Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (11 page)

Geiger, who had died in 1870, was not allowed to bask in posthumous glory, however. And no one was queuing up to pat the septuagenarian Gladstone on the back either. In fact, Geiger, Gladstone, and especially Magnus came under heavy fire, for it turned out they were as shortsighted as they were perspicacious. Their philological insights may have been vindicated, for languages across the world were behaving exactly as predicted. But the reports about the
eyesight
of the natives directly contradicted the assumption that defective vocabulary reflected defective color vision, for no tribe was found that failed to
see
the differences between the colors. Virchow and the gentlemen of the Berlin Anthropological Society administered a Holmgren color test to the Nubians and asked them to pick from a pile of wools those matching in color to a master wool. None of the Nubians failed to pick the right colors. The same picture emerged with other ethnic groups. Admittedly, some reports about various tribes mentioned much greater hesitation in differentiating the cooler colors compared with reds and yellows. But no population, be they ever so rude, was found to be blind to these distinctions. The missionary who lived among the Ovaherero in Namibia, for instance, wrote that they could see the difference between green and blue but simply thought it was ridiculous that there should be different names for these two shades of the same color.

What had seemed almost impossible to contemplate a few years before turned out to be a plain fact: people can spot the difference between different colors but can still fail to give them separate names. And surely, if that was the case with primitive tribes in the nineteenth century, it must have been the same with Homer and all the other ancients. The only possible conclusion was that, had Homer been administered a Holmgren test, he would have been able to spot the difference between green and yellow, just as he would have been able to tell apart purple wools from brown ones, had he been asked to do so by a German anthropologist.

But why then did he call his honey “green” and his sheep “purple”? The culturalists may have had their proof that the ancients could
distinguish all colors, but they were less successful in formulating a convincing alternative explanation, for culture’s assault on the concepts of color still crashed against a solid wall of disbelief. Magnus now modified his counterargument and declared that it was implausible that those primitive peoples perceived all colors
just as vividly
as Europeans. Instead of conceding colors to culture, therefore, Magnus offered a revised anatomical explanation. He admitted that the ancients and the natives of his own day could spot the difference between all colors, but he argued that the cooler colors still appeared to them duller than to modern Europeans (see
figure 3
for an illustration of his revised theory). This lack of vividness, he said, would account for their lack of interest in finding separate names for such colors, and it would also explain the reports from the respondents to his questionnaires, which frequently mentioned the greater hesitation among the natives in distinguishing the cooler colors for which they had no names.

At the time, it was impossible to confirm or to disprove such claims empirically, for while it is easy to test whether someone can spot the difference between two colors or not, it is far more difficult to devise experiments that can tell exactly how vividly this distinction appears to different people. Certainly it was impossible to decide the question on the basis of the available evidence, which was mostly gathered from questionnaires. As no decisive new evidence was forthcoming, the heated discussion gradually subsided over the following years and the question of the color sense remained in limbo for almost two decades, until the first attempt to conduct sophisticated experiments on the mental traits of natives in situ. Substantial progress had to wait for the 1898 Cambridge anthropological expedition to the Torres Straits, and for a remarkable man who finally swung established consensus in favor of culture—much against his better judgment.

To most people who have heard of him, W. H. R. Rivers is the compassionate psychiatrist who treated Siegfried Sassoon during World War I. Rivers worked at Craiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh, where he was
a pioneer in applying psychoanalytic techniques to help officers suffering from shell shock. Sassoon was sent to him in 1917 after being declared insane for publicly questioning the sanity of the war, throwing his Military Cross into the river Mersey, and refusing to return to his regiment. Rivers treated him with sympathy and understanding, and eventually Sassoon voluntarily returned to France. The affection, even devotion, that Rivers inspired in many of his patients seems to have lost none of its intensity years after the war. Sassoon, a man so fearless in battle that he was nicknamed Mad Jack, collapsed with grief at Rivers’s funeral in 1922. And some forty years later, in July 1963, a frail old man called in at the library of St John’s, Rivers’s old Cambridge College, and asked to see his portrait, explaining that he had been treated by Rivers at Craiglockhart Hospital in 1917. According to the librarian’s account, the man stood before the picture at the salute and thanked Rivers for all he had done for him. The visitor returned on at least two other occasions, and every time he asked to see the portrait. On his last visit he was obviously in poor health and finished with the words “goodbye my friend—I don’t suppose we shall ever meet again.”

But Rivers’s vocation as the salve of shell-shocked souls came only later in life, after a distinguished career in two other fields: experimental psychology and then anthropology. It was the experimental psychologist Rivers who was invited in 1898 to join the Cambridge University anthropological expedition to the islands of the Torres Straits, between Australia and New Guinea. But while on the islands, he developed his interest in human institutions, and it was there that he began his seminal studies on kinship relations and social organization, which are widely regarded as laying the foundations for the discipline of social anthropology and are what led Claude Lévi-Strauss to dub him the “Galileo of anthropology.”

