Minds, Brains, Language, and Writing, take 2

Shweta · Jul 2, 2006

The first few posts here are repastes of what I found in cache. I'll just put quote tags around other peoples' posts, unless someone gives me a better idea.

What I said the last time:

My field is cognitive science/cognitive linguistics. I've been talking to people about this a fair amount in the chat room, and about its relevance to writing. It's also come up on other threads. So it occurred to me that I should start a thread on it.

So I did. And here it is. And server overwrites cannot kill it, mua ha!

Shweta · Jul 2, 2006

language and space

shweta said:
We think space is pretty simple, right? There's this 3-d world around us and objects in space hang out in that space, and we can talk about it.

But it turns out that we can talk about it in different ways, and language affects our understanding of this world quite a bit. And since space is kind of fundamental to our understanding of everything, I thought I'd start out with it

The story:
Languages split space up in different ways. English speakers use left/right/front/back relative to our own bodies, or the front of a person or object we're talking about.
We also use North/South/East/West. These are absolute direction terms.

Some languages only have absolute direction terms. In these languages you cannot tell someone to set the knives on the right of the plates and the forks on the left. You have to say "If you're facing north, put the knife on the east side of the plate and the spoon on the west" -- or the equivalent. The equivalent is often "uphill/downhill" for people living on the side of a mountain; but there are people living in totally flat places who also have absolute frames of reference. I think they use the sun.

People who speak these languages are really really good at telling which way's north, and remembering it. They have to be, to learn and use their language.

There are other ways of breaking space up. There's at least one language (I'll look up the name later) where everything in the culture is symmetrical, and houses are built facing uphill, and the people live in a single valley. These people have no notion of right and left, it seems. They cannot tell the difference between a picture and its mirror image.

The evidence:

Absolute Direction languages have been studied by Stephen Levinson's team at the max planck institute of psycholinguistics.

One fun piece of evidence was: they took speakers of Dutch, and of an absolute direction language (it's one of the Australian Aborignal languages), into the desert, in a long and winding journey. At night, or something; they didn't have the sun for reference. Then they set them loose and told them to point north.

The dutch speakers point all over the place. The absolute direction language speakers almost all point more or less north.

It seems like they keep track of how much the road curves, and have this constant, updating, idea of north.

There are other studies too, but I don't want to make the post *too* long. So, a couple links:
http://www.mpi.nl/world/pub/Spatial%20Language.pdf
http://csli-publications.stanford.ed...9,_Cablitz.pdf

I'll try to find friendlier ones later if people want 'em.

So what?

Space is a really important part of language/thought; and as writers we need to situate our narratives. How we do so can give the reader a hint about how our protags are thinking.

In fantasy stories that aren't set in a large country, the language might well be affected by major landmarks. And this will affect how the characters think.

Possibly more interestingly, if you have an alien culture, space might well be conceptualized differently. This would lead to fun misunderstandings.

Could also happen in a fantasy setting where one person comes from another culture.

Shwebb said:
Interesting post, Shweta.

I guess that, as writers, we have to realize that there is more than one landscape we deal with. We have the literal landscape, and the landscape of the mind. I guess the mindscape, really. And it's more important to convey where the character is in his/her/its mind world than anything else.

Thanks for opening my own mind a little bit.

Zonk said:
As I said in the chat room, I'd like to see a control experiment where both sets of linguistically differentiated people were not trained in tracking from birth.

For instance, It's almost impossible for me to get lost in the bush down here; I automatically look for the sun, or stars to orient myself. My wife is hopeless at it, and we both speak the same language.

OTOH, she is very good at finding places if she has to drive to them, or has driven there before. Go figure.

Still the thory is intriguing, and one could imagine an alien first contact where complications arise from, say a language that has variable directional terms based on, say, proximity to the nearest planet or sun system.

C. J. Cherryh has explored the dangers inherent in inter-species language and conceptual differences several times, e.g. her recent Foreigner series; but an alien contact complicated by a major difference in the two species' concept of space itself is, I think a very interesting spot from which to launch a story.

What if one species thinks of space as strictly the domain of the Gods? How would the other prove they were not? Would they actually take advantage of the situation?

Or, what if the one thinks of space as their domain alone, and other species must remain planet-bound?

Interesting.

Medievalist said:
In Old Irish, in the oldest texts, directions are locative, that is, they are given in respect to a speaker and specific landmarks ("between me and Muirthemne"). This changes, gradually, with time.

Shweta said:
That's really cool, Medievalist.

Something I didn't say before and should (thanks Zonk!) is that the claim isn't that language alone affects thought, independent of culture; it's that language/culture can get you thinking in certain ways. Kids in at least some of these absolute direction languages have games that teach them to think in those terms, for example.

Also: there's nothing saying English speakers can't learn to figure out which way's north all the time. It's just that speakers of, for example, Guugu Yimithirr, have to.

I should also say that in the absolute-direction case, there are several experiments other than what I posted. There's one in which you see a pattern, and then go through a few corridors into another room and end up turned 180 degrees, and then you have to say which pattern (of 4 you see) is the "same".
English or Dutch speakers interpret that relative to themselves, and speakers of the absolute direction languages interpret it in terms of absolute direction, even though they got turned around.

Oh, and these people -- I've seen a gesture clip. A guy's telling a story about a boat overturning, and it flipped over to (I think) the South. How he gestures depends on which way he's facing as he tells the story. (So for example, he gestures the boat flipping away from himself only if he's facing south. strange stuff.)

I am academic; hear me babble.

Shwebb said:
This issue reminds me of a spatial issue with another forest culture. When put on flat land to watch the progress of another person coming toward him, the man thought that the traveling man was tiny and kept getting bigger as he was actually coming closer. His mind couldn't handle seeing that much flat space.

Shweta said:
A-ha!
The language I mentioned above, whose speakers couldn't differentiate between mirror images, is Tzeltal. The speakers live in highland Chiapas, Mexico.

Also, a really good academic reference for this stuff, as opposed to the dry and dusty links I posted earlier, is here:

http://www.mpi.nl/world/TICS.pdf

Shweta · Jul 2, 2006

Sapir-Whorf 1

Medievalist said:
Whorf-Sapir, go on, say it, I dare you.

And let's see how long before someone brings up the $%^#&^ "Eskimos" and snow . . .

Shweta said:
Sapir-Whorf! Sapir-Whorf!
I said it

Levinson et al's stuff is all about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, of course, showing that the weak hypothesis is supported.

I was going to babble about the visual system next, cause Shwebb bought it up, but maybe I should cover "Linguistic relativity and what it means for sf/f" first. There are cool studies, and the topic's certainly come up in sf.

We'll see. Tomorrow, though. Not now.

Zonk said:
What is it about the $%^#&^ "Eskimos" and snow? Now you have me curious...

Especially since snow is something I have never seen...at least not IRL. I've seen it in movies, etc., but I've never caught it in the act.

O, ok, nevermind, I read up on the Eskimos and snow...

Evaine said:
It is said that the Eskimos have twenty or thirty different words for snow, depending on what sort of snow it is - soft and fluffy, powdery, hardpacked, etc.
It's rather like Mancunians and their many words for rain....

Shweta said:
Yeah. People claim anywhere from 8 to 50 terms for snow, depending on how cool they think this is
edit: I was conservative. Some people claim over 150 words. See Medievalist's post below for why it's nonsense.

What they don't normally mention is that English-speaking skiers have just as many words for snow. It has little to do with language and plenty to do with experience and expertise.

Vocabulary is shifting and growing and there's lots of specialized terminology that people don't learn unless it makes useful distinctions. So vocabulary, especially a list of nouns, is generally a poor way to judge a language.

Verbs might be able to tell you more, but in general linguists (or at least, linguists who care) look for grammatical differences. Unlike vocabulary, grammar's fairly fixed. So we mostly look at grammatical patterns, and also at what we call "Closed-class items" -- categories that only have a few, fixed, members.

So for example, spatial relation terms are interesting. Differences between languages might mean somethng, because most languages don't have more than 20 or so, and they don't change quickly. (English has in, out, on, off, into, onto, out of, over, under, above, below, left, right, in front of, behind, through, along, across, athwart, between, among... am I missing any?)

And any time you describe objects' relations in space, you have to use one of these. This might conceivably affect how you think about the relations.

Korean, for example, makes no distinction between in and on; but it makes a distinction English doesn't make -- that between tight fit and loose fit. This doesn't mean English speakers don't know the difference. Just that we don't generally focus on it.
And lo and behold, there's a point when English-speaking babies stop paying attention to tight/loose fit, and at that same time Korean-speaking babies stop paying attention to containment versus contact. I think it's at about 8-9 months, but don't quote me on that; this is from a talk I saw 4 years ago.

TheIT said:
What about color? I've heard about some languages which only contain references for light vs. dark but not individual colors.

Sounds like it all boils down to why create a word for a concept you don't need to convey. You'll end up with different words and syntax depending on where you are, who you need to communicate with, and about what.

The examples about absolute direction remind me of one of Carl Sagan's Cosmos episodes regarding memory. Back before literacy was widespread people were forced to rely on their own memories rather than writing the information down. They didn't have the luxury of looking the information up somewhere. The concept of time was also based on personal events rather than absolute dates, i.e. "the day before the thunderstorm" vs. June 1.

Shweta said:
Linguistic relativity
The question: There is a debate in linguistics/psychology that has been going on a long time. It's called the Linguistic relativity/relativism debate. The question is: how much does language affect thought? Related, chronologically later question: are different languages really different, or are they all underlyingly the same, and just different "on the surface"?

If speakers of different languages really do think differently (independent of other factors), then you have to allow that a) language has some effect on thoughts, and b) that effect is different from one language to another, so the languages aren't all just the same thing.

If, on the other hand, thought causes language, and everyone thinks the same, then clearly languages are all basically the same thing.

The evidence:
Well, okay, mostly the evidence is "to follow". But here's a summary.
Which position you take on it these days seems to depend on whether you only study one language (normally English) or language family (normally a subset of Indo-European) and try to generalize from that to everything, or whether you study many, unrelated languages. The people who look at many languages mostly have consensus: the languages really are interestingly different. The people who think everything's the same -- well, they don't see the point in studying many languages, or paying attention to the cross-cultural data.

This isn't quite as intellectually poor as I make it sound: there's just so much data, everyone's ignoring something. But... yeah, it's pretty lame.

So what?
This is good for us, as writers. If languages really are interestingly different and get people to think differently, then that's story fodder.

It's also a challenge. Often sf/f is about asking what-if, or about portraying a really different world. But if those really different worlds, and what-ifs, affect the assumptions and thought-patterns of our characters, then we need to take that into account.

Shweta said:
Several cool questions/comments in so short a post, TheIT. Color is part of the Sapir-Whorf story, so I'll hit that in this thread.

I'm not going to talk about writing/memory much, cause I don't know much about it, but you've given me the next topic: offloading cognition. Well, after the visual system stuff, which I have very little to say about.

Medievalist said:
The reference to the Inuit and words for snow is an urban legend, spawned by imprecise reading.

See here.

Shweta · Jul 2, 2006

Sapir-Whorf 2

Medievalist said:
Color -- color terms are a TPAT, especially in dead languages.

I spent weeks looking at Celtic words for blue/gray/green and transparent, in an effort to figure out horse colorings and dog colorings.

Even in English, men and women identify colors differently, not to mention the differences in individual identification and perception.

My dad was red - green color blind; life got to be interesting, believe me.

TheIT said:
TPAT?

Medievalist said:
Total Paint in The Arse with a ummm, stutter.

Shweta said:
The snow thing is wrong, yes, but it was actually something Whorf claimed.

I've read one paper in which he does, though -- and he only mentions it in passing, spending much more time on the Hopi notion of time (another misunderstanding, I think, but a more subtle one).

People presumably caught onto the eskimo thing because it was immediately (mis)understandable and strange. But also, the detractors of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis use it as a straw man. They debunk that, and conclude that there's no linguistic relativism at all.

Shweta said:
So who were Sapir and Whorf again?
...Background time.

Edward Sapir was a linguist, an anthropologist, and a student of Franz Boas, the guy who founded anthropology in the US.

Boas and his students studied indigenous languages of the Americas. To give you a little context, this was around a hundred years ago; and when Boas argued that no race was inherently intellectually superior than others, that was controversial.

