationmaster was duly convicted of negligence in his signaling, dismissed, and sentenced to six months in prison.