The aim of the Cambridge Torres Straits expedition was to shed light on the mental characteristics of primitive peoples. The fledgling discipline of anthropology was struggling to define its subject matter, “culture,” and to determine the boundaries between acquired and innate aspects of human behavior. In order to shed light on this question, it was
essential to determine to what extent the cognitive traits of primitive people differed from those of civilized people, and the role of the expedition was to advance beyond the mostly anecdotal evidence that had been available before. As the leader of the expedition explained, “For the first time trained experimental psychologists investigated by means of adequate laboratory equipment a people in a low stage of culture under their ordinary conditions of life.” The multivolume meticulous reports that were published by Rivers and the other members in subsequent years helped to make the distinction between natural and cultural traits clearer, and the Torres Straits expedition is thus widely credited as the event that turned anthropology into a serious science.

W. H. R. Rivers with friends

Rivers’s own reason for joining the expedition in 1898 was the opportunity to conduct detailed experiments on the eyesight of the natives. During the 1890s, he had been immersed in the study of vision, and so was keen to resolve the controversy over the color sense, which had not progressed much in the previous two decades. He wanted to see for himself how the color vision of the natives related to their color vocabulary
and whether the capacity for appreciating differences correlated with the power of expressing those differences in language.

Rivers spent four months on the remote Murray Island, at the eastern edge of the Torres Straits, right at the northern tip of the Great Barrier Reef. With a population of about 450, the island offered a manageably small community of friendly natives who were “sufficiently civilized” to enable him to make all his observations and yet, as he put it, “were sufficiently near their primitive condition to be thoroughly interesting. There is no doubt that thirty years ago they were in a completely savage stage, absolutely untouched by civilization.”

What Rivers found in the color vocabulary of the islanders fitted well with the reports from the previous twenty years. Descriptions of color were generally vague and indefinite, and sometimes a cause of much uncertainty. The most definite names were for black, white, and red. The word for “black,”
golegole
, derived from
gole
, “cuttlefish” (Rivers suggested that this referred to the dark ink secreted by the animal), “white” was
kakekakek
(with no obvious etymology), and the word for “red,”
mamamamam
, was clearly derived from
mam
, “blood.” Most people used
mamamamam
also for pink and brown. Other colors had progressively less definite and conventional names. Yellow and orange were called by many people
bambam
(from
bam
, “turmeric”), but by others
siusiu
(from
siu
, “yellow ocher”). Green was called
soskepusoskep
by many (from
soskep
, “bile,” “gallbladder”), but others used “leaf color” or “pus color.” The vocabulary for blue and violet shades was even vaguer. Some younger speakers used the word
bulu-bulu
, obviously a recent borrowing from English “blue.” But Rivers reports that “the old men agreed that their own proper word for blue was
golegole
(black).” Violet was also mostly called
golegole
.

Rivers noted that often “lively discussions were started among the natives as to the correct name of a colour.” When asked to indicate the names of certain colors, many islanders said they would need to consult wiser men. And when pressed to give an answer nevertheless, they simply tended to think of a name of particular objects. For example, when shown a yellowish green shade, one man called it “sea green” and pointed to the position of one particular large reef in view.

The vocabulary of the Murray Islanders was clearly “defective,” but what about their eyesight? Rivers examined more than two hundred of them for their ability to distinguish colors, subjecting them to rigorous tests. He used an improved and extended version of the Holmgren wool test and devised a series of experiments of his own to detect any sign of inability to perceive differences. But he did not find a single case of color blindness. Not only were the islanders able to distinguish between all primary colors, but they could also tell apart different shades of blue and of any other color. Rivers’s meticulous experiments thus demonstrated beyond any possible doubt that people can see the differences between all imaginable shades of colors and yet have no standard names in their language even for basic colors such as green or blue.

Surely, there could have been only one possible conclusion for such an acutely intelligent researcher to draw from his own findings: the differences in color vocabulary have nothing to do with biological factors. And yet there was one experience which struck Rivers so forcefully that it managed to throw him entirely off track. This was the encounter with that weirdest of all weirdnesses, a phenomenon which philologists could infer only from ancient texts but which he met face to face: people who call the sky “black.” As Rivers points out with amazement in his expedition reports, he simply could not grasp how the old men of Murray Island regarded it as quite natural to apply the term “black” (
golegole
) to the brilliant blue of the sky and sea. He mentions with equal disbelief that one of the islanders, “an intelligent native,” was happy to compare the color of the sky to that of dark dirty water. This behavior, Rivers writes, “seemed almost inexplicable, if blue were not to these natives a duller and a darker colour than it is to us.”

Rivers thus concluded that Magnus was right in assuming that the natives must still suffer from a “certain degree of insensitiveness to blue (and probably green) as compared with that of Europeans.” Being such a scrupulous scientist, Rivers was not only aware of the weaknesses of his own argument but careful to air them himself. He explains that his own results proved that one cannot deduce from language what the speakers can see. He even mentions that the younger generation of speakers, who have borrowed the word
bulu-bulu
for “blue,” use it without
any apparent confusion. And still, after acknowledging all such objections, he parries them with one fact, as if it were sufficient to undermine everything else: “One cannot, however, wholly ignore the fact that intelligent natives would regard it as perfectly natural to apply the same name to the brilliant blue of the sky and sea which they give to the deepest black.”