Benjamin Lee Whorf was one of Sapir's students; his training was in chemical engineering, but he got into linguistics.

Whorf taught Sapir's classes while Sapir was sick (Sapir died young, in 1939). He took Sapir's ideas and modified them, added his own thoughts and insights, and taught them. And so I'm not sure (and I'm not sure anyone knows) how much of the hypothesis comes from Sapir, and how much from Whorf.

I've heard that Sapir's take was more moderate than Whorf's, but I don't know whether that's valid.

So! What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? People often say it is the position that language determines thought, or you can't think something unless you have words for it. But here's what Whorf actually says:

"We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way — an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language... all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated." — (Language, Thought and Reality pp. 212–214). Expert taken from here

...So what he's really saying is that language gets us to focus on some aspects of the world, and affects how we parse it, and that categorization varies cross-culturally.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, then (or the "weak" S-W hypothesis, as it's been called), is the position that the structure of the language(s) you speak affects your non-linguistic cognition.

So What?
This stuff makes for fun fiction. Don't just believe me; these ideas have made it into (at least)

C.J. Cherryh, (I dunno, stuff. I don't read Cherryh.)
Samuel Delaney, Babel-17
Suzette Haden Elgin, the Native Tongue series
Frank Herbert, Dune
George Orwell, 1984
Jack Vance, The Languages of Pao
Ursula LeGuin, The Dispossessed

TheIT said:
Or as Mark Twain put it, "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." (not sure of the exact wording)

So what the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is saying is that if you've got a word for a concept, you're going to want to use it? Or that you're more likely to recognize something if a word for it exists in your language? Interesting.

What about people who speak multiple languages? Does their perception change based on what language they're speaking or thinking in? The Babel-17 example is intriguing. It's been a while since I read it, but as I recall they couldn't recognize other concepts once they switched their mindset to speak in the other language.

What about thought that doesn't require words? For example, I'm also an amateur artist. When I'm sculpting something or drawing a picture I don't employ words to perform the activity. Perhaps it's because I know what to do, or because it's a solitary activity I don't need to communicate to someone else what I'm doing. If I have to explain to someone else it's always a struggle to find the right words to convey what my hands know what to do.

Medievalist said:
For Cherryh, I really recommend Huntress of Worlds, and The Foreigner Series (nine books and counting) if you're interested in language, SF and linguistics, and in reading books where humans are the aliens.

I am exceedingly fond of Cherryh; she's up there with Anonymous Medieval Author, Donne, Dunnett and Tolkien.

Shweta said:
Evidence
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is really not about individual words. It's more saying, if you have terms for a conceptual domain that parse the domain up in particular ways, you're more likely to make those distinctions.

To go back to an example, English distinguishes between contact and containment (on, in). Korean distinguishes between tight-fit and loose fit, but not between contact and containment.

By the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, English speakers would be more sensitive to the difference between contact and containment, and Korean speakers to the difference between tight and loose fit.

Fun with babies
So what the experimenters did was, they got babies to look at pictures, while sucking on something. Now, babies can't tell us much, but we can figure out when they're interested. They look at the cool! new! thing! and they suck more. Also, they're interested in differences.

So the experimenters would show a baby a picture of, for example, a tight-fit containment (jisaw piece in puzzle, or something), and wait for the baby to get bored.

Then they'd change the picture. To, for example, an apple in a bowl (loose fit containment), or a lego piece stuck onto another one (tight-fit contact).
When an English-speaking baby (of the right age range) saw the apple in the bowl, it was all "ho hum, more containment". When it saw the lego piece it'd start sucking way more and staring at it. Korean babies of that age did the reverse.

It's not that we can't tell that these are all different pictures. It's that some of them have differences we notice/care about.

Thinking for Speaking
This is one weak form of Sapir-Whorf, put forth by Dan Slobin at UC Berkeley.

...frequent use of forms directs attention to their functions, perhaps even making those functions (semantic and discursive) especially salient on the conceptual level. That is, by accessing a form frequently, one is also directed to the conceptual content expressed by that form. Since such content is organized, by language, into compact sysems—devoted to some types of distinctions and excluding others—particular conceptual domains come to be organized in the speaker’s mind, becoming the basis of thinking for speaking. (Berman and Slobin 1994: 640)

So this isn't saying that all thought is linguistic. Just that if we talk about something the same way over and over, and -- especially -- if we have to know something about a situation in order to talk about it, we'll end up paying attention to that something.

If you're sculpting, that won't be directly affected by your linguistic system. But the concept you want to convey with your sculpture probably is affected by your linguistic system.

Bilinguals

There's a study by Lera Boroditsky on grammatical gender: it goes against the notion that grammatical gender has "no" meaning. She picked words that have opposite genders in German and Spanish (male/female; she ignored neuter words). For example, key, and bridge.

Then she got Spanish/English and German/English bilinguals to come in for the study, and showed them these words -- in English. And asked for adjectives describing the words.

What she found was that if a word was feminine in the bilingual's other language, they'd use "pretty", "golden", "delicate", and so forth to describe it. If it was masculine they'd use words like "strong", "iron", and such.

In English.

She's done another study in Indonesian and English -- Indonesian doesn't have to mark the stage of an action, the way English does (e.g. about to kick/kicking/kicked). What she found was, in both description and memory tasks, English speakers were most sensitive to that distinction, and Indonesian monolinguals the least.

But she also tested Indonesian/English bilinguals, who did better than the Indonesian monolinguals and worse than the English monolinguals -- and, Indonesian/English bilinguals did better when tested in English than in Indonesian.

So yes, there's a long-term effect from the language(s) you know, but there's also an effect from what you're doing right now.

Presumably that's also true for, say, English speakers who are sculpting (to take an, uh, random example) -- they're not as affected by the structure of English as they would be if they were talking, but they are more affected by it than an Arabic-speaking sculptor was.

What this has me wondering...

Is, how would a magical language affect the magician's thought?

Shweta · Jul 2, 2006

Sapir-Whorf 3

Zonk said:
So what happens when someone immerses themselves in a nother language to the point that they begin to think in it?

This happened to a froiend of mine who is studying in China. He came back and had to 're-learn' English, and felt completely disoriented for a while.

Medievalist said:
There have been days when I've given my spouse a grocery list that was not in English; I didn't notice.

Shweta said:
You mean... different from the Indonesian data?

I'm theorizing now: what would happen is, yes, they start thinking in the language, and their thought is affected by it. (To some extent. Their usage of some parts of the language isn't going to be native-like. Non-native fluent English speakers still have trouble with prepositions after speaking the language for years.)

Zonk said:
Rollynge on yon floore laffynge.

That's really funny. Why don't you post it up the next time you do it and we can all guess what the items are?

Um, assuming there is a next time

, and you can find a font for the language...

Response to Zonk's earlier comments on absolute direction languages:

JerseyGirl1962 said:
Same for my hubby. By looking at the sun, he can figure out, hey go north here, go southeast down this street, etc.

Me? Directions mean nothing to me. Any sort of directions hubby gives me he knows he has to give me some landmarks (a gas station, a library, etc.) or I freak out.

For me and (I suspect) your wife, it's the landmarks that help us know where we're going. I don't know if this has any scientific merit, but I just think men's and women's brains (generally) are wired differently in those situations.

~Nancy

TheIT said:
One of my pet peeves in stories is when some random person finds a musty old scroll/book/inscription, reads it aloud, and suddenly all hell breaks loose. Why would someone not trained to wield magic be able to cast a spell? Why would the simple act of verbalizing the words cause magic to react? It gives words too much intrinsic power.

I've been tackling this question while setting up the magic system for my fantasy story. I began with the question "what is the purpose of a magical language?" Is the language to communicate with magic to tell the power what to do, or is language merely a tool used by a mage to force his thoughts into the correct pattern to wield power?

I took the latter approach. In my world's magic system, wielding magic is by means of focused thought. Words are used as aids to concentration to force the mage's thoughts into the correct pattern. Magic doesn't listen to the words, it "listens" to the mage's mind/spirit. If the mage loses concentration in the middle of a spell Bad Things Happen to both the mage and the world around him. Undirected magic causes random effects, usually dangerous or deadly. This also means that no one not trained in wielding magic can just read something aloud and cast a spell (unless the spell was deliberately designed to be triggered by being spoken aloud).

Shweta said:
Magical languages
I think we're in agreement, IT.
I can't go read a book in German and understand it, either. A real language (as opposed to D&D type scrolls) isn't the kind of thing you can just read and make sense of. A real language would change the way the speaker thought, and that'd possibly make magic easier. Or some such.

Landmarks and Directions
Several people have brought this up now. There is actual work on gender differences in navigation, and it concludes that men really are overall better at direction-based navigation, and women are overall better at landmark-based navigation. This is just a general tendency, though.
And, I can't remember who did this, or how plausible the setup was, or how conclusive the findings.
I will it up in a psych text when I get home, if people really want. If not I'll be lazy

pdr said:
Fascinating!
Learning a lot here. Last time I studied language classes was when it was all Noam Chomsky's theories and I barely grasped that then.

When I was last at University in the 70s the theory was that men had a larger spatial area in the brain than women did. Also upbringing played a part as boys were allowed to roam more freely than girls and so used their spatial area more. Did some work with Wood Cree children and yes, the boys, spending time with Dad hunting, were far better than the girls although the girls were pretty good by non-Native Canadian girls' standards.

I can find north and navigate by the stars because I made myself learn but I have to use physical objects to do so. The NZ bush is no place to wander if you are ignorant of these basics.

However I can navigate back to anywhere once I have been there and fixed a landmark. Weird isn't it?

badducky said:
I wouldn't skimp on the delillo, either.

"The Names" by Don DeLillo is just awesome. The book deals with a cult that worships alphabets, and also enjoys human sacrifice.

Not so much "Language" as the many ways of writing that language, but definitely worth adding to the discussion, even if it qualifies as strictly Literature.

badducky said:
Quick tip that I've mentioned in other places:

Many, many professors post their lectures and lecture notes on their webpages for students. Especially undergraduate professors in survey courses that teach the basics.

A great way to learn about an important intellectual is to google "{Important Intellectual XYZ} lecture notes" and check out what you see in the top twelve or so. Very neat trick, and works like a charm.

"Lacan lecture notes"
"Saussure lecture notes"
"Freud Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious lecture notes"
"derrida lecture notes"
etc.

Shweta said:
Yeah, googling for these things is really useful.

So is wikipedia for most of this. The centers of controversy (Skinner, Chomsky, Lakoff) have iffy pages, but for the most part the only people who care enough to make wiki pages for academics are the ones who know about the material.

Shweta · Jul 2, 2006

Gender differences

Shweta said:
Fine, make me do my homework

First, my caveat! I don't know this area of study. I just got this stuff by googling. I've heard about it, and these links pass my bullsh*t detector, but that doesn't mean they're right.

Then, the field's caveats!
This link is especially good because it points out things like, for example, gender differences are relatively small. The differences between women are more than the differences between the averages of women and men. And the differences "emerge against a background of massive similarity in form and function between the genders". There may be huge gender differences in other species, but what humans have is a lot of similarity.

Having said that, what I'm finding is this. Here's an abstract, from a book.

Women were more likely to report using a route strategy (attending to instructions on how to get from place to place), whereas men were more likely to report using an orientation strategy (maintaining a sense of their own position in relation to environmental reference points). Women also reported higher levels of spatial anxiety, or anxiety about environmental navigation, than did men. The orientation strategy was found to be positively correlated with spatial perception ability and negatively correlated with spatial anxiety.

Those are the reported differences in spatial abilities in humans. As for the neuroscience, it's apparently not that males have a larger brain area, it's that (from what I found) we're activating different parts of the brain -- more on the left, and women more on the right. Here's a quote from the abstract of a Nature Neuroscience article. That's a journal I'd trust, but here's my caveat: it's from an fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) study. fMRI is the current fashionable methodology, but the best it can give us is correlation, not cause.

Gender-specific group analysis revealed distinct activation of the left hippocampus in males, whereas females consistently recruited right parietal and right prefrontal cortex. Thus we demonstrate a neural substrate of well established human gender differences in spatial-cognition performance.
Hippocampal areas are associated with memory, while parietal/prefrontal areas are all sorts of complicated stuff. I dunno what it means.

