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

page 68 Siniy and goluboy in Russian: Corbett and Morgan 1988.

“attended carefully to the mental development”: C. Darwin to E. Krause, June 30, 1877.

Acquisition of colors by children: Pitchford and Mullen 2002, 1362; Roberson et al. 2006.

Bellona: Kuschel and Monberg 1974.

Reviews of Rivers: Woodworth 1910b, Titchener 1916, Bancroft 1924.

4: THOSE WHO SAID OUR THINGS BEFORE US

“The life of yesterday”: Lambert 1960, 244. The actual copy of this tablet is late, from Ashurbanipal’s library (seventh century BC). But while no earlier copies of this particular proverb have so far been found, the Sumerian proverbs in general go back at least to the Old Babylonian period (2000-1600 BC).

“What is said is just repetition”: Parkinson 1996, 649.

“Perish those who said our things before us”: Donatus’s phrase was mentioned by his student St. Jerome in Jerome’s commentrary on Ecclesiastes (Migne 1845, 1019): “Comicus ait: Nihil est dictum, quod non sit dictum prius, unde et pr?ceptor meum Donatus, cum ipsum versiculum exponeret, Pereant, inquit, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.”

“The physical types chosen for representation”: Francis 1913, 524.

“We are probably justified in inferring”: Woodworth 1910a, 179.

Suggestion that Geiger’s sequence may have been just a coincidence: Woodworth 1910b.

“Physicists view the color-spectrum as a continuous scale”: Bloomfield 1933, 140.

“arbitrarily sets its boundaries”: Hjelmslev 1943, 48.

“there is no such thing as a ‘natural’ division”: Ray 1953; see also Ray 1952, 258.

Bellonese color system: Kuschel and Monberg 1974.

Claims of arbitrariness in accounts before 1969: See Berlin and Kay 1969, 159-60n1.

“It seems no exaggeration to claim”: Sahlins 1976, 1.

page 85 “Only very occasionally is a discovery”: Newcomer and Faris 1971, 270.

Tzeltal foci: Berlin and Kay 1969, 32. Further detail (from Berlin’s unpublished ms.) in Maclaury 1997, 32, 258 -59, 97-104.

Alleged universality of the foci: Berlin and Kay’s claims about the universality of the foci soon received a boost from the Berkeley psychologist Eleanor Rosch Heider (1972), who argued that the foci have a special status for memory, in that they are remembered more easily even by speakers of languages that do not have separate names for them. However, Rosch’s interpretation of her results has been questioned, and in recent years researches failed to replicate them (Roberson et al. 2005).

Foci that stray from Berlin and Kay’s predictions: Roberson et al. 2000, 2005; Levinson 2000, 27.

majority of languages conform to Geiger’s sequence or to the alternative of green before yellow: Kay and Maffi 1999.

Continued debate on whether color concepts are determined primarily by culture or by nature: Roberson et al. 2000, 2005; Levinson 2000; Regier et al. 2005; Kay and Regier 2006a, 2006b. A related debate about infant color categorization: Ozgen 2004; Franklin et al. 2005; Roberson et al. 2006.

Model for natural constraints: Regier et al. 2007; see also Komarovaa et al. 2007. In a few areas of the color space, especially around blue/purple, the optimal partitions, according to Regier, Khetarpal, and Kay’s model, deviate systematically from the actual systems found in the majority of the world’s languages. This may be due either to imperfections in their model or to the override of cultural factors.

Red as an arousing color: Wilson 1966, Jacobs and Hustmyer 1974, Valdez and Mehrabian 1994.

“crude conceptions of colour derived from the elements”: Gladstone 1858, 3:491.

“Colours were for Homer not facts but images”: Gladstone 1877, 386.

The Hanunoo: Conklin 1955, who does not refer to Gladstone. On the similarity between ancient Greek and Hanunoo, see also Lyons 1999.

page 93 From brightness to hue as a modern theory: MacLaury 1997; see also Casson 1997.

the acquired aptitudes of one generation: Gladstone 1858, 3:426.

“progressive education”: Gladstone 1858, 3:495.

Naturalness in concept learning: See Waxman and Senghas 1992.

Yanomamo kinship terms: Lizot 1971.

The innateness controversy: The most eloquent exposition of the nativist view is Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct (1994). Geoffrey Sampson’s The “Language Instinct” Debate (2005) offers a methodical refutation of the arguments in favor of innate grammar, as well as references to the voluminous academic literature on the subject.

5: PLATO AND THE MACEDONIAN SWINEHERD

The flaws of the equal-complexity dogma: For a fuller argument, see Deutscher 2009.

“You really mean the Aborigines have a language?”: Dixon 1989, 63.

“Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd”: Sapir 1921, 219.

“Investigations of linguists date back”: Fromkin et al. 2003, 15. (Full quotation: “There are no primitive languages. All languages are equally complex and equally capable of expressing any idea in the universe.” The equal-complexity slogan is repeated also on p. 27.

“It is a finding of modern linguistics”: Dixon 1997, 118.

“A central finding of linguistics has been”: Forston 2004, 4.

“Objective measurement is difficult”: Hockett 1958, 180. For a discussion of this passage, see Sampson 2009.

Compensation in complexity between different subareas: Whenever linguists have tried, heuristically, to detect any signs of compensation in complexity between different areas they have failed to find them. See Nichols 2009, 119.

Vocabulary size: Goulden et al. 1990 have estimated the vocabulary size of an average native-English- speaking university student at about seventeen thousand word families (a word family being a base word together with its derived forms, e.g., happy, unhappy, happiness), or as many as forty thousand different word types. Crystal 1995, 123, estimates the passive vocabulary of a university lecturer at seventy-three thousand words.

Sorbian dual: Corbett 2000, 20.

Five categories of cultural complexity: Perkins 1992, 75.

Recent studies on the relation between morphological complexity and size of society: See, e.g., Sinnemaki 2009; Nichols 2009, 120; Lupyan and Dale 2010.

Gothic verb habaidedeima: Schleicher 1860, 34.

Communication among intimates: Givon 2002.

Size of sound inventories: Maddieson 1984, 2005.

Correlation between the number of speakers and the size of the sound inventory: Hay and Bauer 2007. For earlier discussions, see Haudricourt 1961; Maddieson 1984; and Trudgill 1992.

Piraha: See most recently Nevins et al. 2009 and Everett 2009.

Ubarum told Iribum to dispossess Kuli: Foster 1990, who reads u li-pi₅- i -ZU-ma and translates “that he might work it,” but see Hilgert 2002, 484, and a near-identical form in Whiting 1987 no. 12:17, which proves the correctness of the translation given here.