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(Image: Gary Parker/Getty)

Christine Kenneally, contributor




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Gladstone's work may be little-read now, but his musings on colour kicked off one of the most fascinating and fractious debates in the psychological sciences: does the language you speak affect the way you see the world? If, for instance, you have no word for violet, can you actually perceive that colour? What if your language obliges you to specify the compass direction of an object every time you mention it; does that mean you'll always know where north is?

In Through The Language Glass - a book so robustly researched and wonderfully told that it is hard to put down - Guy Deutscher traces the pendulum swing of scientific opinion on this issue, focusing mostly on the story of colour.

Deutscher, an honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester, UK, and author of The Unfolding of Language, brings together more than a century's worth of captivating characters, incidents and experiments that illuminate the relationship between words and mind.

These include a massive 1875 train crash in Sweden that led to the discovery of the phenomenon now called colour blindness, and a significant 1898 trip taken by the experimental psychologist William Rivers. He was investigating colour terms used by islanders in the Torres Strait, between Australia and New Guinea, and his study was the first of many to show just how differently languages can "talk about" colour.

Some languages, for instance, will only definitively identify black, white and red. Such findings have led in just the last few years to clever experiments that show how colour words can speed up recognition of those shades.

Deutscher makes a convincing case for the influence of language on thought, and in doing so he reveals as much about the way colour words shape our perception as about the way that scientific dogma and fashion can blind us.

Book information:
Through the Language Glass: How words colour your world by Guy Deutscher
Published by William Heinemann
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Though this book seems psychologically interesting, well-researched, and insightful, I cannot help but cringe at the thought that the author would have neglected to note that Homer is traditionally considered to have been blind and thus would have had some small trouble in describing colors both vividly and accurately.


I almost fell on the floor laughing at myself. I was so intrigued with the hypothesis that I failed to note such an obvious curiosity concerning the work. Thank you, Mr Schmid.


Homer's sea - at times 'wine-coloured' and friendly, at other times 'scrotum-shrivelling' and terrible. But then, what do we know about the colour of wine in Homer's times? Maybe it was 'seawater-coloured'?


Colour blindness discovered in 1875? Certainly not. It was recognized almost a century earlier. Red green colour blindness is also known as Daltonism (in Italian you say that someone is "daltonico"). John Dalton (as in atoms) descibed the phenomenon in 1798 in an essay called" "Extraordinary facts relating to the vision of colours, with observation" (Mem Literary Philos Soc Manchester 5: 28-45, 1798).

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