P.S. That book sounds awesome, BD, thanks for mentioning it

Shweta said:
Oh, ack! I forgot what might be the coolest link.
checkit out: gender differences in language use. So much fun, and so very much something that could go in a story.

Shweta · Jul 2, 2006

Random cool stuff

Shwebb said:
As we discussed in chat, Shweta, here is what this thread makes me think of:

What if a person/creature/alien had the answer to a major problem in his/her/its mind, but because of culural/language issues, wasn't able to see it? Sort of like not being able to see the elephant in the living room.

Ardellis said:
According to the mice in Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Trilogy, you'd have to dice that individual's brain. But they ended up getting the answer (actually the Question) out of Arthur using randomly-picked Scrabble letters.

Actually, it's an interesting conundrum. How about teaching that person a language that does allow for the concept you're looking for, and then, say, hypnotizing them to see if they can dig it out of their subconscious?

Shweta said:
I think if you taught someone another language in which the concept was available, you wouldn't need to hypnotize them.

The trick is finding such a concept. Mostly it seems like we carve the world up differently, and focus on different things. More complex differences are better attributed to culture, and not so much to language.

Maybe... learning to overlook a difference? Learning a language that didn't make a particular distinction?

I dunno

Shweta said:
Biological motion, just 'cause
I still, really, will get back to vision and color soon.

But I looked up biological motion for a story I'm writing, and discovered that it is both a cooler and a less recent finding than I'd thought. For an amazing set of demos, go here.

The basic thing is, we're really good at figuring out what types of motion are caused by biological entities, and what aren't. And we're good at figuring out the entities from very minimal information about their movement.

I think the original study hooked small lights up to people -- just 9 or 11 lights a person, at joints -- and had them move around in a dark room. Just based on those lights and how they moved, people could tell a lot. Like, the gender of the person moving.

Annnd it gets weirder! Apparently people who have brain damage that impairs their normal ability to recognize moving images (or maybe it's how images move)... are still good at recognizing biological motion.

...To which I say, dude.
(Maybe SoCal is getting to me.)

So what?
Right, I'm not sure how this sparks story ideas, I just think it's really cool. It's not even central to my storylet; I just have psych students referencing it. But there has to be something we can do with it.

JerseyGirl1962 said:
Shweta,

That anxiety - that's me! I remember a few years ago getting lost in the Princeton corridor here in NJ. I95 North becomes I295 South (or something like that) & it was completely foreign to my brain (how could I be travelling on the same road and have a sign saying no, now you're going south?). Screwed me up, big time.

Anytime we're in that area, hubby is always always always at the wheel.

~Nancy

Peggy said:
I'm finding this thread really interesting - thanks for sharing your expertise Shweta!

Upthread is a list some stories that integrate the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I just wanted to add Ted Chiang's excellent novella, "The Story of Your Life" to the list. In it, a linguist works to understand an alien language, and, ultimately, learning the language changes how she perceives the world (I'm not sure if it's a spoiler to say more than that.).

Shweta said:
I need to read Ted Chiang. Thanks for the addition! Perhaps another place to recommend it is here:

Shweta · Jul 2, 2006

Real-life magical beliefs

Context: This bit starts with Diana letting us know that the reading-ancient-scrolls-in-unknown-tongues has a historical basis.

Diana Hignutt said:
Just a little note here. In "historical" magical tradition, by some line of thought, it is the strangeness and unfamiliarity of the barbarous words of evocation that excites the magician's mind. The rough, exotic pronounciations, the unkown meaning, these things have power in and of themselves. Now, that's not to say that someone untrained in the magical disciplines would get results...

Shweta said:
...And it also doesn't mean you can say something you don't know the meaning of without getting unpredicted results.

It's a really interesting point, Diana. Gets into the relation between form and meaning, which isn't nearly as arbitrary as has been claimed. There is work on sound symbolism and such. For example, if you present people with word pairs in a foreign language they can often tell which one means "big" and which means "little"; or which one means "loud" and which means "soft", or "sharp" versus "smooth", and so on.
But I'm not really familiar with the literature, there.

Let's note, too, that this is one historical magical tradition (I assume you're referencing the Golden Dawn and its related movements; am I right?) Vedic magic, by contrast, requires understanding of what your chants mean. Knowledge is one of the four parts of the ritual.

Going back to fiction, though... I think it'd be really hard to have a magic scroll be compelling at this point. It's too likely to make a reader think "D&D", not "Crowley".

Diana Hignutt said:
Ah, dear Shweta, but few people have studied comparative mysticism (and the related philology) to the level and degree Crowley did. Certainly fewer have practiced as many different cultural mystical techniques as he did. He was among the first to master and marry the traditions of the East and West. And, to be completely fair Golden Dawn teaching was derived from Rosicrucian teaching which has ancient and far reaching roots. All in all, I would agree with you though...

Shweta said:
From what I've read of Crowley and what I know of the mystical traditions of the East, I would really hesitate to say that he mastered them. Ditto what I've read of the Rosicrucians; they're still making the basic distinctions we see in Western philosophy, not Eastern.
I'm not saying they treated these in a standard way. It's like... the way Satanists are still stuck with biblical assumptions, even if they turn the premises round some. They aren't working outside the framework.
Neither is anything I've seen in the more Western magical traditions.
My experience/opinion.
I really do agree that Crowley was an extremely interesting and widely studied thinker but... I'd argue that he saw these things very much through the lens of his language/culture, which had extremely different presuppositions from, say, that of Hindu mysticism. (And even that's Indo-European, so not nearly as different as some other systems).

So! I think Crowley's a great case study in the effects of culture/language on thought, and then on magic, and I'm really glad you brought him up; but I think he's primarily an argument for what I was saying <grin>

By the way, I want to say that I'm not talking about SF implications for all this because I think they're more obvious than fantasy ones. The implications I see, at least, which are for alien cultures or for a future human culture.

Not sure if I have anything missing here. I feel like I might, but it might just be further private conversation between myself and Diana that I'm thinking of.

Shweta · Jul 2, 2006

Fun stuff

Manner, verbs, and satellites

Shweta said:
... cause color is just too daunting today.
So! allowing that cultural/linguistic differences might be interesting, what kinds of differences are found in the world's languages?

I've mentioned containment, and tight-fitting. And grammatical gender. And spatial cognition. And I've said a little about event structure.
Now I'm going to summarize some of the other cross-linguistic differences that have been found, going from most normal to weirdest, by the following entirely objective standard: how much did it make my eyes bug out?

I think these are all really cool; I just think some are more spectacular than others,

Verb-framed and Satellite-framed languages

Earlier I mentioned Dan Slobin (and his Thinking for Speaking hypothesis).
The way he and his colleagues collected their data was: they asked people to look at a picture book and then retell the story in that book. They did this with subjects of various ages (I think 4, 10, and adult, but I don't remember and am a bit too lazy to look it up. If you care, ask, and I'll look) who were native speakers of different languages.

Now, here's something they already knew was true of the structure of these languages, and how they talk about motion events. Some of them, like Spanish, are verb-framed. This means the path of motion is coded in the verb. So Spanish uses motion verbs like entrar (go in) and salir (go out).
Languages like English, on the other hand, are satellite-framed. They tend to code the path of motion in particles, or prepositional phrases (he went into Faerie).
Note that English does have some verbs like "enter" and "exit", but they're latinate, there aren't many of them, and they aren't used too often. Similarly, Spanish does have words for "walk" and "run" and such, but you wouldn't normally use them.

Satellite-framed languages dump other information into their verbs. Like, for example, manner. So for example our character being described in English might trundle, or run, or stumble, or jog, or hop, or tiptoe, or saunter, into Faerie. If were speaking spanish he's probably going to "enter" Faerie (translating into English here). If we want to specify how he does, he might "enter Faerie walking".

So what, right? Clearly both languages can express the same information.

Well, what Slobin et al found was that, sure, they can. But they don't. Manner of motion is rarely coded in Spanish narratives. But it's common, and comes in early, in English narratives. English kids start using manner verbs early, and they use a lot of them. Ditto other languages of the same type (though there's a gradient of sorts).
Does this affect thought?

Well so. There's another experiment where they got people to read a story (apparently at least one example was from Isabel Allende's House of Spirits). It features a guy walking through muddy, stony terrain, weighed down with bags he's carrying.
Spanish speakers read the originals, English speakers read an exact translation (without any manner put in), and Spanish-English bilinguals read both. Now, you could infer manner of motion from the text, but it wasn't explicitly in there.

The task was to report on mental imagery.

So, English speakers reported lots of imagery (the guy trudging along, dodging objects, rocking from side to side, staggering, feeling weighed down, etc).
Spanish speakers reported less.
Trans. from Chilean: I don't picture him getting down from the train but rather standing still on the platform and I don't see him going along a very long trajectory in order to arrive at the village; rather I see him at a distance from it, looking at it. I repeat that I don't observe him moving in the direction of the village but rather as static images, more like photographs.
But perhaps most interesting are the bilinguals. They reported more scenery-imagery when they read in Spanish, and more motion-imagery (and I think more imagery in general) when they read in English.
In Spanish: It would seem that he moves, walks, but I don't see any sort of detailed action on his part. I know that he walks and must have his feet burdened with the stony ground but I see the stones and the path more than the manner in which he walks. ... It would seem that he were floating at times as if he were seated in a cart.
In English: I'm still seeing very little manner of movement but I see more concrete walking and I can sort of make out a pace. I see less of the surroundings. The story feels different. There is less detail in regards to the scenery.

I'm afraid the best reference I have for this cool study is Slobin's lecture notes. So lots of other stuff in there. But anyway, yeeeah, changing the way people think, apparently.

I've read some Allende myself, and I found myself really wanting more imagery. Thinking "But so much is going on that's cool, why aren't you showing me?" Then I realized it was translated from Spanish...

...Oof, ok, that was long. And I said color was daunting....

Shweta said:
Kinship terms
No real fun experiments on this one. Just... what terms for family relations does a culture have? What's that say about how relationships are seen?

English has:
Blood relations:

Great...
Grandmother Grandfather (Great...)
Mother Father Aunt Uncle
Sister Brother Cousin
Daughter Son Niece Nephew
Granddaughter Grandson
Great...

Relations by marriage are all X-in-law, except for husband/wife/spouse/partner.

What's this tell us? Well first, English marks gender. We do have words like "parent", "child", "sibling"; but they're seldom used. So this suggests that English speakers care about the gender of the person being addressed/talked about.
The gendered pronouns might suggest this too ^-^

So, okay, it's possible to have a language that doesn't make gender distinctions, or makes more. Yay. What else?

Let's look at Tamil. Tamil is a Dravidian language mostly spoken in Southern India and Sri Lanka. I'm a use it for an example cause I speak it. Badly, but who's keeping score?

Tamil has different words for older brother and younger brother, and for older sister and younger sister.
The words for older brother and older sister sound alike, and those for younger bro/younger sis sound alike.

Tamil also has different words for sister-in-law depending on whether she married your older brother or younger brother, and I think for whether she's your husband's older or younger sister, though there I'm not sure.

So we can guess that maybe there's a cultural emphasis on age goin' on. Which there is. Age maps to pecking order.

Now for the fun.
There are four words for aunt, and four for uncle.
Aunt can be: Father's sister; Mother's older sister or father's older brother's wife; Mother's younger sister or father's younger brother's wife; Mother's brother's wife.
Uncle can be: Mother's brother; Father's older brother or mother's older sister's husband; Father's younger brother or mother's younger sister's husband; Father's sister's husband.

So the age thing seems to be most important with same-gender siblings. Annnyway, Tamil speakers really truly think of these all as different relationships. So much so that if they're speaking English, they'll say things like "elder-brother" even if they don't have a younger brother. I've noticed it. I've done it myself. I've really confused my English-speaking friends.

I think the reason for the crazy aunt-uncle thing has its roots in who'd take care of you if your parents died.

Annyway, this should have gone before the Slobin cause it doesn't make my eyes bug out. But kinship terms can tell you a lot about how a culture is put together. And what assumptions are being made an how people categorize relationships.

Shweta said:
Kinship terms (Oh yeeeaahhh)
I totally forgot the kinship term thing that does make my eyes bug out.
Blame the time, it's 3am here. Also it came up in chat so I thought I'd already posted about it.

