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

peoples. The fledgling discipline of anthropology was struggling to define its subject matter, “culture,” and to determine the boundaries between acquired and innate aspects of human behavior. In order to shed light on this question, it was essential to determine to what extent the cognitive traits of primitive people differed from those of civilized people, and the role of the expedition was to advance beyond the mostly anecdotal evidence that had been available before. As the leader of the expedition explained, “For the first time trained experimental psychologists investigated by means of adequate laboratory equipment a people in a low stage of culture under their ordinary conditions of life.” The multivolume meticulous reports that were published by Rivers and the other members in subsequent years helped to make the distinction between natural and cultural traits clearer, and the Torres Straits expedition is thus widely credited as the event that turned anthropology into a serious science.

W. H. R. Rivers with friends

Rivers’s own reason for joining the expedition in 1898 was the opportunity to conduct detailed experiments on the eyesight of the natives. During the 1890s, he had been immersed in the study of vision, and so was keen to resolve the controversy over the color sense, which had not progressed much in the previous two decades. He wanted to see for himself how the color vision of the natives related to their color vocabulary and whether the capacity for appreciating differences correlated with the power of expressing those differences in language.

Rivers spent four months on the remote Murray Island, at the eastern edge of the Torres Straits, right at the northern tip of the Great Barrier Reef. With a population of about 450, the island offered a manageably small community of friendly natives who were “sufficiently civilized” to enable him to make all his observations and yet, as he put it, “were sufficiently near their primitive condition to be thoroughly interesting. There is no doubt that thirty years ago they were in a completely savage stage, absolutely untouched by civilization.”

What Rivers found in the color vocabulary of the islanders fitted well with the reports from the previous twenty years. Descriptions of color were generally vague and indefinite, and sometimes a cause of much uncertainty. The most definite names were for black, white, and red. The word for “black,” golegole, derived from gole, “cuttlefish” (Rivers suggested that this referred to the dark ink secreted by the animal), “white” was kakekakek (with no obvious etymology), and the word for “red,” mamamamam, was clearly derived from mam, “blood.” Most people used mamamamam also for pink and brown. Other colors had progressively less definite and conventional names. Yellow and orange were called by many people bambam (from bam, “turmeric”), but by others siusiu (from siu, “yellow ocher”). Green was called soskepusoskep by many (from soskep, “bile,” “gallbladder”), but others used “leaf color” or “pus color.” The vocabulary for blue and violet shades was even vaguer. Some younger speakers used the word bulu-bulu, obviously a recent borrowing from English “blue.” But Rivers reports that “the old men agreed that their own proper word for blue was golegole (black).” Violet was also mostly called golegole.

Rivers noted that often “lively discussions were started among the natives as to the correct name of a colour.” When asked to indicate the names of certain colors, many islanders said they would need to consult wiser men. And when pressed to give an answer nevertheless, they simply tended to think of a name of particular objects. For example, when shown a yellowish green shade, one man called it “sea green” and pointed to the position of one particular large reef in view.

The vocabulary of the Murray Islanders was clearly “defective,” but what about their eyesight? Rivers examined more than two hundred of them for their ability to distinguish colors, subjecting them to rigorous tests. He used an improved and extended version of the Holmgren wool test and devised a series of experiments of his own to detect any sign of inability to perceive differences. But he did not find a single case of color blindness. Not only were the islanders able to distinguish between all primary colors, but they could also tell apart different shades of blue and of any other color. Rivers’s meticulous experiments thus demonstrated beyond any possible doubt that people can see the differences between all imaginable shades of colors and yet have no standard names in their language even for basic colors such as green or blue.

Surely, there could have been only one possible conclusion for such an acutely intelligent researcher to draw from his own findings: the differences in color vocabulary have nothing to do with biological factors. And yet there was one experience which struck Rivers so forcefully that it managed to throw him entirely off track. This was the encounter with that weirdest of all weirdnesses, a phenomenon which philologists could infer only from ancient texts but which he met face to face: people who call the sky “black.” As Rivers points out with amazement in his expedition reports, he simply could not grasp how the old men of Murray Island regarded it as quite natural to apply the term “black” (golegole) to the brilliant blue of the sky and sea. He mentions with equal disbelief that one of the islanders, “an intelligent native,” was happy to compare the color of the sky to that of dark dirty water. This behavior, Rivers writes, “seemed almost inexplicable, if blue were not to these natives a duller and a darker colour than it is to us.”

Rivers thus concluded that Magnus was right in assuming that the natives must still suffer from a “certain degree of insensitiveness to blue (and probably green) as compared with that of Europeans.” Being such a scrupulous scientist, Rivers was not only aware of the weaknesses of his own argument but careful to air them himself. He explains that his own results proved that one cannot deduce from language what the speakers can see. He even mentions that the younger generation of speakers, who have borrowed the word bulu- bulu for “blue,” use it without any apparent confusion. And still, after acknowledging all such objections, he parries them with one fact, as if it were sufficient to undermine everything else: “One cannot, however, wholly ignore the fact that intelligent natives would regard it as perfectly natural to apply the same name to the brilliant blue of the sky and sea which they give to the deepest black.”

LEGACY FRUIT AND OTHER THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS

At the last hurdle, then, Rivers’s imagination simply lost its nerve and balked at the idea that “blue” is ultimately a cultural convention. He could not bring himself to concede that people who saw blue just as vividly as he did would still find it natural to regard it as a shade of black. And in all fairness, it is difficult to blame him, for even with the wealth of incontrovertible evidence at our disposal today, it is still very hard for us to muster the imagination needed to accept that blue and black seem separate colors just because of the cultural conventions we were reared on. Our deepest instincts and guttest of feelings yell at us that blue and black are really separate colors, as are green and blue, whereas navy blue and sky blue, for instance, are really just different shades of the same color. So before we continue with the final episode of the quest for the origin of the color sense, we can take a short break from the historical narrative and embark on three thought experiments that might help to make the power of cultural conventions sink in.

The first experiment is an exercise in counterfactual history. Let’s imagine how the color-sense debate might have unfolded had it been conducted not in England and Germany but in Russia. Imagine that a nineteenth-century Russian anthropologist, Yuri Magnovievitch Gladonov, goes on an expedition to the remote British Isles off the northern coast of Europe, where he spends a few months with the reclusive natives and conducts detailed psychological tests on their physical and mental skills. On his return, he surprises the Royal Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg with a sensational report. It turns out that the natives of Britain show the most curious confusions in their color terminology in the siniy and goluboy area of spectrum. In fact, the aboriginal population of those cloud-swept isles does not distinguish between siniy and goluboy at all and calls them by the same name! At first, Gladonov says, he assumed the natives had a defect in their vision, perhaps because of lack of sufficient sunlight during most of the year. But when he tested their eyesight, he found that they could distinguish perfectly well between siniy and goluboy. It was just that they insisted on calling both these colors “blue.” If pressed to explain the difference between these two colors, they would say that one was “dark blue” and the other “light blue.” But they insisted it was “ridiculous” to call these two shades different colors.