Reddit reviews Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

Following along with this comment, I strongly recommend the book Through the Language Glass. He is also one of the sources for the Radiolab episode you mentioned.

In the text Deutscher goes into detail on why, as /u/edXcitizen87539319 mentions, the whole idea that Homer couldn't see blue is very, very wrong. He suggests that the common trend in the development of color words (red, ochre, green, violet, yellow, blue) is more likely due to linguistic interaction between the groups of interest, and the simple fact that some colors are more important to specify (red can mean fire, or poisonous, and so on, while before the invention of dyes blue was really only useful for the sky and the water). There are also counter-examples of tribes in Africa and the Americas that followed a completely different order of color word development.

However, Deutscher goes on to describe some of the experiments that do show a connection between a society and its language. For example, languages with more speakers tend to have less grammatical complexity (this is a statement backed up by statistics performed on linguistic databases). Also, if a language makes a distinction (such as the light blue/dark blue distinction) native speakers are often faster to make that distinction in practice (such as separating slightly different shades of blue napkins quickly).

It is a very interesting topic of research, but, as is often the case when comparing different cultures, interpretations of the data are often prone to extremes when reality is typically quite mundane.

I am positive I read something very similar to that quote in "Though the language glass", a book I read just last year. Wether that is the origin of that quote or if the author was, in turn, quoting somebody else I don't know.

I picked that example because it is bluer than the traffic lights I'm used to in the US. Japanese speakers historically treated the English equivalents of blue and green as shades of the same color ao, but with language shift midori came to be seen as its own color "green" distinct from ao, roughly equivalent to blue. According to the book Through the Language Glass, Japanese traffic lights were imported from the US in the 1930s before the linguistic shift and so were called ao even though they were just as green as American traffic lights. In 1973 after the shift, the lights were still called ao and the Japanese government decided to make the traffic lights as blue as possible while still following international guidelines.

An important point: just because blue and green were treated as shades of the same color, it doesn't mean Japanese speakers couldn't tell the difference. English speakers are perfectly capable of distinguishing light blue and dark blue even though they fall under the same term "blue", while Russian speakers treat light blue and dark blue as independent colors.

I don't have an answer for you, but your question reminded me a book I heard about a while ago. I think it's this one. Seems like the book talks about this issue in the context of colors and direction words. It might be a place to start or have an appendix with some recommended reading.

Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher is about if and how our perception of the world depends on our language and whether languages are more influenced by nature or culture. Blew my mind quite a few times.
It's easily one of my favourite non-fiction books.

Try this book called Through the Language Glass http://www.amazon.com/Through-Language-Glass-Different-Languages/dp/0312610491

Interesting how they interpret this 'green/blue' test differently, I'm having trouble finding the actual paper for the study.

Some people seem to think its that we simple didn't perceive blue, the radio lab article was based on stuff from through the language glass so its not like we actual didn't 'see' blue, its just that it didn't show up enough in experience to warrant a word to be created for it, in the Namibian tribe they studied, there were many many different words for green in their language though, and they found that even though we see them all the same colour, the Namibians could differentiate about 12 different shades as if they were completely different colours.

Interesting book, and sort of shows that how we perceive the world changes with how we communicate.

Google it, then read this book.

> should be Colours/Colors are

Yay sloppy editing.

We view the world through the lens of the language in which we speak. Words are simply symbols of ideas which each language deals with differently depending on history and heritage. Some examples of untranslatable words from other languages

This is an interesting book about language shaping thought.