Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (44 page)

Geiger’s rousing speech: As described by Delitzsch 1878, 256.

Magnus’s evolutionary model: 1877b, 50.

“the retina’s performance was gradually increased”: Magnus 1877a, 19. See also Magnus 1877b, 47.

“still just as closed and invisible”: Magnus 1877a, 9.

Magnus’s theory ardently discussed: According to Turner 1994, 178, the literature on the Magnus controversy exploded to more than 6 percent of all publications on vision between 1875 and 1879.

Nietzsche on Greek color vision: Nietzsche 1881, 261. Orsucci 1996, 244ff., has shown that Nietzsche followed the debate over Magnus’s book in the first volume of the journal
Kosmos.

Gladstone’s review of Magnus: Gladstone 1877.

“if the capacity of distinguishing colours”: Wallace 1877, 471n1. Wallace changed his mind the next year, however (1878, 246).

page 49 “the more delicate cones of the retina”: Lecture delivered on March 25, 1878 (Haeckel 1878, 114).

“and the results of this habit”: Lamarck 1809: 256–57.

Wallace on the giraffe’s neck: 1858, 61.

“when a boy, had the skin of both thumbs”: Darwin 1881, 257. Darwin also quotes approvingly “Brown-Sequard’s famous experiments” on guinea pigs, which were taken at the time to prove that the results of operations on certain nerves in the mother were inherited by the next generation.

The belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics was virtually universal: Mayr 1991, 119. For an assessment of Weismann, see Mayr 1991, 111.

“Weismann began to investigate the point”: Shaw, introduction to
Back to Methuselah
(1921, xlix). Shaw in fact had a strong aversion to (neo-) Darwinism and passionately believed in Lamarckian evolution.

Weismann reported on the still ongoing experiment: 1892, 523n1, 514, 526–27.

Weismann’s remained the minority view: For example, in 1907, Oskar Hertwig (1907, 37), the director of the Anatomical and Biological Institute in Berlin, still predicted that in the end the Lamarckian mechanism would prove the right one. See also Mayr 1991, 119ff.

“the acquired aptitudes of one generation”: Gladstone 1858, 426, and similar formulation a few years later (1869, 539): “the acquired knowledge of one generation becomes in time the inherited aptitude of another.”

Magnus’s explicit reliance on the Lamarckian model: Magnus 1877b, 44, 50.

Criticism of Magnus: The earliest and most vocal critic of Magnus’s theory was Ernst Krause, one of Darwin’s first followers and popularizers in Germany (Krause 1877). Darwin himself felt that Magnus’s scenario was problematic. On June 30, 1877, Darwin wrote to Krause: “I have been much interested by your able argument against the belief that the sense of colour has been recently acquired by man.” Another vocal critic was the science writer Grant Allen (1878, 129–32; 1879), who argued that “there is every
reason to think that the perception of colours is a faculty which man shares with all the higher members of the animal world. In no other way can we account for the varied hues of flowers, fruits, insects, birds, and mammals, all of which seem to have been developed as allurements for the eye, guiding it towards food or the opposite sex.” But the argument about the bright colors of animals was weakest exactly where it was most needed, because the coloring of mammals, as opposed to birds and insects, is extremely subdued, dominated by black, white, and shades of brown and gray. At the time, there was precious little direct evidence about which animals can see colors: bees and other insects had been shown to respond to color, but the evidence petered out when it came to the higher animals and especially to mammals, whose sense of color was shown (see Graber 1884) to be less developed than that of man. See also Donders 1884, 89–90, and, for a detailed account of the debate, Hochegger 1884, 132.

“we see in essence not with two eyes”: Delitzsch 1878, 267.

A short visit to the British museum: Allen 1879, 204.

“it does not seem plausible to us”: Magnus 1877c, 427. See also Magnus 1880, 10; Magnus 1883, 21.

3:
THE RUDE POPULATIONS INHABITING FOREIGN LANDS

Passersby in the elegant Kurfürstendamm: Since 1925 this part of the street has been called Budapester Strasse.

Nubian display: Rothfels 2002, 84.

Nubians’ sense of color: Virchow 1878 (Sitzung am 19.10.1878), and Virchow 1879.

