Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (7 page)

Gladstone’s solution to this conundrum was an idea so radical and so strange that he himself seriously doubted whether he should dare to include it in his book. As he reminisced twenty years later, he eventually published it “only after submitting the facts to some very competent judges. For the case appeared to open up questions of great interest, with respect to the general structure of the human organs, and to the laws of hereditary growth.” What makes his proposal even more astonishing is the fact that he had never heard of color blindness. Although, as we shall see, this condition would become famous soon enough, in 1858 color blindness was unknown among the general public, and even those few specialists who were aware of it hardly understood it. And yet, without using the term itself, what Gladstone was proposing was nothing less than universal color blindness among the ancient Greeks.

The sensitivity to differences in color, he suggested, is an ability that evolved fully only in more recent history. As he put it, “the organ of colour and its impressions were but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age.” Homer’s contemporaries, Gladstone said, saw the world primarily through the opposition between light and darkness, with the colors of the rainbow appearing to them merely as indeterminate modes between the two extremes of black and white. Or, to be more accurate, they saw the world in black and white with a dash of red, for Gladstone conceded that the color sense was beginning to develop in Homer’s time and had come to include red hues. This could be deduced from the fact that Homer’s limited color vocabulary is heavily slanted toward red and that his main “red” word,
eruthros
, is rather untypically used
only
for red things, such as blood, wine, or copper.

The undeveloped state of color perception, Gladstone argues, can immediately explain why Homer had such lively and poetic conceptions of light and darkness while being so tight-lipped on prismatic colors. What is more, Homer’s seemingly erratic color epithets will now “fall into their places, and we shall find that the Poet used them, from his own standing-ground, with great vigour and effect.” For if Homer’s
“violet” or “wine-looking” are to be understood as describing not particular hues but only particular shades of darkness, then designations such as “violet sheep” or “wine-looking sea” no longer seem so strange. Likewise, Homer’s “green honey” becomes far more appetizing if we assume that what caught his eye was a particular kind of lightness rather than a particular prismatic color. In terms of etymology,
chlôros
derives from a word meaning “young herbage,” which is typically fresh light green. But if the hue distinction between green, yellow, and light brown was of little consequence in Homer’s time, then the prime association of
chlôros
would have been not the greenness of the young herbage but rather its paleness and freshness. And as such, Gladstone concludes, it makes perfect sense to use
chlôros
to describe (yellow) honey or (brown) freshly picked twigs.

Gladstone is well aware of the utter weirdness of the idea he is proposing, so he tries to make it more palatable by evoking an evolutionary explanation for how sensitivity to colors could have increased over the generations. The perception of color, he says, seems natural to us only because mankind as a whole has undergone a progressive “education of the eye” over the last millennia: “the perceptions so easy and familiar to us are the results of a slow traditionary growth in knowledge and in the training of the human organ, which commenced long before we took our place in the succession of mankind.” The eye’s ability to perceive and appreciate differences in color, he suggests, can improve with practice, and these acquired improvements are then passed on to the offspring. The next generation is thus born with a heightened sensitivity to color, which can be improved even further with continued practice. These subsequent improvements are bequeathed to the next generation, and so on.

But why, one may well ask, should this progressive refinement of color vision not have started much earlier than the Homeric period? Why did this process have to wait so long to get going, given that from time immemorial all things bright and beautiful have been blazing us in the eye? Gladstone’s answer is a masterstroke of ingenuity, but one that seems almost as bizarre as the state of affairs it purports to account for. His theory was that color—in abstraction from the object that is
colored—may start mattering to people only once they become exposed to artificial paints and dyes. The appreciation of color as a property independent of a particular material may thus have developed only hand in hand with the capacity to manipulate colors artificially. And that capacity, he notes, barely existed in Homer’s day: the art of dyeing was only in its infancy, cultivation of flowers was not practiced, and almost all the brightly colored objects that we take for granted were entirely absent.

This dearth of artificial colors is particularly striking in the case of blue. Of course, the Mediterranean sky was just as sapphire in Homer’s day, and the Côte just as azure. But whereas our eyes are saturated with all kinds of tangible objects that are blue, in all imaginable shades from the palest ice blue to the deepest navy, people in Homer’s day may have gone through life without ever setting their eyes on a single blue object. Blue eyes, Gladstone explains, were in short supply, blue dyes, which are very difficult to manufacture, were practically unknown, natural flowers that are truly blue are also rare.

Merely to be exposed to the haphazard colors of nature, Gladstone concludes, may not be enough to set off the progressive training of color vision. For this process to get going, the eye needs to be exposed to a methodically graded range of hues and shades. As he puts it, “The eye may require a familiarity with an ordered system of colours, as the condition of its being able closely to appreciate anyone among them.” With so little experience in manipulating and controlling colors artificially and so little reason to dwell on the color of materials as an independent property, the progressive improvement in the perception of color would thus have barely started in Homer’s time. “The organ was given to Homer only in its infancy, which is now full-grown in us. So full-grown is it, that a child of three years in our nurseries knows, that is to say sees, more of colour than the man who founded for the race the sublime office of the poet.”

