If we speak different languages with largely independent histories, shouldn’t our ancestors have carved up the visual atlas rather differently?
To respond to these criticisms, the authors launched what they called the World Color Survey, a project that started collecting data in the late 1970s. This was a survey of 110 languages, all spoken by pre-industrial societies, many that have no written script.
Researchers set out to map the color boundaries for each culture. To do this, they showed people a set of colored tiles in 10 different shades of 40 different hues. In all, 400 tiles of color that represent the building blocks of our visual world.
They then asked native speakers of these 110 different languages, many from remote tribal cultures, to painstakingly name the color of each tile. After tallying up what people said, they could divide these tiles into islands of color, similar to the map of color from before. Here’s what they learnt.
First, cultures are quite different in how their words paint the world. Take a look at this interactive map. For the 110 cultures, you can see how many basic words they use for colors. To the Dani people who live in the highlands of New Guiniea, objects comes in just two shades. There’s mili for the cooler shades, from blues and greens to black, and mola for the lighter shades, like reds, yellows and white. Some languages have just three basic colors, others have 4, 5, 6, and so on. There’s even a debate as to whether the Pirahã tribe of the Amazon have any specialized color words at all! (If you ask a Pirahã tribe member to label something red, they’ll say that it’s blood-like).
But there’s still a pattern hidden in this diversity.
In modern Japanese, midori is the word for green, as distinct from blue. This divorce of blue and green was not without its scars. There are clues that remain in the language, that bear witness to this awkward separation. For example, in many languages the word for vegetable is synonymous with green (sabzi in Urdu literally means green-ness, and in English we say ‘eat your greens’). But in Japanese, vegetables are ao-mono, literally blue things. Green apples? They’re blue too. As are the first leaves of spring, if you go by their Japanese name. In English, the term green is sometimes used to describe a novice, someone inexperienced. In Japanese, they’re ao-kusai, literally they ‘smell of blue’. It’s as if the borders that separate colors follow a slightly different route in Japan.
And it’s not just Japanese. There are plenty of other languages that blur the lines between what we call blue and green. Many languages don’t distinguish between the two colors at all.
