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

debate over Magnus’s book was thus the start of the open war between the claims of nature and of culture on the concepts of language.

The opinion of Magnus’s critics was that since vision could not have changed, the only explanation must be that the deficiencies in ancient color descriptions were due to “imperfections” in the languages themselves. Their argument, in other words, was that one cannot infer from language which colors the ancients were able to perceive. The first person who made this point explicitly was Ernst Krause, one of Darwin’s earliest German disciples. But it was a biblical scholar, Franz Delitzsch, who put it most memorably when he wrote in 1878 that “we see in essence not with two eyes but with three: with the two eyes of the body and with the eye of the mind that is behind them. And it is in this eye of the mind in which the cultural-historical progressive development of the color sense takes place.”

The problem for the critics-whom we can dub somewhat anachronistically as the “culturalists”-was that their proposed explanation seemed just as implausible as Magnus’s anatomical scenario, perhaps even more so. For how can one imagine that people who saw the difference between purple and black, or green and yellow, or green and blue, simply could not be bothered to differentiate these colors in their language? The culturalists tried to make the idea more appealing by pointing out that even in modern languages we use idioms that are rather imprecise about color. Don’t we speak of “white wine,” for instance, even if we can see perfectly well that it is really yellowish green? Don’t we have “black cherries” that are dark red and “white cherries” that are yellowish red? Aren’t red squirrels really brown? Don’t the Italians call the yolk of an egg “red” (il rosso)? Don’t we call the color of orange juice “orange,” although it is in fact perfectly yellow? (Check it next time.) And another example that would not occur to people in the nineteenth century: would race relations between the “dark browns” and “pinkish browns” have been as tortured as between “blacks” and “whites”?

But a few haphazard idioms are still a long way off from the consistent “defects” of the ancient texts, so by itself this argument was not very convincing. The culturalists thus sought supporting evidence from a different direction: not from language itself but from material facts that would show that the ancients saw all colors. Indeed, one ancient culture seemed to offer such evidence in plentiful supply. As one of the culturalists explained, a short visit to the British Museum is enough to demonstrate that the ancient Egyptians used blue paint. As it happens, Lazarus Geiger had already admitted in his lecture of 1867 that the Egyptians were an exception to the near-universal blue blindness of the ancients. He acknowledged that the Egyptians had a much more refined vocabulary of color than other ancient cultures and that their language had words for “green” and “blue.” But that only showed, he argued, that the progressive refinement of color vision started much earlier in Egypt than elsewhere. For after all, “who would want to take the architects of the temple in Karnak as representatives of the state of humanity in a primitive stage?”

A more precious piece of evidence was lapis lazuli, a gemstone from the mountains of Afghanistan that was highly prized throughout the ancient Near East. The Babylonians, for example, referred to it as “the treasure of the mountains” and valued it so highly that they would petition their gods with the words “may my life be as precious to you as lapis lazuli.” Archaeological excavations from the palace in Mycenae, from a period much earlier than Homer’s, proved that the Greek royalty were also in possession of small quantities of this gemstone. And while many other precious stones are at least partly transparent and thus can show various reflection effects, lapis lazuli is entirely opaque. Its main claim to beauty is its magnificent deep blue color. But if the dwellers of the Mycenaean palace could not see blue, why should they have bothered about a stone that would have appeared to them just like any other polished pebble?

All these arguments, however, hardly impressed Magnus and his followers. In his replies to the culturalists, Magnus seemed merely to be summing up the commonsense view when he asserted that “it does not seem plausible to us that a language which, like Homer’s, possessed such a rich vocabulary for the most varied and subtle effects of light should not have been able to create for itself words for the most important colors.”

The culturalists needed more, an argument clincher. They needed incontrovertible proof that someone who saw all colors could still call honey and gold “green,” horses and cows “red,” and sheep “violet.” And so they finally hit upon the idea of turning to the “savages.”

