A world without blue

Was Homer colorblind? With that question linguist Guy Deutscher begins his fascinating 2010 book Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages.

That question perplexed scientists for many years, In the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer describes the sea as "wine-looking," the same description he assigns to oxen. And he describes honey as green. But it wasn't just Homer. The Old Testament, in the original Hebrew, describes gold as being green. So was everyone colorblind back then?

The explanation, says Deutscher, is not that Homer and other ancient writers were colorblind but that they simply did not have words for all the colors. Even now languages used by people in isolated parts of the world often do not have words for blue and yellow. Every language has a word for red, he writes. Blood is red. Red dye is relatively easy to make. Red is an important color to everyone. Green, too, is an important color because so much of the natural world is green. The sky is blue, but not much else. Nobody in those cultures had blue eyes. And just as English-speaking people may describe both navy blue and baby blue as blue, so some languages have used the word green to cover a broad range of the color spectrum, including what we would call yellow or gold.

Although still a controversial idea, the author argues in the second half of his book that our language can affect how we think. Those who speak languages, such as Spanish and Italian, that assign a gender to each word — something English did until the 11th century — tend to give masculine or feminine characteristics to inanimate objects, studies suggest.

Deutscher, who is originally from Australia, discusses one nearly extinct Aborigine language, one of several found in the world, that has no words for left or right. Instead they use compass directions to reference everything, such as their north hand (which becomes their south hand when they turn around) or the jug on the east side of the table. Even when taken to a strange place by a roundabout way, they somehow know instantly in which direction everything is. And they can remember these directions when they share memories later. Yet when these people learn English, they have no trouble learning left and right. In their own language, however, they always think in terms of directions.

The research Deutscher discusses may not be conclusive, but it is suggestive. The language we speak may influence how we view the world. If we had no word for blue, what color would a clear sky be?