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

Gladstone’s solution to this conundrum was an idea so radical and so strange that he himself seriously doubted whether he should dare to include it in his book. As he reminisced twenty years later, he eventually published it “only after submitting the facts to some very competent judges. For the case appeared to open up questions of great interest, with respect to the general structure of the human organs, and to the laws of hereditary growth.” What makes his proposal even more astonishing is the fact that he had never heard of color blindness. Although, as we shall see, this condition would become famous soon enough, in 1858 color blindness was unknown among the general public, and even those few specialists who were aware of it hardly understood it. And yet, without using the term itself, what Gladstone was proposing was nothing less than universal color blindness among the ancient Greeks.

The sensitivity to differences in color, he suggested, is an ability that evolved fully only in more recent history. As he put it, “the organ of colour and its impressions were but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age.” Homer’s contemporaries, Gladstone said, saw the world primarily through the opposition between light and darkness, with the colors of the rainbow appearing to them merely as indeterminate modes between the two extremes of black and white. Or, to be more accurate, they saw the world in black and white with a dash of red, for Gladstone conceded that the color sense was beginning to develop in Homer’s time and had come to include red hues. This could be deduced from the fact that Homer’s limited color vocabulary is heavily slanted toward red and that his main “red” word, eruthros, is rather untypically used only for red things, such as blood, wine, or copper.

The undeveloped state of color perception, Gladstone argues, can immediately explain why Homer had such lively and poetic conceptions of light and darkness while being so tight-lipped on prismatic colors. What is more, Homer’s seemingly erratic color epithets will now “fall into their places, and we shall find that the Poet used them, from his own standing-ground, with great vigour and effect.” For if Homer’s “violet” or “wine-looking” are to be understood as describing not particular hues but only particular shades of darkness, then designations such as “violet sheep” or “wine-looking sea” no longer seem so strange. Likewise, Homer’s “green honey” becomes far more appetizing if we assume that what caught his eye was a particular kind of lightness rather than a particular prismatic color. In terms of etymology, chloros derives from a word meaning “young herbage,” which is typically fresh light green. But if the hue distinction between green, yellow, and light brown was of little consequence in Homer’s time, then the prime association of chloros would have been not the greenness of the young herbage but rather its paleness and freshness. And as such, Gladstone concludes, it makes perfect sense to use chloros to describe (yellow) honey or (brown) freshly picked twigs.

Gladstone is well aware of the utter weirdness of the idea he is proposing, so he tries to make it more palatable by evoking an evolutionary explanation for how sensitivity to colors could have increased over the generations. The perception of color, he says, seems natural to us only because mankind as a whole has undergone a progressive “education of the eye” over the last millennia: “the perceptions so easy and familiar to us are the results of a slow traditionary growth in knowledge and in the training of the human organ, which commenced long before we took our place in the succession of mankind.” The eye’s ability to perceive and appreciate differences in color, he suggests, can improve with practice, and these acquired improvements are then passed on to the offspring. The next generation is thus born with a heightened sensitivity to color, which can be improved even further with continued practice. These subsequent improvements are bequeathed to the next generation, and so on.

But why, one may well ask, should this progressive refinement of color vision not have started much earlier than the Homeric period? Why did this process have to wait so long to get going, given that from time immemorial all things bright and beautiful have been blazing us in the eye? Gladstone’s answer is a masterstroke of ingenuity, but one that seems almost as bizarre as the state of affairs it purports to account for. His theory was that color-in abstraction from the object that is colored-may start mattering to people only once they become exposed to artificial paints and dyes. The appreciation of color as a property independent of a particular material may thus have developed only hand in hand with the capacity to manipulate colors artificially. And that capacity, he notes, barely existed in Homer’s day: the art of dyeing was only in its infancy, cultivation of flowers was not practiced, and almost all the brightly colored objects that we take for granted were entirely absent.

This dearth of artificial colors is particularly striking in the case of blue. Of course, the Mediterranean sky was just as sapphire in Homer’s day, and the Cote just as azure. But whereas our eyes are saturated with all kinds of tangible objects that are blue, in all imaginable shades from the palest ice blue to the deepest navy, people in Homer’s day may have gone through life without ever setting their eyes on a single blue object. Blue eyes, Gladstone explains, were in short supply, blue dyes, which are very difficult to manufacture, were practically unknown, natural flowers that are truly blue are also rare.

Merely to be exposed to the haphazard colors of nature, Gladstone concludes, may not be enough to set off the progressive training of color vision. For this process to get going, the eye needs to be exposed to a methodically graded range of hues and shades. As he puts it, “The eye may require a familiarity with an ordered system of colours, as the condition of its being able closely to appreciate anyone among them.” With so little experience in manipulating and controlling colors artificially and so little reason to dwell on the color of materials as an independent property, the progressive improvement in the perception of color would thus have barely started in Homer’s time. “The organ was given to Homer only in its infancy, which is now full-grown in us. So full- grown is it, that a child of three years in our nurseries knows, that is to say sees, more of colour than the man who founded for the race the sublime office of the poet.”

What are we to make of Gladstone’s theory? The verdict of his contemporaries was unequivocal: his claims were almost universally scoffed at as the fantasies of overzealous literal-mindedness, and the oddities he had uncovered were unceremoniously brushed away as poetic license, or as proof of the legend of Homer’s blindness, or both. With the benefit of hindsight, however, the verdict is less black and white. On one level, Gladstone was so accurate and farsighted that it would be inadequate to class him as merely ahead of his time. Fairer would be to say that his analysis was so brilliant that substantial parts of it can stand almost without emendation as a summary of the state of the art today, 150 years later. But on another level, Gladstone was completely off course. He made one cardinal error in his presuppositions about the relation between language and perception, but in this he was far from alone. Indeed, philologists, anthropologists, and even natural scientists would need decades to free themselves from this error: underestimating the power of culture.

2. A Long-Wave Herring

In the autumn of 1867, distinguished natural scientists from all over Germany convened in Frankfurt for the Assembly of German Naturalists and Physicians. The times they were exciting: the world in 1867 bore little resemblance to what it had been nine years earlier, when Gladstone published his Studies on Homer. For in the meantime, The Origin of Species had appeared and Darwinism had conquered the collective psyche. As George Bernard Shaw later wrote, “Everyone who had a mind to change changed it.” In those heady early days of the Darwinian revolution, the convened scientists would have been used to the airing of all kinds of peculiar notions about matters evolutionary. But the topic announced for the plenary lecture at the closing session of their conference must have seemed unusual even by the exacting standards of the time: “On the Color Sense in Primitive Times and its Evolution.” Even more unusual than the title was the identity of the young man who stood at the lectern, for the honor of addressing the final session of the conference fell to someone who was neither a natural scientist nor a physician, who was only in his thirties, and who was an Orthodox Jew.

In fact, very little was usual about the philologist Lazarus Geiger. He was born in 1829 to a distinguished Frankfurt family of rabbis and scholars. His uncle Abraham Geiger was the leading light in the Reform movement that transformed German Jewry in the nineteenth century. Lazarus did not share his uncle’s taste for religious modernization, but while in all matters practical he insisted on obeying the laws of his ancestral religion to the letter, in matters of the intellect his mind soared entirely unfettered and he entertained ideas far more daring than those of even his most liberal Jewish or Christian contemporaries. Indeed, his linguistic investigations convinced him-long before Darwin’s ideas became known-that he could trace in language evidence for the descent of man