3. The Rude Populations Inhabiting Foreign Lands

Passers-by in the elegant Kurfurstendamm in Berlin on the morning of October 21, 1878, would have come across rather a funny sight. There, in front of the entrance to the zoo, was a large group of eminently bearded scientists waiting for a private tour. These gentlemen were the distinguished members of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory, and they had a special appointment to watch the hottest show in town. On display that day were not the stars of the regular menagerie or Knut the cuddly polar bear cub, but even more exotic creatures, never before exhibited in Europe. They had been imported by the circus impresario and animal dealer Carl Hagenbeck and had been put on view in zoos across the country, causing a sensation wherever they went. In Berlin alone, some sixty-two thousand people had come to watch the show in a single day.

What the throngs of wildly excited spectators flocked to see was a group of about thirty dark-skinned savages and their strange costumes (or lack thereof). They were called the “Nubians” and were in fact a group of men, women, and children from the Sudan. Naturally, the anthropological society did not wish to share its business with hoi polloi, so Herr Hagenbeck kindly offered them a private viewing. And so it was that on this autumnal Monday morning the bearded gentlemen, armed with measuring tapes, rulers, and colored skeins of wool, arrived at the zoo to slake their scientific curiosity. As practitioners of what would now be known as physical anthropology, the scientists were primarily interested in measuring sizes of noses and earlobes, shapes of genitals, and other such vital statistics of the rare specimens on display. But the other thing they were all agog to examine was the Nubians’ sense of color. For the controversy over Magnus’s book was now in full swing, and it had finally dawned on the scientific community that the “rude populations inhabiting foreign lands,” as one American ethnologist put it, could hold the key to the mystery.

As it so happens, there had been clues lying around for almost a decade that suggested that ethnic groups from around the world could resolve the question of the ancients’ color sense. In 1869, two years after Geiger had revealed the remarkable parallels between the color vocabularies of different ancient cultures, the newly established German Journal of Ethnology published a short note by Adolf Bastian, an anthropologist and best-selling travel writer. Bastian argued that oddities in the description of colors were not confined to ancient epics, since there were nations around that still marked the border between green and blue differently from Europeans. His servant in Burma, he wrote, “apologized once that he couldn’t find a bottle that I called blue (pya), because it was in fact green (zehn). In order to punish him by making him the object of ridicule of his peers, I reproached him in the presence of the other servants, but quickly noticed that the object of ridicule wasn’t he but myself.” Bastian also argued that Tagalog speakers in the Philippines had not even distinguished between green and blue until the arrival of the Spanish colonizers, because the Tagalog words for “green” and “blue” were clearly recent borrowings from Spanish verde and azul. And he claimed that the language of the Teda tribe in Chad still did not distinguish green from blue at all.

Back in 1869, no one took much heed of Bastian’s stories. But once the debate over Magnus’s theory had flared up, the relevance of this information became apparent to the culturalists, and so suggestions were made that more information should be collected from peoples in remote corners of the globe. And thus it was that Rudolf Virchow, the founder and chairman of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory, took up the challenge by leading his entire society on the arduous trek across the Tiergarten to the Berlin Zoo, in order to check the Nubians firsthand. More intrepid scholars were extending the research beyond the confines of the zoo to examine the sense of color of primitive peoples in situ. The first such investigation was carried out in the same year, 1878, by Ernst Almquist, a doctor on board a Swedish expedition ship that was ice-locked in the Polar Sea. As the ship was forced to winter just off the Chukchi Peninsula in eastern Siberia, Almquist made the most of the opportunity by testing the color sense of the Chukchis, the nomadic reindeer herdsmen and seal hunters who inhabited the area. The Americans had it easier, because they had so many savages living right under their noses. Army doctors were instructed to test the color sense of the Indian tribes with whom they came in contact, and their evidence was compiled into a detailed report by Albert Gatschet, the ethnologist of the U.S. Geological