Watch Your Language Blog

Do you know all the colors of the rainbow?

Of course, in order to answer that, you first need to know how many colors there are. Believe it or not, that information varies from language to language.

A common example of this is with the colors blue and green, which are of course different colors in English and would be counted as such in a census of the rainbow. However, these colors are covered by a single term in Vietnamese, xahn.

Does this mean that a Vietnamese person is incapable of distinguishing blue from green? That would be pretty wild, suggesting that language determines how we experience reality.

But the truth is a bit more boring. Languages just choose to pay attention to different bits of reality, and in the case of Vietnamese, the distinction between blue and green just isn't always important. If it is, speakers can specify xahn la cay (xahn like the leaves, or "green") or xahn duong (xahn like the sea, or "blue"). There are similar patterns of conflation of green and blue in other languages, from Asia to Africa to the Americas.

If you feel sorry for all of those speakers suffering from color term impoverishment, take a look in the mirror. According to Russians, English speakers are actually lacking when they talk about the color blue. Russians have two distinct terms, goluboy (light blue) and siniy (dark blue), for English's poor single "blue." Again, English speakers can tell the difference; they just have to resort to qualifying a more basic color in order to talk about it.

Greek also has a few terms for blue, French has different terms for brown, and Latin had two different sorts of white. What all of this means is that languages look at the same rainbow and simply choose to carve it up differently. However, it probably does not mean that humans perceive color in fundamentally different ways because of the languages they speak.

Tags: colors, language, newsletter, Russian, Vietnamese
February 22, 2008