There's an Australian language where, in order to talk about Person A to Person B, you have to know your relation to Person A, and also Person B's relation to them.
So if I was talking to my mother about her mother I'd use a term that meant [My grandmother, who is your mother]. Or something like that.

I'm really not sure how these people talk to strangers.

(I really hope this language isn't Guugu Yimithirr. There's already too much mind-boggling stuff about that one.)

Ok, one more. Just cause it did make my eyes bug out.

One of the more unusual kinship terms in the world is maili, from Njamal, an Australian aborigine language. The word maili means "any relative two generations distant", such as a father's father (two generations before) or a daughter's son's wife's sister (two generations after).

This is from what looks to be a rather cool constructed-language newsletter

Shweta said:
Evidentials
Oki. Evidentiality is the type of evidence you have for making a statement. If I say "Peter has a new hat", did I see the hat? Did Peter tell me he has a new hat? Did Molly tell me Diana says Peter has a new hat?

In English, I don't have to specify. I can talk about gossip the same way as I talk about my own direct experience. This is cause English lacks evidentials.

An evidential is a grammatical element that specifies evidentiality. In languages that have evidentials, you have to say, any time you make a statement, what your source is for that statement.

My advisor told me (heh, there's evidentiality) that there's an Eastern European country (she told me which one. I forget) where when televised news first appeared, nobody believed it. This is because all the newscasters, grammatically, had to report everything as "I heard that..."
...So they changed the language. So that newscasters -- and only newscasters -- could report the news with the "I saw..." evidential.

I wish I remember the language. Anyway, that made my eyes bug out a little. Imagine writing about speakers of a language where you have to do that. I think it'd be fun, for the length of a short story anyway.

Links!

A nice, fairly non-technical page on evidentials
The rather more technical Wikipedia page

And a cool map! Of where you find which evidentials

Shweta said:
Past and future
Unlike Whorf, I'm not going to talk about Hopi. (He thought Hopi speakers had no tense in their language and so no concept of time; it was later found that they used adverby things to put tense into their sentences)

That's me not talking about Hopi

So! We talk, gesture, and think about time in terms of space. The future is conceptualized as in front of us; it's somewhere we're going to. The past is behind us. We can either think of ourselves as moving (We're coming up on Christmas; we're rushing through the year) or as ourselves as static and time as moving (Christmas is coming; my deadline is getting closer).

But waitaminute! We have words like "before" (which can mean "earlier" or "in front of"). So we can't always talk/think of the past as behind us, right?
Wrong.
If objects are coming towards us, we English speakers think of them as facing us. So in front of them means something different from in front of us. So imagine the days of the week coming towards you. Monday comes first; it's in front of Tuesday. Monday's before Tuesday.
Evidence: We can never talk about an event as being before "us", only before other events. Also, if a meeting was supposed to be on Wednesday and it gets postponed, we can say it was pushed back.
After is analogous. (Comes from 'aft').

Every language that has ever been studied structures its understanding/expression of time this way. There have been claims to the contrary, but they always turn out to be like English before/after.
Every. Single. Language.
Except one.

Didja see that coming? Let me introduce you to Aymara, a language spoken in the Andean highlands. Its speakers have a word that means "eye", and also means "past". And I forget the exact word for future, but it means behind.

What's different is this. Aymara has no words for future that mean front. At all. And no words for past that mean back. And if I remember right, they explain that the past is in front 'cause you can see it.

But maybe that's just the language, right?
Nope.
When we talk about the future, we're likely to gesture in front of us. There are these mindbogglingly cool video clips of Aymara speakers. There's one where someone's saying something that translates to "Long ago, looong ago" and gesturing out in front of 'em. Another one talking about knowledge handed from their ancestors to them, with the gesture reaching out in front of the speaker, and then coming in to her chest. These are just great.

Can it be used in fiction? Already has, I'm afraid. Terry Pratchett's trolls think of the past as in front of them, because they can see it. I swear, the man's precognitive.
But I'm not sure his trolls gesture.

Shweta said:
More on Australian languages
I'm tellin' ya, Australian languages are seriously cool.

Aboriginal Australians are celebrated for their use of linguistic devices to mark the subtleties of social situation and relationship. Three sorts of phenomenon are widely reported (see Capell 1962; Dixon 1972: 19): (1) special vocabulary is often associated with male initiation (see, for example, Hale 1971); (2) there is often extensive word tabooing, usually involving strict prohibition on names of deceased people, as well as on words that sound like such names (for examples of such practices across Cape York Peninsula, see Roth 1903); and (3) many societies have so-called "Mother-in-law" languages -- special vocabularies that replace all or part of the normal lexicon in speech between kin who stand in certain avoidance relationships to one another. Prototypically across the continent, a man must avoid his own mother-in-law.
From Guugu Yimidhirr brother-in-law language. Haviland (1979)

Does this not make you boggle? It makes me boggle. Each one of those "widely reported" phenomena could probably turn into a story so weird editors wouldn't believe in them.

Guugu Yimithirr
We've already met Guugu Yimithirr. It's an absolute direction language spoken in Australia. (Hope Vale, Queensland, for people who go "uh, Australia's big, girl")
But that's not all! As suggested above, Guugu Yimithirr has a special way for you to talk to your brother-in-law.

The summary is that in order to talk to certain people who are taboo, you have to use respectful ("fanciful", "higher") words. But don't just trust me; the article is well-worth reading in full. It has such weirdnesses as:

If a man was unavoidably in his mother-in-law's presence, he would sit silently, guugu-mul, with head bowed.

But he could talk to his father-in-law or brother-in-law so long as he spoke respectfully, using the special words.

[Brother-in-law] words are called guugu dhabul 'forbidden words'; dhabul is also the term to describe tabooed sites (e.g. graves) and, significantly, kin one must avoid. The style is also described as dani-manaarnaya 'being soft/slow'; one must speak to one's brother-in-law, father-in-law, etc., with respect -- which is to say, slowly and softly. ... [one also has to speak] 'sideways', or 'crosswise', neither facing his interlocutor, nor, if he can help it, addressing him directly...

...Dude. (I only just found out about this. My husband pointed me at it. It's cool!)

Arrernte
So here's a language from the Alice Springs area. Studied by David Wilkins. My source for this is here. Speakers often speak, sign, and draw in sand, all together. They also gesture a lot, and apparently sometimes the meaning of their sentences depends on the gestures that go with them. I'm not sure how this is ddifferent from their signing.

Wilkins says: Sometimes you can see Arrernte people silently telling stories to their children just by drawing in the sand and/or signing.

Wilkins talks about a woman who had a stroke, and got Broca's Aphasia, which leaves you (at least temporarily) unabe to talk in sentences. She was still able to sign and do sand drawings, though -- with her left hand. It was the right side of her body (left side of her brain) that was affected, and so unlike many Broca's aphasics, she could communicate before she ever started talking again.

So the reason this one makes me boggle is that I wanted to make up a language in which people talk and sign together; but apparently it's been done

Shweta said:
And then there's always Piraha
Annd finally, the language that's been making linguists' jaws drop lately. It's spoken in the Brazilian rainforest.

I don't know much about Piraha. Just what I've seen going by, here and here. I'll summarize that (you may have seen it all before, but still, it is to boggle).

So apparently Piraha has barely any distinctive sounds (phonemes). Female speakers have seven consonants and three vowels; males have more consonant.
Females and males pronounce some of these phonemes differently.

They may not have recursive sentence structure. Like, if I wanted to say "After this, I'm going to sleep" I can't. I have to say something like "I do this. I go to sleep."

They've got either no numbers, or just 1/2/many. The words might mean "small size or amount," "large size or amount" and "cause to come together," as Daniel Everett, the guy who studied the language, claims.
They have trouble with tasks that involve counting above three. They couldn't learn to, either. (They couldn't learn to read, either. When they figured out what the reading thing was about, it bothered them).

No abstract color words either, other than terms for light and dark. They say things like "blood-like", which they might well be making up on the spot (this isn't clear to me).

Not very many kinship terms. quote: "They tend to refer, for example, to a grandparent by the individual's name rather than as a parent of a parent."

So these guys. According to Everett, they have no art. They have no stories. No creation myths. They only have two tenses, and these refer to whether or not something's under the speaker's control/experience. Everett says that -- From the villagers' perspective, talking should concern only knowledge based on one's personal, immediate experience. No Piraha refers to abstract concepts or to distant places and times.

(Quotes are from the first link).

Annnd possibly the weirdest one of all: the language can be whistled. Or hummed. Or played on a musical instrument. And it's still understandable.

Watch me boggle.
Also, watch me point and laugh at Noam Chomsky. "Universal Grammar that, sucka!"

Shwebb said:
Shweta, I'm so glad you started this thread.

You've opened my mind up to many story possibilities. It's wonderful to think that we have "alien" minds, culturally speaking, right in front of us.

I'm looking forward to your posting more, here!

Thanks!

Shweta said:
Thanks, Shwebb
It's good to know I haven't just wandered off into stuff nobody else cares about; that I'm not just talking to myself. Though, it's good lit review for me too, I suppose...

Peggy said:
I just wanted to let you know that I'm finding your posts really interesting. I hope you have the time to keep sharing information with us!

Shweta said:
Yay!
I will, though it might be sporadic just now; my WIP is kind of telling me how to fix it.
If I do wander off into stuff nobody cares about, please tell me! Then I'll wander back to something else.
Or, y'know, ask me things.

RedMolly said:
This is so, so awesome. Thanks for sharing this information with us--this is fantastic fodder for stories (not to mention just kinda cool to know).

Are you an anthropology student? Linguistics? Just wondering...

Whups. Entirely missed this. Molly: I'm in Linguistics. My undergrad degree is in art and cognitive science.

RedMolly said:
OK, I have a question about mother-in-law languages (love that term, BTW). In these societies, is a man unlikely to live near his mother-in-law, thus not often forced into these avoidance situations, or does he see her all the time? And is there any similar prohibition between women and their fathers-in-law?

Thanks!

Bartholomew said:
Shweta, I figured you'd find this interesting.

I've found that different languages make you think differently.

When I'm reading and conversing in German, I'm more straightforward and less inclined to speak with my tongue in my cheek.

Spanish--the exact opposite, and I tend to get angrier quicker.

And then, English-- Normal old me.

Strange, I thought.

Shweta said:
He doesn't live near her in the Guugu Yimithir. The wife lives with the husband, and in fact can talk just fine to her mother-in-law; and has to be respectful to FIL but can talk to him.

They historically married geographically or genealogically distant people, where possible. Now they're all in one area, but they try to avoid their MILs. But apparently that practice, and the respect-language, is falling into disuse now. Now meaning the 70s; it's probably gone by 2006.

(And, it's more complicated. They have "MIL" relationships with people other than their literal MILs, and such.)

Shweta said:
Ok, so.
My next topics:
Color/vision
Offloading cognition
Semantic frames and framing

Shweta · Jul 2, 2006

Color conversation

Kind of.
A little imperfection in the where-to-cut-posts-off heuristic here. I am left with a few more posts before the actual color stuff.

DamaNegra said:
Wow!! What an interesting thread!! Just adding my two cents:

I'm a trilingual, I speak French, Spanish and English, although my French is not yet fluent (yet).

I've found that I think differently when I'm in English or in Spanish, and sometimes thinking in one language helps me understand a concept better than in another language. Although I speak spanish in everyday life, my english is perfect, and I feel that has helped my mind broaden more than it would have under just one language. The only thing I still have trouble with is the distinction between in and on, because Spanish doesn't have that distinction either. "in the car" would be "en el carro" and "on the car" would be "en el carro" too.

Shweta said:
Dama, spatial relations terms are some of the hardest things to get in any language. English, Spanish, Dutch, and some other geographically close (and in some cases related) languages have vastly different ways in which they cut up space.
They're work on that too, by Levinson and colleagues

And I should say, "bilinguals" in studies are generally balanced bilinguals. Which means, they've been learning both languages from an early age and are about equally fluent in both.

Shweta said:
Oh and Dama!
Have you read any Isabel Allende?

If you do, you should read her in both Spanish and English! And then tell us what you thought of it in both languages <grin>

Shweta said:
The question of color (teaser)
As I understand it...
Before the late 60s, there were two main views on how color names worked.

