the language of colour

Here's the linguist Guy Deutscher:

Recently, it has been demonstrated in a series of ingenious experiments that we even perceive colors through the lens of our mother tongue. There are radical variations in the way languages carve up the spectrum of visible light; for example, green and blue are distinct colors in English but are considered shades of the same color in many languages. And it turns out that the colors that our language routinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to certain color differences in reality, so that our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language. As strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue.

There are many other amazing paragraphs in this piece...do read the whole thing.

Comments

[ashcash]

the more one atomises the more one is able to differentiate which in itself is about refinement. But there is such a thing as becoming too micro-scopic.

[Cheap True Religion Outlet]

I am looking to confirmation to what I have been praying about and I trust the Holy Spirit will reveal the truth via your prayers. Please don’t allow yourself to guess on what it is I am seeking from the Lord, this is real important to me and I want to make sure the confirmation has come from the Lord. I will know what Jesus has said once I read your response to your praying, because it is very specific and only the Lord knows what it is. For the next two weeks I won’t even be answering any emails, so please hold off on sending any emails except news related emails. If I miss some news I will have your news links.