perceptionLanguages are extremely diverse, but they are not arbitrary. Behind the bewildering, contradictory ways in which different tongues conceptualise the world, we can sometimes discern order. Linguists have traditionally assumed that this reflects the hardwired linguistic aptitude of the human brain. Yet recent scientific studies propose that language “universals” aren’t simply prescribed by genes but that they arise from the interaction between the biology of human perception and the bustle, exchange and negotiation of human culture.
[Language] peculiarities have been explained by linguists by reference to the history of the people who speak it. That’s often fascinating, but it does not yield general principles about how languages have developed—or how they will change in future. As they evolve, what guides their form?
There are several schools of thought about how colours get named. “Nativists,” who include Berlin and Kay and also Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist, argue that the way in which we attach words to concepts is innately determined by how we perceive the world. As Pinker has put it, “the way we see colours determines how we learn words for them, not vice versa.” In this view, often associated with Noam Chomsky, our perceptual apparatus has evolved to ensure that we make “sensible”—that is, useful—choices of what to label with distinct words: we are hardwired for practical forms of language. “Empiricists,” in contrast, argue that we don’t need this innate programming, just the capacity to learn the conventional (but arbitrary) labels for things we can perceive.
For colour, our physiology influences this process, picking out some parts of the spectrum as more worthy of a distinct term than others. The crucial factor is how well we discriminate between similar colours—we do that most poorly in the red, yellowish green and purple-violet parts (we can’t distinguish reds as well as we can blues, for example).
When researchers included this bias in the colour-naming game, they found that generally accepted colour terms emerged in their population of agents in much the same order proposed by Berlin and Key: red, then violet, yellow, green, blue and orange.
[T]here’s nothing in the physiology of vision that would let you guess a priori that red is going to emerge first. And indeed, in the computer simulations there’s initially no well-defined word for red—it is only after some time that a word stably referring to the red part of the spectrum appears, followed later by violet, and so on. Culture—the discourse between agents in the population—is the filter which extracts the labels that are most useful from the biological given of colour vision. So both biology and culture are required to get it right.
It increasingly seems, then, that language is determined not simply by how we are programmed, but by how it is used and by what we need to say.