“rude populations inhabiting foreign lands”: Gatschet 1879, 475.

“apologized once that he couldn’t find a bottle”: Bastian 1869, 89–90.

Relevance of the “savages”: Darwin, for instance, suggested in a letter to Gladstone (de Beer 1958, 89) that one should ascertain whether “low savages” had names for shades of color: “I should
expect that they have not, and this would be remarkable for the Indians of Chilee and Tierra del Fuego have names for every slight promontory and hill—even to a marvellous degree.”

“the color of any grass, weed or plant”: Gatschet 1879, 475, 477, 481.

Almquist’s reports: Almquist 1883, 46–47. If pressed, the Chukchis also produced other terms, but these seemed to be variable. In Berlin, Rudolf Virchow reached a similar conclusion about the color terminology of some of the Nubians (Virchow 1878, 353).

Nias in Sumatra: Magnus 1880, 8.

None of the Nubians failed to pick the right colors: Virchow 1878, 351n1.

Ovaherero: Magnus 1880, 9.

Magnus’s revised theory: Magnus 1880, 34ff.; Magnus 1881, 195ff.

Rivers’s life and work: Slobodín 1978.

“goodbye my friend—I don’t suppose we shall ever meet again”: Whittle 1997.

“Galileo of anthropology”: Lévi-Strauss 1968, 162.

“For the first time trained experimental psychologists”: Haddon 1910, 86.

“lively discussions were started”: Rivers 1901a, 53.

“seemed almost inexplicable, if blue”: Rivers 1901b, 51. See also Rivers 1901b, 46–47.

“certain degree of insensitiveness to blue”: Rivers 1901a, 94. Rivers also tried to show experimentally, using a device called a Lovibond tintometer, that the thresholds at which the natives could recognize very pale blue glass were higher than those of Europeans. The serious problems with his experiments were pointed out by Woodworth 1910b, Titchener 1916, Bancroft 1924. Recently, two British scientists (Lindsey and Brown 2002) proposed a similar idea to Rivers’s, suggesting that people closer to the equator suffer from stronger UV radiation, which causes their retina to loose sensitivity to green and blue. The severe problems with this claim were pointed out by Regier and Kay 2004.

“One cannot, however, wholly”: Rivers 1901a, 94.

page 68
Siniy
and
goluboy
in Russian: Corbett and Morgan 1988.

“attended carefully to the mental development”: C. Darwin to E. Krause, June 30, 1877.

Acquisition of colors by children: Pitchford and Mullen 2002, 1362; Roberson et al. 2006.

Bellona: Kuschel and Monberg 1974.

Reviews of Rivers: Woodworth 1910b, Titchener 1916, Bancroft 1924.

4:
THOSE WHO SAID OUR THINGS BEFORE US

“The life of yesterday”: Lambert 1960, 244. The actual copy of this tablet is late, from Ashurbanipal’s library (seventh century
BC
). But while no earlier copies of this particular proverb have so far been found, the Sumerian proverbs in general go back at least to the Old Babylonian period (2000–1600
BC
).

“What is said is just repetition”: Parkinson 1996, 649.

“Perish those who said our things before us”: Donatus’s phrase was mentioned by his student St. Jerome in Jerome’s commentrary on Ecclesiastes (Migne 1845, 1019): “Comicus ait: Nihil est dictum, quod non sit dictum prius, unde et præceptor meum Donatus, cum ipsum versiculum exponeret, Pereant, inquit, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.”

“The physical types chosen for representation”: Francis 1913, 524.

“We are probably justified in inferring”: Woodworth 1910a, 179.

Suggestion that Geiger’s sequence may have been just a coincidence: Woodworth 1910b.

“Physicists view the color-spectrum as a continuous scale”: Bloomfield 1933, 140.

“arbitrarily sets its boundaries”: Hjelmslev 1943, 48.

“there is no such thing as a ‘natural’ division”: Ray 1953; see also Ray 1952, 258.

Bellonese color system: Kuschel and Monberg 1974.

Claims of arbitrariness in accounts before 1969: See Berlin and Kay 1969, 159–60n1.

“It seems no exaggeration to claim”: Sahlins 1976, 1.

page 85 “Only very occasionally is a discovery”: Newcomer and Faris 1971, 270.