Subjectivist view:
Everyone's color experience is different. Everyone draws the boundaries between colors in different places, and everyone names a different set of colors if you ask them to name colors; and people argue about what's crimson and what's scarlet, and so forth.

Universalist view:
Colors are really just exactly all the same for everyone with normal color vision.

The question: Which view is right? Will we ever get any kind of consensus on what color "lavender" is? If not, is that true for all other colors?

To be answered some other time, in our next exciting episode of, shweta babbles randomly.
Or, y'know, whenever you guys say things.

Bartholomew said:
Real is subjective, entirely. As such, both views are correct.

Take me, for instance. My world is blue and yellow. Does that make my world incorrect? Am I the only one who sees the world this way?

If you ask me what color Scarlet is... well, I'd have to see a patch to tell you, but I garantee that its gray, blue or yellow.

Lavender is an ingriedient in my shampoo, as far as I'm concerned, and happens to be a sort of dim blue.

Does this make my perception incorrect? No. And even if I were the only person who sees this way, I would not need others to validate my viewpoint.

This is real to me, just as your view is real to you.

Shweta said:
No Bart, but the question is about normal color vision.
Which you don't have.
Nothing wrong with it, or incorrect about your perception, but the question is actually not about colorblindness -- though the answer does explain a lot about it.

Shweta said:
Also consider your statement "I garantee that its gray, blue or yellow."

Well, sure, but what are those? And how do you know to name them as such?

Bartholomew said:
Trial and Error

TheIt said:
Adding to the list of SF novels about communication: Hellspark by Janet Kagan. A group of scientists from radically different cultures are trying to determine whether an alien species is sentient based on whether or not the aliens have a language. Problem is, the scientists can barely communicate with each other, much less the aliens.

The talk about evidentiality made me think of it. One of the cultures in the novel had a language in which the speakers must indicate the level of accuracy in their statements. Trying to get one of them to lie nearly made him catatonic.

Shweta said:
ooooh, that sounds fun!
*adds it to the list*

DamaNegra said:
I've always wondered about this same thing. How can I guarantee that what you see as green, I see it as your red but we both call it green?? Um... am I getting my message across?? Like we both point to a color and say it's green, because we've been taught that color is green, but I see my green as your red, and you see your green as my purple. And what is black anyway?? The other night I spend almost 20 minutes staring into the dark, trying to decipher what black is. Still no luck.

Shwebb said:
Would someone please explain to me what "teal" is?!

And since color is supposed to be the absorption of light (and I know I'm really simplifying this to the point of sounding wrong) what effect would being able to see more infrared or ultraviolet have on color and perception?

Shweta said:
Dama, you ask a hard question

It's a popular one among philosophers. It's called (if I remember right) the color inversion problem, and is a subset of what they call the problem of other minds. Which is, basically, how can we know that anyone else has experiences? Maybe nobody else does! Maybe they're all zombies, just acting like they have experiences. And even if they did, how do we know they have the same experiences?
The answer is, we can never know. But we know enough to suggest that we mosly have similar experiences, because we all have very similar neural mechanisms that are presumably somehow causing those experiences. So it would be really strange if the exact same mechanism was causing arbitrarily different experiences in different people.

And eep, Shwebb, you ask the even harder questions

I'll try to answer that.

But, there shall be a delay on this till my brain starts working again. I had an allergy attack yesterday.

Shweta said:
Oh and, to answer the easier of Shwebb's questions --
Wikipedia says, "Teal is a bluish-green color, darker than cyan and hence more greenish-looking (compare the colors yellow and olive). This color gets its name from the wings of the common teal, a member of the duck family. "
And the color I wrote it in is teal according to this interface.

TheIT said:
For a good reference on color from an artistic standpoint, take a look at Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green by Michael Wilcox. It's got a simple yet scientific explanation about why things appear to be particular colors, and is very helpful if you're trying to predict what color you'll end up with if you mix paint together.

The simplified example is that a red apple looks red when seen in white light because pigment in the apple absorbs all other colors of the visible spectrum except red. The color you see is the color which gets reflected. You can only see something if light bounces off the object and returns to your eyes. Turn off the light and you see no color.

From a scientific standpoint, visible colors are measurable ranges of wavelengths. If you show two people light with the same wavelength and say "that's red", you'll have an absolute standard to measure against. Whether the two people perceive "red" in the same manner is another question entirely. Telepathy, anyone?

Shweta said:
So this is the physical basis of color. The psychophysical basis is more complex, but absolutely needs us to understand the physical. And the linguistic piggybacks on the psychophysical.

Linguistics is a lot easier for people who don't care about meaning

Medievalist said:
I'm slowly going mad looking at all the colors in pre-1600 that are identified as glas. Often, I can correlate it with another piece of information--an object that is said to be glas, a dye, a natural phenomenon.

But glas covers an enormous range of colors, and of effects of light -- transparent things are glas, for instance (hence our word glass), as are drops of water from a splash or rain.

Shweta said:
Med, have you considered emailing Eve Sweetser? She knows the historical stuff, the celtic stuff and the category structure stuff, and might be able to provide helpful insight.
Maybe the color story will help you figure it out, but if not I'd talk to Eve about it. She's not around right now, but if you email her in about 7-10 days...

Medievalist said:
Yeah, I've spoken with her about this. I presented on this a few years ago. Part of the problem is there isn't a corpus, which is how I got involved in digitizing medieval Celtic texts.

Shweta said:
Yay, Med

Though not yay that it's driving you up the wall.

So on the subject of research, I start wondering why I'm doing this instead of writing my dissertation. And then it occurs to me that this thread might spark stories, and thus be actually useful to someone, which the diss won't. Plus. there are 791 views on this thread, and that's probably a hundred times more readers than the diss will ever get

Life is odd that way.
Color, though, is still too daunting.

Pthom said:
Yes, you are oversimplifying.

Visible light occupies a very small region of the electromagnetic spectrum, from ultra-violet to infra-red. The human eye can not perceive light waves with frequencies beyond those extremes.

Let's first discuss how we see. Nerve endings in our retinas convert light radiation into electric signals, which are sent to our brains and there decoded into images we understand. Part of the retina detects motion, or changes in the amount of light striking it. The rest of the retina detects color. Humans see color more vividly than do most other animals, but other animals, such as cats, see motion much better than we do.

Before we talk about color, let's get black and white out of the way. Black is the definition we use for the absense of all light. A black cloth absorbs all light, reflects none, so there is nothing for our eyes to see. You can't see in a sealed room because there is no light at all (unless your cell phone rings and lights up) and therefore we "see" black.

White, on the other hand, is the word we use to define the presence of all visible light wavelengths at once. (Sunlight is almost white; it is a bit heavy in the yellow portion of the spectrum.)

Color is just one of the perceived phenomena of visible light. I'll assume we're all familiar with the way a prism can separate white light into a 'rainbow' of all of the colors. In fact, a rainbow is produced by sunlight being refracted by thousands of rain droplets.

We "see" because light is reflected from surfaces into our eyes. Certain materials reflect different wave lengths of the light spectrum. A red stop sign absorbs just about all wavelengths except red ones. A lawn absorbs red and reflects green. The sky appears blue because although the atmosphere allows all wave lengths to pass through, it tends to scatter blue more, and we see those scattered waves.

As for the names of colors, I think it's like the names of anything else. We all agree that four-legged animal over there eating grass is a horse. And that that other one is a cow. Etc. The horse never changes into a house or a tree. The horse is always a horse, and looks just the same to everyone who sees it. We all agree it has one toe per foot, a long hairy tail and is usefull for pulling plows through dirt.

Similarly, we agree that the sky is the same color (whatever it is) day after day. Generally. When there is a sunset, it changes. But tomorrow, it will be that same shade of ... oh, what's the name? Bleah? Blurg? Blau? Sure. You pick one. Whatever you pick, I'll be able to use that word to tell you tomorrow that the sky is blau. Still.

And so the grass is gruen. No, it's green, dummy. Well, it's the same as the leaf on that not horse, right? You mean tree? Yeah. Same color. Gruen. Oh, well over here, we say "green".

Bartholomew said:
Colors are interesting in that they are names for things perceivable by only one organ.

Why do we not have similar words for smells, I wonder? Everything is given either a general name, "Pungent," or "Weak," -- or else a specific name in terms to what it relates to - "The scent of soap."

But I can't direct your attention to a scent, say, "Brawp" and have you know what that scent is.

Sure, I mean, I could just say, "I smell Skunk."

But I could also say, "I see leafs."

The effect isn't changed at all, insofar as I can tell. The difference is that you've isolated a visual concept to the point where you can identify it and talk about it in abstract terms.

But you can't do the same thing with your other senses, outside of using generic terms that are relate to the objects they come from-- not from a sensory, abstract identifier.

Shweta said:
Haha, and I shall answer! this question

The answer lies in the fact that in some ways we're better at making distinctions of scent than of color.
Send me happy vibes. Once my lungs work, I swear to anything you want, I'll splain what we currently know about vision. And color.

Pthom said:
G'zmorth made a face as he placed his burr on the glarp. "Can't we find another place to farld?"

"What's wrong?" B'zillevlk said, smurling swikly. "The ooblie from here is yozzillis."

G'zmorth shifted. "This glarp is too krastik. Huarks my burr."
What's the matter with the above? It appears we have two beings in a casual situation doing something rather normal, but that the location picked by second being is uncomfortable to the first.

We write such scenes all the time. But we use words for actions and things that are familiar to our readers. To the contemporaries of G'zmorth and B'zillevlk, all is understandable (maybe). But it isn't to English speaking humans on Earth. We get a sense of what they are doing, but that's all. Most of us, I believe, would throw a book written like this across the room after reading less than a page.

In the following, I use commonly understood terms for the actions and things. And instantly we know what's going on.

George made a face as he placed his rear on the log. "Can't we find another place to sit?"

"What's wrong?" Betty said, smiling sweetly. "The view from here is fabulous."

George shifted. "This log is too rough. Hurts my butt."I also changed the names to ordinary human names, but I didn't need to do that, other than my original names alone are reason enough to toss the thing.

Why do we call a fallen tree trunk "log?" Why do we sit and not farld? B'zillevlk's (Betty's) smurl is a smile and swik means sweet, and so forth, but without the translation, we're hoplessly lost. Oh, because the syntax and grammar and even the actions of the characters are familiar (even I can't make up completely alien aliens), we might be able to work out the plot eventually. But who wants to work that hard for entertainment?

We agree that a leaf is a leaf because those who've gone before us agreed it is a leaf and those who went before them before them before them named it "leaf." And the trunk of the tree becomes log when it's on the ground for the same reasons. In fact all these words are the way they are for that very reason. Otherwise we might still be grunting and pointing at stuff.

Might not be a bad idea, come to think of it. At least we wouldn't have to worry if there's enough money in the account to fill up the SUV.

Shweta · Jul 2, 2006

The Color Story

Shweta said:
The Color Story
But for now I'll start to tell a story. It's called the Color story, and all the cognitive science kids at Berkeley learn it. Because it's a triumph of interdisciplinary science, and it happened at Berkeley, mua ha.

So going back to Sapir and Whorf, in the late 60s, people thought color naming was totally arbitrary. They figured this by getting people to name colors, and then showing them little color tiles (a standard set) and asking them which tiles were that color. So they'd ask Dutch speakers which tiles were rood, or rose, or blau. (red/pink/blue) and so forth. And they'd get color names, and different sets of color tiles picked, for each person they asked.

Then Brent Berlin, who was in Berkeley's Anthro department (but later got chased out by postmodernists or something), and Paul Kay, who was in Berkeley's Linguistics department (and is still one of our Emeritus professors; crotchety and gruff and a wonderful person to argue with) did some field work.

They wandered off (well, sent grad students off, I guess) to investigate speakers of different languages. They used chips from a more elaborate color chart, shown here:

And they asked a different question, in two different ways.

Firstly, they didn't ask for all the color terms in the language. They asked for only Basic Color Terms.
Basic Color Terms are color terms in a language that fulfill these criteria:
1) They are monomorphemic; that is, their name has only one "chunk" of meaning in it. So blue is ok, but green-blue and light blue are not.
2) They are in common use in the language. So mauve or puce -- not okay. (Assume a 5-year-old would know them.)
3) They are general color terms. So blond isn't okay, because it's only used to describe hair and wood.
4) Their primary meaning should be the color. So silver isn't okay, because its primary meaning is the metal. Orange is iffy in English; maybe its primary meaning is the fruit. It's unambiguously a basic color term in Dutch, where the fruit is called sinaasappel and the color is oranje.

