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

ages that have gone before us. There is no memory of those in the past; of those in the future there will be no memory among those who will come afterwards.

(Ecclesiastes 1:9, ca. third century BC)

Nullum est iam dictum, quod non dictum sit prius.

Nothing is now said that has not been said before.

(Terence, The Eunuch, 161 BC)

Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.

Perish those who said our things before us.

(Aelius Donatus, commentary on Terence, fourth century AD)

4. Those Who Said Our Things Before Us

The year 1969 was particularly blessed with momentous historical events: man landed on the moon, I was born, and a little book called Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution was published in Berkeley and became an instant sensation in linguistics and anthropology. Such was its revolutionary impact that forty years later, most linguists believe that the study of color started in the summer of ’69. And even those who are vaguely aware that anyone had given any thought to the subject before Basic Color Terms would still consider the pre-1969 period as distant prehistory, a Dark Age of no relevance or consequence except perhaps for ancient historians. To appreciate why one book had such an explosive effect, we have to step back to where our story left off and witness the curious fate that befell Geiger’s sequence in the early decades of the twentieth century. Or, to be more precise, we have to diagnose one of the severest cases of collective amnesia in the history of science.

It would be natural to expect that once culture had asserted its authority over the concepts of color, an obvious question would land at the top of everyone’s to-do list: Why do the color names of so many unrelated languages nevertheless evolve in such a predictable order? If each culture can refine its color vocabulary according to its whim and special circumstances, then why do peoples from the polar regions to the tropics, from Africa to America, always have a word for red, for instance, even if they have names for no other prismatic color? Why are there no desert languages with a name just for yellow but not for anything else? Why are there no jungle languages with names only for green, brown, and blue? The old explanation for Geiger’s sequence, which blamed it on the evolution of the retina during the last millennia, was now off the table. But if it was not the gradual refinement of vision that determined the order in which color names emerge, an alternative explanation for Geiger’s evolutionary progression was needed. Surely, then, the search for this explanation would now become the most pressing task on the agenda.

But linguists and anthropologists had other agendas. Instead of trying to solve the question, they chose to ignore it. It was as if the whole research community had fallen under an enchantment of forgetfulness, for within a few years Geiger’s sequence simply faded from consciousness and was never heard of again. This turn of events may seem barely comprehensible at first, but it must be viewed in the context of the seismic shifts in worldview that the human sciences were undergoing at the time: the profound changes in attitudes toward so-called savages and the growing abhorrence of any hierarchies that graded ethnic groups according to their alleged degree of evolution, a term that among anthropologists was rapidly becoming a dirty word.

The received opinion in the nineteenth century had been that the “savages” were anatomically inferior to civilized people, and that they were not fully evolved humans. It was widely assumed that various ethnic groups around the globe simply represented earlier way stations in the biological evolution of European man. The attitudes of the outgoing century were nowhere better summed up than in the huge exhibition that took place in the first years of the new century-the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. This grand event, the greatest world’s fair to date, was held in St. Louis, Missouri, to commemorate the centenary of the Louisiana Purchase (Thomas Jefferson’s acquisition from Napoleon of a huge chunk of the North American continent). One of the main highlights of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition was an unprecedentedly large anthropological display. Exotic ethnic groups from all over the world were brought to St. Louis and exhibited in separate “villages” arranged according to their alleged degree of evolution. The official report of the exposition explained its choice of the range of races on display in the following words (take a big breath!): “The physical types chosen for representation were those least removed from the sub-human or quadrumane [ape] form, beginning with the pygmy aborigines of Africa, and including the negrito folk of interior Mindanao [Philippines]; the Ainu of the northern island of the Japanese Archipelago… and varying physical types among North American natives.”

As hard as such sentiments are to comprehend in retrospect, they were not at odds with the scientific assumptions of the time. Given the general belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, it was only natural to conclude that primitiveness was a state one is born with, not merely born into. For if the mental attitudes of one generation affect the offspring’s heredity, then it follows fairly logically that primitiveness is a biologically inherited condition, not just a state of education. It was widely accepted, for example, even among the most enlightened of scientists, that mental traits such as tendency toward superstition, lack of inhibition, and lack of powers of abstraction were all hereditary traits that characterized the “low savages.”

All this began to change, however, in the early years of the new century. As doubts about the inheritance of acquired characteristics increased, the belief in biological primitiveness was gradually laid to rest and made way for a new understanding of culture’s sovereignty over mental traits. In America, it was now being explicitly proclaimed as a tenet of anthropological science that culture was the only admissible factor in explaining mental differences between ethnic groups. The gulf between the old and new attitudes is nowhere more apparent than in the differences between the official report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition and an alternative account by the psychologist Robert Woodworth from Columbia University, the center of the new American anthropology. Woodworth had been inspired by Rivers’s experimental methods with the Torres Strait islanders (though not impressed by Rivers’s interpretation of his results) and decided to use the gathering of so many different ethnic groups in St. Louis to conduct his own examinations. He tested hundreds of people from different races and ethnic types, not just for vision but also for many other mental processes. His findings about those whom the official report characterized as “least removed from the sub-human” were published in the magazine Science in 1910 and may now appear as the most banal statement of the obvious, but at the time they seemed so radical that they had to be hedged with a profusion of “maybe’s,” “possibly’s,” and “probably’s.” The underlying message was crystal clear nonetheless: “We are probably justified in inferring that the sensory and motor processes, and the elementary brain activities, though differing in degree from one individual to another, are about the same from one race to another.”

While this new understanding may not have immediately sunk into the public consciousness, in the scientific community the changes in attitude were fairly rapid. The new anthropology required each culture to be understood on its own terms, as a product of its own evolution rather than as merely an earlier stage in the ascent toward Western civilization. Gradations of different cultures were decidedly out, and anything that smacked of the old evolutionary hierarchy from ape to European man was now being treated with suspicion and distaste.

Unfortunately, Geiger’s evolutionary progression was felt to be exactly such an unwanted hangover. The hypothesis of a common order in the development of color vocabulary (black and white › red › yellow › green › blue) seemed to be committing the worst sins of the past: it placed different languages on a straight hierarchy in which the simplest cultures, with the fewest color names, were at the bottom, and European languages, with their refined and sophisticated color vocabulary, were at the top. What is worse, Geiger’s sequence inevitably made the color systems of primitive peoples appear like mere way stations on the road toward European civilization. In the new intellectual climate, such an evolutionary hierarchy was an embarrassment. And the thought that in this