Tzeltal foci: Berlin and Kay 1969, 32. Further detail (from Berlin’s unpublished ms.) in Maclaury 1997, 32, 258–59, 97–104.

Alleged universality of the foci: Berlin and Kay’s claims about the universality of the foci soon received a boost from the Berkeley psychologist Eleanor Rosch Heider (1972), who argued that the foci have a special status for memory, in that they are remembered more easily even by speakers of languages that do not have separate names for them. However, Rosch’s interpretation of her results has been questioned, and in recent years researches failed to replicate them (Roberson et al. 2005).

Foci that stray from Berlin and Kay’s predictions: Roberson et al. 2000, 2005; Levinson 2000, 27.

majority of languages conform to Geiger’s sequence or to the alternative of green before yellow: Kay and Maffi 1999.

Continued debate on whether color concepts are determined primarily by culture or by nature: Roberson et al. 2000, 2005; Levinson 2000; Regier et al. 2005; Kay and Regier 2006a, 2006b. A related debate about infant color categorization: Özgen 2004; Franklin et al. 2005; Roberson et al. 2006.

Model for natural constraints: Regier et al. 2007; see also Komarovaa et al. 2007. In a few areas of the color space, especially around blue/purple, the optimal partitions, according to Regier, Khetarpal, and Kay’s model, deviate systematically from the actual systems found in the majority of the world’s languages. This may be due either to imperfections in their model or to the override of cultural factors.

Red as an arousing color: Wilson 1966, Jacobs and Hustmyer 1974, Valdez and Mehrabian 1994.

“crude conceptions of colour derived from the elements”: Gladstone 1858, 3:491.

“Colours were for Homer not facts but images”: Gladstone 1877, 386.

The Hanunoo: Conklin 1955, who does not refer to Gladstone. On the similarity between ancient Greek and Hanunoo, see also Lyons 1999.

page 93 From brightness to hue as a modern theory: MacLaury 1997; see also Casson 1997.

the acquired aptitudes of one generation: Gladstone 1858, 3:426.

“progressive education”: Gladstone 1858, 3:495.

Naturalness in concept learning: See Waxman and Senghas 1992.

Yanomamö kinship terms: Lizot 1971.

The innateness controversy: The most eloquent exposition of the nativist view is Steven Pinker’s
The Language Instinct
(1994). Geoffrey Sampson’s
The “Language Instinct” Debate
(2005) offers a methodical refutation of the arguments in favor of innate grammar, as well as references to the voluminous academic literature on the subject.

5:
PLATO AND THE MACEDONIAN SWINEHERD

The flaws of the equal-complexity dogma: For a fuller argument, see Deutscher 2009.

“You really mean the Aborigines have a language?”: Dixon 1989, 63.

“Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd”: Sapir 1921, 219.

“Investigations of linguists date back”: Fromkin et al. 2003, 15. (Full quotation: “There are no primitive languages. All languages are equally complex and equally capable of expressing any idea in the universe.” The equal-complexity slogan is repeated also on p. 27.

“It is a finding of modern linguistics”: Dixon 1997, 118.

“A
central
finding of linguistics has been”: Forston 2004, 4.

“Objective measurement is difficult”: Hockett 1958, 180. For a discussion of this passage, see Sampson 2009.

Compensation in complexity between different subareas: Whenever linguists have tried, heuristically, to detect any signs of compensation in complexity between different areas they have failed to find them. See Nichols 2009, 119.

Vocabulary size: Goulden et al. 1990 have estimated the vocabulary size of an average native-English-speaking university student at about seventeen thousand word families (a word family being a
base word together with its derived forms, e.g., happy, unhappy, happiness), or as many as forty thousand different word types. Crystal 1995, 123, estimates the passive vocabulary of a university lecturer at seventy-three thousand words.

Sorbian dual: Corbett 2000, 20.

Five categories of cultural complexity: Perkins 1992, 75.

Recent studies on the relation between morphological complexity and size of society: See, e.g., Sinnemäki 2009; Nichols 2009, 120; Lupyan and Dale 2010.

Gothic verb
habaidedeima
: Schleicher 1860, 34.

Communication among intimates: Givón 2002.