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

Have you ever wondered why cheap cameras lie about color all the time? Why is it, for example, that when you use them to take pictures in artificial light indoors, suddenly the colors look all wrong? Why does everything look unnaturally yellow and why do blue objects lose their luster and become gray? Well, it’s not the camera that is lying; it’s your brain. In the yellowish light of incandescent lamps, objects actually do become more yellow and blues do become grayer-or at least they do to any objective measuring device. The color of an object depends on the distribution of wavelengths that it reflects, but the wavelengths reflected naturally depend on the wavelengths of the light source. When the illumination has a greater proportion of light in a certain wavelength, for instance more yellow light, the objects inevitably reflect a greater proportion of yellow light. If the brain took the signals from the cones at face value, therefore, we would experience the world as a series of pictures from cheap cameras, with the color of objects changing all the time depending on the illumination.

From an evolutionary perspective, it’s easy to see why this would not be a very useful state of affairs. If the same fruit on a tree looked one color at noon and a different color in the evening, color would not be a reliable aid in recognition-in fact, it would be a positive hindrance. In practice, therefore, the brain does an enormous amount of compensating and normalizing in order to create for us a relatively stable sensation of color. When the signals from the retina do not correspond to what it wants or expects, the brain normalizes them with its “instant fix” function, which is known as “color constancy.” This normalization process, however, is far more sophisticated than the mechanical “white balance” function of digital cameras, because it relies on the brain’s general experience of the world and, in particular, on stored memories and habits.

It has been shown, for example, that long-term memory and object recognition play an important role in the perception of color. If the brain remembers that a certain object should be a certain color, it will go out of its way to make sure that you really see this object in this color. A fascinating experiment that demonstrated such effects was conducted in 2006 by a group of scientists from the University of Giessen in Germany. They showed participants a picture on a monitor of some random spots in a particular color, say yellow. The participants had four buttons at their disposal and were asked to adjust the color of the picture by pressing these buttons until the spots appeared entirely gray, with no trace of yellowness or any other prismatic color left. Unsurprisingly, the hue that they ended up on was indeed neutral gray.

The same setup was then repeated, this time not with random spots on the screen but with a picture of a recognizable object such as a banana. The participants were again requested to adjust the hue by pressing buttons until the banana appeared gray. This time, however, the actual hue they ended up on was not pure gray but slightly bluish. In other words, the participants went too far to the other side of neutral gray before the banana really looked gray to them. This means that when the banana was already objectively gray, it still appeared to them slightly yellow! The brain thus relies on its store of past memories of what bananas look like and pushes the sensation of color in this direction.

The involvement of language with the processing of visual color information probably takes place on this level of normalization and compensation. And while it is not clear how this works in practice, it seems plausible to assume that the concepts of color in a language and the habit of differentiating between them contribute to the stored memories that the brain draws on when generating the sensation of color.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: LANGUAGE, CULTURE, AND THOUGHT

“There are four tongues worthy of the world’s use”: Jerusalem Talmud, tractate Sotah, p. 30a ().

“significant marks of the genius and manners”: Bacon 1861, 415 (De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum, 1623, book 6: “Atque una etiam hoc pacto capientur signa haud levia [sed observatu digna quod fortasse quispiam non putaret] de ingeniis et moribus populorum et nationum, ex linguis ipsorum”).

“Everything confirms”: Condillac 1822, 285.

“the intellect and the character of every nation”: Herder 1812, 354-55.

“We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure”: Emerson 1844a, 251.

“We may study the character of a people”: Russell 1983, 34.

Cicero on ineptus: De oratore 2, 4.18.

“what the Romans speak is not so much a vernacular”: Dante, De vulgari eloquentia 1.11.

page 4 “the most logical, the clearest, and the most transparent language”: Brunetiere 1895, 318.

Voltaire on the unique genius of French: Dictionnaire philosophique (Besterman 1987, 102): “Le genie de cette langue est la clarte et l’ordre: car chaque langue a son genie, et ce genie consiste dans la facilite que donne le langage de s’exprimer plus ou moins heureusement, d’employer ou de rejeter les tours familiers aux autres langues.”

Seventeenth-century French grammarians: Vaugelas, Remarques sur la langue francoise, nouvelles remarques, 1647 (Vaugelas 1738, 470): “la clarte du langage, que la Langue Francoise affecte sur toutes les Langues du monde.” Francois Charpentier 1683, 462: “Mais ne conte-t-on pour rien cete admirable qualite de la langue Francoise, qui possedant par excellence, la Clarte & la Nettete, qui sont les perfections du discours, ne peut entreprendre une traduction sans faire l’office de commentaire?”

“we French follow in all our utterances”: Le Laboureur 1669, 174.

“What is not clear may be English”: Rivarol 1784, 49.

English is “methodical, energetic, business-like”: Jespersen 1955, 17.

“monistic view”: Whorf 1956 (1940), 215.

“If our system of tenses was more fragile”: Steiner 1975, 167, 161.

Anglican revolution due to English grammar: Harvey 1996.

Chomsky’s Martian scientist: Piattelli-Palmarini 1983, 77.

“Taken in its wide ethnographic sense”: Tylor 1871, 1.

“impressions of the soul”: Aristotle, De interpretatione 1.16a.

“great store of words in one language”: Locke 1849, 315.

Tagalog: Foley 1997, 109.

Body parts: See Haspelmath et al. 2005, “Hand and Finger.” In earlier Hebrew, there was a differentiation between (hand) and (arm), and the latter is still used in some idiomatic expressions in modern Hebrew. But in the spoken language, (hand) is regularly used for both hand and arm. Likewise, English has a word, “nape,” that refers to the back of the neck, but it’s not in common use.

1: NAMING THE RAINBOW

“founded for the race”: Gladstone 1877, 388.

“the most extraordinary phenomenon”: Gladstone 1858, 1:13.

Gladstone’s view of Homer: Wemyss Reid 1899, 143.

“You are so absorbed in questions about Homer”: Myers 1958, 96.

The Times’s review of Gladstone: “Mr Gladstone’s Homeric Studies,” published on August 12, 1858.