Mapping Words to Colors
upstart writes:
No language has words for all the blues of a wind-churned sea or the greens and golds of a wildflower meadow in late summer. Globally, different languages have divvied up the world of color using their own set of labels, from just a few to dozens.
The question of how humans have done this -- ascribe a finite vocabulary to the multitude of perceivable colors -- has been long studied, and consistent patterns have emerged, even across wildly divergent languages and cultures. Yet slight differences among languages persist, and what is less understood is how the differing communicative needs of local cultures drive those differences. Do some cultures need to talk about certain colors more than others, and how does that shape their language?
In a new study, researchers led by Colin Twomey, [...] and Joshua Plotkin [...] address these questions, developing an algorithm capable of inferring a culture's communicative needs -- the imperative to talk about certain colors -- using previously collected data from 130 diverse languages.
Their findings underscore that, indeed, cultures across the globe differ in their need to communicate about certain colors. Linking almost all languages, however, is an emphasis on communicating about warm colors -- reds and yellows -- that are known to draw the human eye and that correspond with the colors of ripe fruits in primate diets.
"Their results were so astonishing," Plotkin says. "They demanded explanation."
Substantial research followed, some of which suggested that one major reason for the remarkable similarities between languages' color vocabularies came down to physiology.
"Languages differ, cultures differ, but our eyes are the same," says Plotkin.
But another reason for the overarching similarities could be that humans, regardless of what language they speak, are more interested in talking about certain colors than others.
Journal Reference:
Colin R. Twomey, Gareth Roberts, David H. Brainard, et al. What we talk about when we talk about colors [open], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2109237118)
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