Secondly, they asked people to pick the best example of each color. Not all examples.

And lo and behold, they started seeing a lot of similarity between what people picked, both within a language, and cross-linguistically. People might disagree about where boundaries were, but they agreed about the best examples, to a large extent.

Bear in mind, we are still talking about people with normal color vision, here.

Shweta said:
Basic Color Terms
Of course, not all languages have the same basic color terms.

But they're pretty restricted. One of the things Berlin and Kay found was that languages have between 2 and 12 basic color terms and (not entirely surprisingly) there's a correlation between the technological level of a culture and the number of basic color terms in the language. (At higher tech levels you have more colors being used distinctively, and more objects distinguished only by their colors. The implications for SF should be pretty clear, I think).

If a language has two basic color terms, one covers light and warm colors, and one covers dark and cool colors. The Dani are one such group, and we'll come back to the Dani, and Eleanor Rosch's studies with them.

Note that this does not mean the people are unable to distinguish more colors. Or that they only have two color terms. These are just the general, abstract color terms they have.

If a language has has three basic color terms, they'll cover light colors, dark/cool colors, and red.
If it has four, they'll start being more recognizable to English speakers as something like black, white, red, and a cover term for green and blue (often called grue; this is a different sense of the word from both the philosopher's grue and the nethack beastie).
If it has five, you'll generally get black, white, red, yellow, and grue. There are (rare) cases where you get black, white, red, blue, and "grellow".
If it has six, you get black, white, red, yellow, green, blue.

After this you tend to get orange, grey, and purple; and then things like pink and brown. I think. But the order gets iffy here.

English has (arguably) eleven basic color terms:

Black
White
Grey
Red
(Orange)
Yellow
Green
Blue
Purple
Pink
Brown

Russian has one more; it distinguishes light and dark blue. English might be starting to get there, with the blue/cyan distinction becoming more common.

I hypothesize that higher tech future cultures may well have rather more than this.

Shweta said:
So to specify and reiterate, this is very clearly not the whole color inventory in any of these languages. Or even the whole basic color inventory for specialists speaking these languages (artists have a lot more terms, and as Pthom points out to me, people dealing with color lithography have been using Cyan as a basic term for a long time).

The tendencies I'm talking about are when the colors make it into general, common usage in the population at large.

Pthom said:
Perhaps, but I think that unless your future cultures can see in the infrared or ultraviolet (something Shwebb asked earlier), too many more names for basic colors will just become confusing. In physics, only five color names are used, really: red, yellow, green, blue and violet. And, of course, the terms for all colors: white, and the term for no color: black.

I've rearranged some threads here for easier reading.
Bart/Pthom's conversation:

Bartholomew said:
Sorry for being unclear.

I did mean colors, specifically.

said:
Not to worry, Bart. So did I. But things are named, colors included, through a similar process. In conversation with shweta, though, her emphasis here isn't how colors got named, but how, once named, individuals perceive them.

For everyone on Earth, there are names for just about everything. So, we're taught that stop signs are red, whether we can perceive the wavelength or not. (It helps that stop signs are octagonal.) We're taught that grass is green, the sky blue, school busses yellow.

And, I believe, that since human eyes work pretty much the same across the species, the way we perceive "slightly greenish dark brown" and call it raw umber, is so close to the same for everyone, that there is no arguement.

Gender stuff (mostly):

Peggy said:
This is interesting: Women may perceive color differently than men. I wonder if women use color terms differently than men.

Shweta said:
So at this point, Medievalist, I'm really curious: is glas a basic color term? And if so, what are the others in the language at the time?

Medievalist said:
Women do use color terms differently in English than men do. I think Lakoff did research on this, but I'm not sure Lakoff is considered reputable these days.

RedMolly said:
Shweta, I'm wondering about color terms for green. It seems to be one of those truisms (which might or mightn't be true) that the human eye can perceive more variations of green than any other color. Does this inform human color vocabulary at all? And how common is it for a language to use "natural" color terms such as silver, copper, azure (yech), pine, etc., instead of "pure" color terms?

(I'm also having fun thinking about how non-human or "talking animal" characters' different perceptions of color might affect their vocabularies...)

Shweta said:
Which Lakoff?
I don't think George has done any real field work. He talks about others' field work, but his own is mostly on gathered English data. And I didn't think Robin cared about color, though she does about gender differences...

They're both considered reputable or utterly not, depending on whether they're hurting the theories of the people you ask. George's political stuff is still good linguistics, though he has been oversimplifying his own theories lately, for a general audience. I happen to think this is a mistake, because a lot of people seem to be misunderstanding them based on Don't think of an Elephant. But a lot of people are at least hearing about them, so who knows.

As for the green thing (and this in response to Peggy too), I've heard that women have more sensitivity to green, and more types of green receptor. And often women will say that something's green when men think it's blue (when it's on the border). This might be because, evolutionarily, women were the gatherers and men the hunters?

One more post to molly:

Shweta said:
I think at least the female human eye can perceive more greens. And I'm not sure how common it is to use "natural" color terms rather than basic ones; any given "natural" term (like pine) is less common in English than, say, "green"; but there are far more of them. And I'm not sure how the Dani do it. Hell, I'm not even sure how the Spanish do it.
I think it also depends on context. Probably nobody's going to try and specify the exact hue of a green light, when all they're trying to say is "go already". But an artist might well make a zillion distinctions, because it matters whether you're talking about Indian yellow or gamboge. So in an art studio (anecdotally) I have seldom heard people talking about just plain "yellow".

The nonhuman thing could be really cool
If you do it can I see it?

Question/Clarification about basic colors vs colors:

Peggy said:
This puzzles me a bit. I would have thought that even primitive cultures would need terms to distinguish between colors in the natural world. Wouldn't they need to say things along the lines of "the blue bird is good to eat" or "the red-spotted mushrooms are poisonous" or "you can trade the green stones with the tribe over the hill for baskets" and the like? Or do they use more specific names for objects than us technological city-dwellers.

Shweta said:
Peggy -- they have more color terms. They just don't have more basic color terms, that is, terms that are only/primarily used to refer to color.

Less techie cultures also have far more elaborated and specific categories for objects in the natural worls. Probably they have names for those red-spotted mushrooms, and the green stones.

Peggy said:
That was the distinction I was missing. So, that would mean they would use more terms that refer to objects of a specific color - sort of like calling something "the color of the parrot", rather than "green"?

Shweta said:
I think so. Or even just "parrot", like we use "lavender" or "turquoise" or "violet".

Or like we'd say "parrot green", someone who has a "grue" term might say "parrot grue".

Shweta · Jul 2, 2006

More color story

And back to our regular interwoven schedule, again with some rearrangements for clarity:

Pthom said:
One thing Shwebb asked that I haven't seen adequately answered, is what happens when beings can see well into the infrared or ultra-violet. I think certain insects can see a ways into the ultra-violet and certain blossoms reflect different patterns in the ultra-violet than they do in so-called "visible" light. Seeing very far into the ultra-violet would be amazing, since that's the realm of x-rays and gamma rays. Seeing the other way, into and past the infra-red, you're able to see the beam sent out by your TV remote, garage door openers, the pool of light near the automatic door at the supermarket. Past that into longer wavelengths, it would be really tough to see at all, in our society for that's the realm of microwaves and radio waves.

But assuming that's the case, someone would come up with names for the reflected images (if there are any, since many of those waves can pass through solid matter).

Shweta said:
This is partly because I don't know. It'd depend on how it happened, and how it was wired, both at the retinal level and in primary visual cortex.
And the other reason I haven't tried to answer it yet is that I haven't talked at all about the retina and visual cortex and the weirdnesses we can get out of them, yet

TheIT said:
A higher tech society might have more names for colors simply because they have the chemistry or technology to create colors not easily found in nature. For an artist a lot of colors are named based on the chemicals used to make the paint, such as Zinc Yellow and Cadmium Yellow.

Shweta said:
Entirely in agreement, IT. I think it's the combination of being able to make more colors, and using them for various purposes. If all the purples I ever see are in flowers, I'm not going to need a term for "purple" that isn't a flower name. If, however, we start being able to make purple dye and it's used to mark royalty, I suddenly have a very culturally salient reason to have a special term for it. (Though it might still not be a general one, if the categories of use are only flowers and kings.)

I wonder if we'll start to come up with one-word terms for neon colors/fluorescents soon? And iridescent colors? I also wonder if words like "silver" and "gold" are starting to mean the color more than the metal, since we see a lot more of the color than the metal these days...

Peggy said:
Not about language, but about biology
Quote:
Originally Posted by Shweta
As for the green thing (and this in response to Peggy too), I've heard that women have more sensitivity to green, and more types of green receptor. And often women will say that something's green when men think it's blue (when it's on the border). This might be because, evolutionarily, women were the gatherers and men the hunters?

This is at least part of the physiological basis:
http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedai...lor_differ.php
Quote:
In the eye, cone cells can have three different photopigments. These are usually generalized as red, green, and blue, but their actual values are closer to yellowish green, green, and bluish violet. To avoid confusion, psychologists typically refer to them to long-, medium, and short-wavelength sensitive cones. Supposing we're looking at a yellowish-green thing, the long-wavelength cones are stimulated the most, the medium-wavelength cones are stimulated a bit, and the short-wavelength cones are not stimulated at all, and the appropriate signal is sent along the optic nerve to the brain, which then recognizes the color as "yellowish-green."

What the researchers were finding when they actually looked at the structure of the eye is that many women—perhaps over fifty percent—possessed a fourth photopigment.
More here: http://aris.ss.uci.edu/cogsci/person...meson/PICS.pdf
What is interesting is that a simple mutation that changes a single amino acid can change people's color perception. It's interesting to imagine an isolated human population that evolves different perception than the rest of Homo sapiens. I wonder if that would affect their language?

Zonk said:
And from Chemistry...
There was this girl back in one of my HS Chem classes. Dunno why she took the class really, she was an Arts student; maybe she just had to have one more class to fill out her hours.

She drove the Prof (a male) nuts with her color nomclementure. A positive Fehling's test wasn't just blue, it was Royal Blue or Cobalt; a Phosphorus flame was Pale Jade, etc.

She wasn't trying to be difficult, that was how she saw it; he was just trying to get her to use standard terminology. Their mutual frustration was fun to watch

Dang, that brought back memories...

Bartholomew said:
DRIVE BY POSTING!

To prove to Shweta that I still read this thread. =)

Medievalist said:
There are a number of I.E. languages that distinguish between green(s) of live /organic things and the green(s) of things that are not organic. Irish is one; Persian used to.

Shweta said:
Oooh Medievalist. What do the terms translate to, if anything?
*curious*

I'm still here! Just, housecleaning. I've decided that the apartment must be spotless. So I'll post more in a day or three.

Shweta · Jul 2, 2006

Stuff. I have no good categorization for these posts.

Just a couple posts here, then more Berlin & Kay

Shweta said:
Bouncing back to a previous topic...
I forgot about Mixtec.
Mixtec's spatial relations terms are all words for body parts.

Quoting from Brook Danielle Lillehaugen's MA thesis (which is actually about other languages):

"For example, lohoh can mean many things including 'face', 'top (of something e.g. a table)', 'face (of a watch)', 'front (of a house)', and the prepositions 'on', 'in front of', 'to' and 'from'. When presented out of context lohoh is usually defined by speakers as '(a person's) face'. 'Face' seems to be the most basic meaning of this term, and all the other meanings can be explained using 'face' as a semantic base."

Note that, like absolute direction terms, this isn't entirely foreign to English. We talk about the face of a watch, and the foot of a mountain, and so forth. But we don't do it exclusively, like the Chalcatongo Mixtec seem to.

An interesting thing here is that the top of a circular table would be the "face", but the top of a rectangular table would be "animal-back".
So if the book was on the table, the shape of the table would determine how you described that (as either face-table or animal-back table).

