http://www.boreme.com/posting.php?id=30670 Here's a short BBC documentary about the relationship between color and language. I couldn't find it on Youtube. I find it fascinating how easy it is for that tribe in Nambia to distinguish between all the shades of green that seem really similar to me and how they struggle to find differences in such different colors.
AKA the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, IMO one of the coolest and most interesting concepts in linguistics.
Personally, I would find anyone named Peewee Nipplepuss to be intimidating. Sort of the Boy named Sue philosophy that a name like that could only make you tough in life. Jack Savage, not so much. One study compared some young children from England with kids from a tribe in Nambia. In the English language, young kids usually learn 11 basic colors (black, white, gray, red, green, blue, yellow, pink, orange, purple and brown) but in Himba it's only five. For instance, they lump red, orange and pink together and call it "serandu." If you showed the Himba toddler a pink card and then later showed him a red one and ask if they're the same card, the kid would often mistakenly say yes -- because they're both "serandu." Same as if you showed you "Eggshell" and an hour later showed you "Bone" and asked if it was the same card from before. Now, again, they can see the colors; if you hold up a pink card and a red card next to each other, the English kid and Himba kid both would say they're different. But not when they see them one at a time. Makes me think of how the eskimo's apparently have hundreds of words to describe snow. They must also see the world differently, no? I often think musicians must hear music differently and that painters must see art differently etc. knowledge is power.Experiments have found that whether or not you can register a color depends on whether or not you have a name for it in your language. You can see the color, it just doesn't register in your mind.
-This is interesting to me, especially as someone that is apparently bordering on color blindness. Does this mean that if I were introduced to more words for more nuanced colors I would literally see the world differently? That's amazing.
As I understand it, rather than certain languages having more words for more nuanced colors, in general most different language families simply break up colors along different places on the color spectrum. For example, I know there are many South American cultures that can't tell the difference at all between our blue and green, because the word they use for that color encompasses that whole area of the spectrum. On the other hand, they break up what we would call maybe just red and dark red into separate colors. * Source: I'm feeling a bit too lazy to look up references, but I minored in linguistics (and, although I focused more on computer language, I did take a handful of more generalized linguistics classes). I had a professor whose specialty was American Indian linguistics who insisted that this isn't really true - that they really have about the same number of words for snow that we do in English. He said that their words for snow combined with adjectives (again, the same general adjectives that we would use) are often mistaken for single words. He never really showed us any data or studies to back this up, so I'm not really sure. I'm mostly comfortable taking his word for it.Does this mean that if I were introduced to more words for more nuanced colors I would literally see the world differently? That's amazing.
Makes me think of how the eskimo's apparently have hundreds of words to describe snow. They must also see the world differently, no?
Yes, your professor was right: from wikipedia Basically yellow snow would be a compound word like "yellowsnow", so depending on your definition of a word, maybe you could say there are thousands of ways to say snow in Esquimo... but that would not be very accurate and representative of reality.The claim that Eskimo languages have an unusually large number of words for snow is a widespread idea first voiced by Franz Boas and often used as a cliché when writing about how language may keep us more or less alert to the differences of the natural world. In fact, the Eskimo–Aleut languages have about the same number of distinct word roots referring to snow as English does, but the structure of these languages tends to allow more variety as to how those roots can be modified in forming a single word.