Book Review: When Linguists Attack
22nd May 2025
Alma T.C. Boykin. (Whose books I highly recommend.)
So, does a person have to have a word before he can imagine a concept? Or can you understand a concept if your language doesn’t have that word or idea yet? Linguists and historians of language have been arguing over this, and over other questions about how language shapes perception, ever since future Prime Minister William Gladstone write a three-volume analysis about Homer. In a short chapter at the back of the last volume, Gladstone observed that Homer’s descriptions were either about light things, dark things, or red things. Everything else was texture or related it to something (“rosy-fingered dawn”) and so on. Gladstone had some theories about this. He was … ignored, in part because he actually believed that Homer was telling a true story, which everyone knew was silly. Gladstone was right about both things, although not exactly.
It turns out that only comparatively late in the development of languages and vocabulary to people start splitting colors up past dark, light, and blood-colored (red). Next comes yellowy-green, then yellow and green, then blue, and then it gets sort of jumbled. So, does this mean that the human eye develops color vision at different rates in “complex” versus “primitive” societies? Um, well, to make a lot of arguing and anatomy short, no. Colors are need based, to an extent, and only when artificial tints (as in, made by people and put on things like walls, rather than staying on plants and rocks) come into use do larger numbers of color words appear. How the language people finally reached this conclusion is a long and interesting story.