Diana Hignutt said:
That's interesting. This is probably far too anecdotal to count for much, but after my gender reassignment surgery, greens looked different to me. I noticed it leaving the hospital. At first I thought that maybe I hadn't noticed the colors of the traffic lights in Montreal, and maybe they were different, but when I returned home, the greens on the traffic signals looked different than they had. Now, I had been taking female hormones for about a year and a half before that, and some testosterone-blockers, but it wasn't until I only had the estrogen in me(i.e. and just the little bit of testosterone that my adrenal glands produced) that I noticed this change in color.

Shweta · Jul 2, 2006

More Color story

These posts lead from Berlin & Kay's anthropological linguistics, to Rosch's psychology.

Shweta said:
...Where was I?
Ok, yeah, Berlin and Kay.
They asked people about colors. Their work was really controversial, because there are two camps in anthropology/linguistics/psychology -- the people who say that everything is universal, and culture doesn't matter much, and the people who say that culture determines everything. And these findings went against both camps. There were apparently some universals across cultures, and a fair amount of cultural variation (e.g. in what basic colors languages actually had).

So if you google Berlin and Kay, you'll find people arguing against their "universalist" position, but if you search harder you'll also find people arguing against their "subjectivist" position. It's pretty weird.

Their position is consistent with the weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis -- that there are some things people share across the board, presumably because we have the same types of brain in the same types of body and interact with our environment in much the same way. But there are also linguistic/cultural differences.

So, do those affect thought?

Shweta said:
Rosch and the Dani
(Wouldn't that be a good, or at least strange, band name?)

I am going to simplify past at least two things just now. One is that for part of this work, Eleanor Rosch's name was Eleanor Rosch Heider (then she got divorced. Now it's confusing trying to find some of her really cool papers. This is a good example of why women in academia should never ever change their names). The other is that Rosch has done a lot of amazing work on concepts and categories, and why they don't work the way Aristotle thought. Maybe that's another good topic, but it's not -- exactly -- the current one.

The question
So you have these people, the Dani, who only have two basic color terms. One covers light and warm colors (mola, but let's call it light-warm), and one covers dark and cool colors (mili, but let's call it dark-cool).

Around 1968/69, Rosch went to Papua New Guinea with her then-husband and did field work on the Dani. (Note that this is right when Berlin and Kay were doing stuff too). I'm working almost entirely from memory on this one, by the way, because I can not find good online references, and I'm too lazy to go look up old class readers. Details might be slightly off.

The data
Identification: So the Dani have this one color term that covers black, blue, green, purple, and very dark red and brown. Right? You might expect that their best example of it would be something that's kind of like all of those. So, dark greeny-blue, perhaps.
It's not.
Their best examples for dark-cool are: black, and the same colors that English speakers would consider the best examples of "blue" and "green".
I cannot remember if Rosch did this with the Dani, if the World color survey did it independently. This kind of result crops up in all languages studied.

Memory task: She got a group of Americans and a group of Dani to do a recognition memory task. She'd show them a color chip from a set of 40 chips, and 30 seconds later they had to pick that color out of the full set.
The Americans made fewer errors, but both groups made the same types of errors. Statistical analysis showed that both groups had a similiar "color space".

Learning task: She taught two groups of Dani new color terms. She used simple monosyllabic words that they could pronounce easily, and both groups got the same set of words.
But they meant different things.
For group A, the words corresponded to colors that English has basic color terms for. (Like red, yellow, green, blue, purple...)
Group B's words corresponded to colors that English speakers might call, say, lavender, mauve, turquoise, yellow-green, and so forth.

Group A learned the words better than group B. The words were the same. But it was just easier to learn words for categories like red than categories like turquoise.

So in many ways, the Dani's understanding of color was not really different from the understanding that English speakers have. This is consistent with the more universalist stuff Berlin and Kay found -- for example, that languages the world over seem to develop basic terms for the same color categories.

Shweta said:
So this goes against Sapir-Whorf?
...It's not so simple as that.

That was Dani. Then there was Berinmo. Roberson and colleagues tried to repeat Rosch's experiments with the Berinmo speakers of Papua New Guinea, and got different results. It turns out there are interesting things that happen at boundaries, that Rosch didn't look at. More on that later.

But it's not so simple as that either.

Roberson et al also claimed that Berinmo's basic color terms were not like other languages' color terms. And indeed if you eyeball them they seem kinda different.

So then Paul Kay did some statistics with Terry Regier. They found that if you get rid of the very subjective "those look the same/different to me" judgements, you could see that the categories were statistically similar.

So where do we stand, here?

To quote a recent paper by Paul Kay and Terry Regier:
The ‘linguistic relativity’ versus ‘linguistic universals’ debate in the color domain has revolved around two questions, often insufficiently distinguished.
1. Do the languages of the world lexically carve up the color space largely arbitrarily?
2. Where color-naming differences among languages occur, do they correlate with corresponding differences in memory, learning, and discrimination of colors?
A committed relativist wants the answers to be Yes and Yes; a committed universalist wants the answers to be No and No. In our view, currently available evidence points strongly toward the answers No and Yes, providing aid and comfort to neither extreme position.

Shweta said:
On the boundaries.
So suppose I show you three color chips.

One's a slightly greenish blue, one's a slightly bluish green.
The third is also blue but it's much more greenish than the first.

I ask you which two are more alike. You're probably going to lump the two blue ones together. Experiments show that you're likely to do this even if #3 is closer to #2 in psychological "color space".

But a speaker of Berinmo, who has only one basic color term to cover all these chips, will lump #2 with #3.

So you do get effects of thought on language. They're just subtle, in the case of color.

It gets weirder.
So okay, language (and categorical thinking) affects what we see, slightly. Big deal. Right? But apparently language only affects half of what we see in this way.

According to Gilbert, Regier, Kay, and Ivry, language affects the right half of our visual field, but not the left half so much. Now the right half is processed by the left side of the brain, and that's the side that is most involved in language processing.

So what?
Mostly I think this is just another way in which the language your protags speak might affect, and even skew, their perception and the way in which they think about things.
And it really really makes me wonder what happens if we technologically or magically affect the mechanisms of vision.

So while a couple people have already explained the mechanism some, I think that's where I'll go next. More into the brains side of the mind/brain/language thing, but I think it's rich fodder for stories.

TheIT said:
Interesting about the experiments with color chips. I wonder if the researchers would get different responses if they tested artists or people who understand how to mix colors together.

New topic: Are you familiar with the Star Trek: TNG episode "Darmok"? The Federation could never communicate with this alien culture until one of the alien captains took matters into his own hands and forced Picard to learn. The aliens communicated by reference using historical and fictional incidents to convey ideas. For example, in our culture "Juliet on her balcony" would be a reference to romance, but if you didn't know who Juliet was or why she was up on the balcony you'd be lost.

I like the episode (mostly because of Patrick Stewart and Paul Winfield's acting) and I find the aliens intriguing, yet the more I think about it, the more I have difficulty suspending my disbelief. If the aliens spoke only by reference to stories and history, then how did they teach their young the original references? Couldn't they apply the same techniques to teaching the Federation people? Any thoughts?

Shweta said:
Differences with artists:
Well so, I'm a painter. And I had the exact same results as other English speakers. It's only one data point, but I found it interesting, and if it had anything whatesoever to do with my research, I would totally test different populations of English speakers.

And um :blush: I don't watch Star Trek. I never have. I don't own a TV. Never have. So I'm clueless...
But from what you've said, yeah, I would have trouble suspending disbelief. Maybe it'd work for abstract concepts (and we do it too -- consider the use of 9/11 to mean all sorts of related things now in American English), but I have trouble figuring out how any species would ever evolve not to understand concrete concepts in terms of everyday experience. Or how they'd understand abstract concepts without... abstracting. Or how they could write fiction if it always had to reference other fiction to communicate anything.

Though they could maybe have a formal language that was poetic and referential, and a lower-status informal language that was more concrete, I guess. And then use the formal language with the high-status aliens...
There are Earth cultures that have special languages for particular situations.

Annnd I think that's all of it.
Ooof.
Anyone still with me?

RedMolly · Jul 2, 2006

Well, aren't *you* prepared in the event of disaster!

Thanks--this thread was a great reference and I was sorry to think we'd lost it.

Shweta · Jul 2, 2006

I was a girl guide

Actually, I learned what to do the last time the site was down. And I'm glad I did, because I was going into a panic thinking I had to either redo this entire thing or lose it.

...And you can betcha this page is saved, now.

Shweta · Jul 26, 2006

Arright. I should really go in and make this prettier, but for now, perhaps adding some content would be a good idea.

I should talk about the visual system, because magical systems could totally take advantage of it. So could VR systems and such, I guess; and if you have aliens with different visual systems, that'll affect things majorly.

I was also going to talk about offloading cognition, which is way fun and also relevant. I have forgotten if there was other stuff.

And mirror neurons and canonical neurons should come up too, I think. That's stuff.

Shweta · Jul 26, 2006

Basic color terms, summary and questions

Overview:

So, we left with the question (maybe) of why do people have the same set of basic color terms across multiple languages. We have wide variance in other color terms. And yet, if we restrict our studies to color terms which:

1) are monomorphemic (a single meaning-element)
2) are in common use
3) are in general use
4) Primarily refer to a color, not an object in the world

Then cool things happen. There are only twelve of these found across all languages. English has:
Black, White, Red, (Orange), Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Brown, Pink, Grey.
Russian has two terms for English's "blue"; one covers "light-blue". Presumably something like cyan.

If we know how many such terms a language has, we can predict with a high degree of accuracy what they are. That is, what area of color space the categories cover, and where their best-examples are.

And while categories like scarlet and vermillion and alizarin crimson* have some overlap, the basic color categories pretty much don't. A color can be red and scarlet at the same time, but it can't be green and blue (and people get into arguments about whether it is green or blue, sometimes).

Furthermore, in (I think) all studied cases, if a language has six basic color terms, they are more or less equivalent to English Black, White, Red, Yellow, Green, Blue.
And not, say, Pink, Brown, Grey, Purple, Yellow, and Grey. Even though those are all basic color terms too. (Ok, I reused yellow, whatcha gonna do about it?)

And then there's the psychological data, with the Dani and such.

The question:
So... why? Why are there these weird correspondences across languages and cutures?

More data:
Because more data is always good

You've all seen afterimages, right? If not, look at this for a half minute or so, keeping your eyes in one place, then look at a blank white space. You should see one.
Why do you see those colors?**

Also, let's consider color-blindness. Up till now, I've been talking about normal color vision.
But there are two types of color-blindness (and color-insensitivity) that affect the way we see red and green, and one that affects the way we see blue and yellow. (I'm not sure if anyone only sees in black and white; it's theoretically possible, I guess, if they have all three types of color blindness at once, but they'd also have lots of trouble with fine distinctions).
Why those three types?
Why is there no color-blindness that affects how people see red and yellow, but not green and blue? Or purple and blue, but not the warm colors?

All these questions have a unified answer, more or less.

* I love alizarin crimson, while this is totally off-topic, I must share.

** For more visual illusions, do go look at these:

http://www.brl.ntt.co.jp/IllusionForum/basics/visual/index-e.html
http://www.gla.ac.uk/philosophy/CSPE/illusions/illusions.html
http://dragon.uml.edu/psych/illusion.html

Shweta · Jul 27, 2006

The retina

The physical structure of the retina is really cool, and described here.
There's too much for me to go into, and most of it isn't really all that useful for us as writers, I think.

So, to bounce to the bit I want to talk about: there are two types of retinal light receptor. Rods, which pick up light really well but don't pick up color, and cones, which are sensitive to red, green, or blue light.

...Well, not quite. It's true that there are cones that are most sensitive to light in the ranges we call red, green, and blue. But they all have a range of sensitivity to light. That is, the so-called "blue" ones will respond to light at other wavelengths, just not as strongly. Here's a nice graph of the sensitivity:

And here is more of an explanation than I'm going to give you

So the important thing to note is that if you look at the responses of all three cones, any given wavelength has a unique response. This means we can tell any of these colors apart from the responses of all three types of cone together, if we do some calculation.

So okay, what's the calculation, and how does the brain do it?

Opponent Process cells

Brains don't get calculators. Any "calculation" they do involves neurons connecting to other neurons, and either activating or inhibiting them. (I hope this isn't confusing to anyone, but if it is, I can go into it more)

Now, cone cells have connections to opponent process cells, also in the retina (I think). There are six types of opponent process cell.
Two of them are Black/White. Two are Red/Green. And two are Blue/Yellow.
Notice the six basic color terms above?