What are we to make of Gladstone’s theory? The verdict of his contemporaries was unequivocal: his claims were almost universally scoffed at as the fantasies of overzealous literal-mindedness, and the oddities he had uncovered were unceremoniously brushed away as poetic license,
or as proof of the legend of Homer’s blindness, or both. With the benefit of hindsight, however, the verdict is less black and white. On one level, Gladstone was so accurate and farsighted that it would be inadequate to class him as merely ahead of his time. Fairer would be to say that his analysis was so brilliant that substantial parts of it can stand almost without emendation as a summary of the state of the art today, 150 years later. But on another level, Gladstone was completely off course. He made one cardinal error in his presuppositions about the relation between language and perception, but in this he was far from alone. Indeed, philologists, anthropologists, and even natural scientists would need decades to free themselves from this error: underestimating the power of culture.

In the autumn of 1867, distinguished natural scientists from all over Germany convened in Frankfurt for the Assembly of German Naturalists and Physicians. The times they were exciting: the world in 1867 bore little resemblance to what it had been nine years earlier, when Gladstone published his
Studies on Homer
. For in the meantime,
The Origin of Species
had appeared and Darwinism had conquered the collective psyche. As George Bernard Shaw later wrote, “Everyone who had a mind to change changed it.” In those heady early days of the Darwinian revolution, the convened scientists would have been used to the airing of all kinds of peculiar notions about matters evolutionary. But the topic announced for the plenary lecture at the closing session of their conference must have seemed unusual even by the exacting standards of the time: “On the Color Sense in Primitive Times and its Evolution.” Even more unusual than the title was the identity of the young man who stood at the lectern, for the honor of addressing the final session of the conference fell to someone who was neither a natural scientist nor a physician, who was only in his thirties, and who was an Orthodox Jew.

In fact, very little was usual about the philologist Lazarus Geiger. He
was born in 1829 to a distinguished Frankfurt family of rabbis and scholars. His uncle Abraham Geiger was the leading light in the Reform movement that transformed German Jewry in the nineteenth century. Lazarus did not share his uncle’s taste for religious modernization, but while in all matters practical he insisted on obeying the laws of his ancestral religion to the letter, in matters of the intellect his mind soared entirely unfettered and he entertained ideas far more daring than those of even his most liberal Jewish or Christian contemporaries. Indeed, his linguistic investigations convinced him—long before Darwin’s ideas became known—that he could trace in language evidence for the descent of man from a beastlike state.

Geiger possessed almost unparalleled erudition. As a seven-year-old boy, he declared to his mother that he would like to learn “all languages” one day, and in the course of his short life—he succumbed to heart disease at the age of forty-two—he managed to come closer to this ideal than perhaps anyone else. But what made him stand out as a thinker was the combination of this phenomenal learning with a seemingly inexhaustible stream of bold original theories, particularly on the development of language and the evolution of human reason. And it was on such an evolutionary theme that he addressed the men of science who gathered in his hometown in September 1867. His lecture started with a provocative question: “Has human sensation, has perception by the senses, a history? Did everything in the human sense organs thousands of years ago function exactly as it does now, or can we perhaps show that at some remote period these organs must have been partly incapable of their present performance?”

Geiger’s curiosity about the language of color had been piqued by Gladstone’s discoveries. While most contemporaries wrote off Gladstone’s claims about the rawness of Homer’s colors out of hand, Geiger was inspired by what he read to examine the color descriptions of ancient texts from other cultures. And what he discovered there bore uncanny resemblances to the oddities in Homer. Here, for instance, is how Geiger described the ancient Indian Vedic poems, in particular their treatment of the sky: “These hymns, of more than ten thousand lines, are brimming with descriptions of the heavens. Scarcely any subject is evoked
more frequently. The sun and reddening dawn’s play of color, day and night, cloud and lightning, the air and the ether, all these are unfolded before us over and over again, in splendor and vivid fullness. But there is only one thing that no one would ever learn from those ancient songs who did not already know it, and that is that the sky is blue.” So it was not just Homer who seemed to be blue-blind, but the ancient Indian poets too. And so, it would appear, was Moses, or at least whoever wrote the Old Testament. It is no secret, says Geiger, that the heavens play a considerable role in the Bible, appearing as they do in the very first verse—“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”—and in hundreds of places after that. And yet, like Homeric Greek, biblical Hebrew does not have a word for “blue.” Other color depictions in the Old Testament also show deficiencies remarkably similar to those in the Homeric poems. Homer’s oxen are wine-colored—the Bible mentions a “red horse” and a “red heifer without spot.” Homer tells of faces “green with fear”—the prophet Jeremiah sees all faces “turned green” with panic. Homer raves about “green honey”—the Psalms rove not far away, on “the wings of a dove covered with silver, and her feathers with green gold.”
*
So whatever condition caused the deficiencies in Homer’s descriptions of color, it seems that the authors of the Indian Vedas and of the Bible must have had it too. In fact, the whole of humanity must have languished in that condition over the course of millennia, says Geiger, for the Icelandic sagas and even the Koran all bear similar traits.

But Geiger is only just beginning to gather momentum. Widening Gladstone’s circle of evidence, he now dives into the murky deep of etymology, an area that he had made entirely his own, navigating it with more confidence than perhaps anyone else at the time. He shows that the words for “blue” in modern European languages derive from two sources: the minority from words that earlier meant “green” and the majority from words that earlier meant “black.” The same coalescing of blue and black, he adds, can be seen in the etymology of “blue” in languages further afield, such as Chinese. This suggests that at an earlier period in the history of all these languages, “blue” was not yet recognized as a concept in its own right and was subsumed under either black or green.