So what do these guys do?

Okay, let's look at the black/white opponent process cells first. They're the easy ones.

1) White-on-Black-off (or White+/Black-): This type of cell has connections from all three type of cone in that part of the retina. It is activated when all of them are active, and thus giving it input.
So if there's white light coming in, that means light of many different frequencies. it's going to activate all three types of cone, and they feed into this cell and it gets activated.

If you like electronics, think of this as an AND gate. It sums the responses from these different types of cell.

2) Black+/White- is the opposite type. It's normally activated, but it gets inhibitory connections from all three types of cone. So when they're active (when there's light coming in, so that part of the retina isn't looking at blackness), it stops being active.

Then the others.

3) Red+/Green- cells have connections from the "red" (long-wavelength) and "green" (medium-wavelength) cones. But they're different types of connections.
The connection from the long-wavelength cones activates it.
The connection from the medium-wavelength cones inhibits it.
So it's active when it's getting input from long-wavelength cones -- unless it is also getting input from the medium-wavelength cones. At which point it goes "nup, not red" and shuts up.

If you like electronics, this is a neurally-instantiated XOR, of sorts.

4) Green+/Red- cells do the exact opposite.

...So both these guys are responding to the difference between how much red there is coming in, and how much green.

5) Blue+/Yellow- cells are like this, too. They have a connection to the short-wavelength ("blue") cones, which activates them. And a connection to the yellow cones which inhibits them.

Okay, if you were paying attention you just went "wait, what? Yellow cones?"
Cause there aren't any

But if you look at the yellow range in the picture above, you'll see that it's where both the "red" and "green" cones are pretty active. So the retina gets yellow by summing red and green.

Which is to say, the Blue+/Yellow- cells are inhibited by both "red" and "green" cones.
Which is a good reason not to call them red and green cones. Long and medium cones.

6) Yellow+/Blue- -- again, the opposite. These guys are activated by both long and medium cones, and inhibited by the short ones.

Here's a schematic of the opponent process cells:

Le voila. You have cells which respond really really well to these six colors. And yeah, the maximum responses map to our "best" examples of black/white/red/yellow/green/blue.

And that is why Berlin and Kay found all these similarities across cultures. We all have pretty much the same brains.

Shweta · Jul 27, 2006

Afterimages and color blindness

So, here we have explanations for the other two bits of data I brought up before, as well.

Colorblindness

People who have colorblindness lack one (or more) of the cone cells.

If you lack the long-wavelength cone cells your red-green opponent cells are only getting half the information they need. So you end up with red-green colorblindness.

If you lack the medium-wavelength cone cells, ditto. You end up with slightly different red-green colorblindness (different because these interact with the other cones differently, I think).

If you lack the short-wavelength cones, you get blue-yellow colorblindness. The blue/yellow opponent cells have not enough information.

And if you lack more than one type of cone ... well... you get more confusion with the opponent-process cells.

This is why color-blindness hits color pairs, not single color ranges. Basically, you can't see blue without being able to see yellow too.

Infra-red vision?
People asked, earlier, what would happen if we could detect infra-red light. What that would be like.
Now I can answer. Kinda.

I think it would have to do with how the cones were connected to the opponent-process cells. If they were wired up like the long-wavelength cones, we'd just have a wider range of things we'd see as red.

If they were wired up differently, I don't really know.

Afterimages

We need two more bits of information to figure this out.
1) If we look at mid-tone grey, all the opponent process cells are kinda active; but none of them win out over the others. The brain is sensitive to differences between these guys, not just their absolute activation rate.

2) Neurons get tired if you make them be really active for a long time.

So suppose you're making one bit of your retina look at bright green for a minute (as you do if you look at a picture with bright green in it, and you son't move your eyes). What happens?

The green+/red- opponent process cells are really active. They're firing like crazy.
The red+/green- opponent process cells are all inhibited. The cones are going "hey you, shut up."

Then you stop. You look at a blank wall.
They don't go back to their normal equilibrium immediately.

The green+/red- cells are all "Ooog I'm tired." And they are less active than normal.
The red+/green- cells are all "Yay! Freedom!" and they are (I think) more active than normal.

So you see red.

And that concludes this evening's pulling rabbits out of hats.

Shweta · Jul 27, 2006

Ok, sure, but we're writers, so what?

Well, I think that what your character sees is going to tell the reader a lot. So it's nice to know some of how it works

And I think that in general this is the kind of thing that sparks ideas in writerly heads.

But beyond that, I think this helps answer some specific questions:

1) What if you changed a person's color vision? How would it work out?
2) Can I just give my (alien) characters totally different visual systems and have them refer to the same colors?
3) Can my characters have totally different basic colors?

Also, it raises a bunch of other questions. I'm sure there are techy-modification or alien-species questions, and if anyone has 'em I'll try to answer. But I think in terms of fantasy more, so...

I think having spells or other magical things be visually funky is really cool; and they can be convincingly so if they, for example, are noticeable to one part of the visual system and not others. So maybe spells are only ever red/green.

I could see people having to stare at a blank wall to see magically, because the sensation is so faint it gets hidden if we're looking at the real environment and our retinal cells are all firing like crazy.

Or perhaps being in a magical state paints everything blue to your eyes, but then afterwards you have magical aftereffects and everything looks jaundiced yellow.

I have other ideas on this theme, but they involve more of the visual system. Which I might get to at some point.

And okay, on that note, I must quote this:

Under normal circumstances, there is no hue one could describe as a mixture of opponent hues; that is, as a hue looking "redgreen" or "yellowblue". However, in 1983 Crane and Piantanida carried out an experiment proving that, under special viewing conditions involving the use of an eye tracker, it is apparently possible to override the opponency mechanisms and, for a moment, get some people to perceive novel colors:

"[s]ome observers indicated that although they were aware that what they were viewing was a color (that is, the field was not achromatic), they were unable to name or describe the color. One of these observers was an artist with a large color vocabulary. Other observers of the novel hues described the first stimulus as a reddish-green."

Why yes, I do like wikipedia. For this kind of thing.

Good night. Do please please let me know if you're reading this thing. I feel very weirdly like I'm talking to myself here.

Soyarma · Jul 27, 2006

Forgive me if some of the things I mention here have already been discussed. I skimmed a bit reading through all of this. I do a lot of graphical design and page layout for websites so I am often thinking about colors and what looks proper.

I've taken colorblindness tests (as I couldn't do this if I were) and found that I have perfect color preception. Though upon reading this it probably means I have perfect preception for a 3 cone person. My wife has always seen a lot of things as blue that I see as purple and some tests showed that she had a bit of color blindness. Now I wonder if she has a 4th set of cones instead and actually does just see more blue than I do.

All of that aside I've just finished reading Jennifer Fallon's Second Sun Trilogy where the people live in a binary system with a red star that shines at night and a yellow star that shines during the day.

I found myself wondering if their eyes would adjust to percieve less red just as it may be that our eyes have adjusted to percieve less yellow. What would a person with earth normal vision see if they came there, etc...

Also as you explained above Shweta, in low light our cones are less receptive and so we see things with less color. I've had it explained to me as the cones are basically shutting off in low light and we see only with our rods (thus in black and white). It makes for interesting supposition about how people would see in low light worlds. Would they use more garish colors for things and what would visitors see, or what would their exports look like?

Shweta · Jul 27, 2006

Interesting questions, Soyarma

Let's see if I can answer them now.

Soyarma said:
I do a lot of graphical design and page layout for websites so I am often thinking about colors and what looks proper.

And web colors are extra-hard because different monitors make them look different, of course. I do wonder if that will eventually affect our language significantly; we can't assume (right or wrong) that other people are seeing the same colors as us any more.
Probably though, the overal population will just ignore it unless it causes problems.

I've taken colorblindness tests (as I couldn't do this if I were) and found that I have perfect color preception. Though upon reading this it probably means I have perfect preception for a 3 cone person. My wife has always seen a lot of things as blue that I see as purple and some tests showed that she had a bit of color blindness. Now I wonder if she has a 4th set of cones instead and actually does just see more blue than I do.

If I remember right, what's going on with purple is that towards the short end of the spectrum, the "long" cones are actually smewhat activated. So are the "short" ones, and purple is what you get when those are both activated and the medium ones are not. So the Blue+/Yellow- opponent process cells are active, and so are the Red+/Green- cells.

So your wife's difference can't be explained by a greater range of "blue" cones. It might be explicable by a greater range of "green" (medium) cones, I guess -- if those were active as well as the "red" ones, they'd cancel out and she would probably see slightly greyish blue.

And women are known to have a wider range of medium cones than men. This the age-old spousal argument of whether that shirt is actually green or blue.

It might also be (And I think it most likely) that her long-wavelength cones just aren't picking up on the very short wavelengths, so she doesn't see purple. That would be minor color insensitivity.

If she sees a color circle, does she see a line between the red and blue? Or do they shade easily into one another for her?

All of that aside I've just finished reading Jennifer Fallon's Second Sun Trilogy where the people live in a binary system with a red star that shines at night and a yellow star that shines during the day.

I found myself wondering if their eyes would adjust to percieve less red just as it may be that our eyes have adjusted to percieve less yellow. What would a person with earth normal vision see if they came there, etc...

Our eyes do adjust to different lighting conditions. That's why we're often surprised by photographs; they come out yellow, or they're darker than we expect, or entirely washed out... well, that's because that's what the light actually was where we took the picture, but our eyes compensated for it. You know how, when you go from an artificially-lit room to bright sunlight, it's blinding for a moment -- but soon you can't even really tell? and it's not just that the sunlight is brighter; it is much less yellow-tinted than most artificial lights. But we don't notice, most of the time.

We do the same with light of other hues too. You can walk into a room all lit with red light, and soon enough you're compensating and stop even noticing it.
I'm afraid I don't remember the mechanism. It is probably a mixture of some opponent process cells becoming tired out, and the visual cortex paying less attention to them cause they're always firing.

So! Yes, the characters would almost certainly be compensating for the different light. I wonder if their rods (which are the most functional in low light) would be more red-sensitive than ours, too. Assuming the red star is dim.

Also as you explained above Shweta, in low light our cones are less receptive and so we see things with less color. It makes for interesting supposition about how people would see in low light worlds. Would they use more garish colors for things and what would visitors see, or what would their exports look like?

It's not so much that the cones are shutting off as that there's just not enough light for them to react to. But... apparently in true darkness, when we're really dark-adapted (which never happens in cities at this point) our cones change their structure and become more sensitive. So you do get *some* vision with cones.

This is important because the fovea, the part of the retina that light falls on from what you're actually looking directly at, is much more sensitive to detail. And it's mostly cones. Without the cones you can only really see blurs. (This is also why you can only see dim stars by not looking directly at them -- you foveate elsewhere and your rods pick them up).

Anyway, it'd depend on the world and the species. Have these people had time to evolve to compensate for the low light? If so they might have fairly good color vision. Or none at all if it's not adaptive; most polar critters are just white or black, aren't they? And a low-light world is likely to be hot.

Of course, if they have the tech to make artificial light, all bets are off. Depends on the light they can make.
Exports, again, depend on tech level. If they're using native materials, in a cold place that's likely to be black and white fur, or dark wood -- in our world it's only in warm places that the natural world is bright and colorful. It takes a lot of sunlight, and a lot of life, in an ecosystem before colors become adaptive.

So I think I'm saying that the visual system isn't going to be what determines this, but other factors of the low-light environment. And in general I think that's an important world-building note -- we have to take into account not only how factors like light affect human perception/cognition, but also how they affect the environment as a whole.

Hope that's helpful

Saanen · Jul 27, 2006

Going back briefly to the impossibility of a "reddish-green" color, I've got tomatoes in my garden that are just beginning to turn from green to red. It makes a strangely distinctive color that I've always thought of as "reddish-green."

This is a truly fascinating thread! I'm glad it's back; I missed it the first time around as my computer was down for a few agonizing months after I moved.

Shweta · Jul 30, 2006

Huh, Saanen, I know that color

I think reddish-green is a pretty good description for it, too. Apples don't turn that color, they have straks of red and straks of green, but the way tomatoes change...
yeah.

But if we saw that color in isolation, I bet we'd call it brown. It's partly that we know it's going from green to red, isn't it?

Minds, Brains, Language, and Writing, take 2

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