Color naming controversy

Theory of color vision before the turn of the 20th century.

Gladstone Theory

General Provisions

Odysseus sails the sea on a raft of amphorae. Skifos from the collection of the Ashmola Museum , IV c. BC er

Gladstone's observations on the perception and use of colors in Homer were presented by him in the appropriate chapter III of the volume “ Studies on Homer and Homeric Age ” (“ Studies on Homer and his age” , hereinafter referred to as “ Studies ”). According to them, the vocabulary of Homer, used to describe the colors (“the winery of the sea”), was very limited, and its epithets related to color, for the modern reader, sound very strange. Gladstone makes the following basic observations about Homer's poems ^[1] :

• Their color language is poor;
• The same word is used to designate objects of various colors;
• To indicate the color of the same objects, completely different epithets are used ;
• The coarsest colors prevail, mostly black and white, and there is a tendency to reduce all the others to shades of these two;
• Color characteristics in the descriptions are much less common.

To prove these points, Gladstone wrote down all the adjectives related to color used by Homer and analyzed all the situations in which they were used. These adjectives he found the 8 basic colors: λευκός white , μέλᾱς black , ξανθός yellow , ἐρῠθρός red , πορθυρεoς purple , κυάνεος indigo (dark blue) and two words without direct equivalent - φοῖνιξ (apparently a synonym for magenta) and πολιός ^{[2 ]} . Another 13 words were revealed for color epithets.

As a result of this analysis, he concludes that“The organ of color and his impressions were only partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age” ^[3] . In response to the theory of evolution of Darwin and Lamarck , in the article “ The color sense ” (1877), Gladstone develops his theory with the concept of “sight training”, according to which, like artists, the eyes “train” during training, this happens on a historical scale peoples ^[4] .

Criticism and evaluation

Despite the fact that the poverty of the color descriptions of ancient authors was noted by Joseph Scaliger in 1577, and in the XVIII century philologist Friedrich Döhring ^[5] and the writer Johann Goethe spoke about it, conclusions about the peculiarities of the ancient perception were not drawn from this ^[6] . Disagreements between color epithets, including the famous “vine-colored sea”, philologists preferred to give other explanations: from the bizarre color reflections of light at dusk or dawn and the presence of red algae in water, to the peculiarities of the figurative thinking of the author ^[7] . It was also suggested that some wines of the southern regions may have a blue color ^[8] . The Scottish philologist author of a similar work on Homer of Gladstone, found in 1866 color metaphors in the Iliad quite natural, and all claims to them were far-fetched ^[9] .

According to the modern ethnolinguist Nancy Hickerson, Gladstone's “Studies” were the first work in her science. Numerous historical reviews on the theme of color perception debates and its connection with linguistics have traditionally indicated Gladstone as the discoverer of this topic. At the same time, various authors describe Gladstone's own views on this subject in different ways. According to American psychologist (1910), they can be described as biological determinism , other researchers believe that he was an early representative of culturalism in linguistics, and gave a new impetus to in the context of the hypothesis of linguistic relativity Brent Berlin and saw in Gladstone a forerunner of evolutionism. Some scholars, such as the English ethnolinguist (1901), generally denied any influence of Gladstone beyond the limits of literary comments ^[10] .

A detailed analysis of the views of Gladstone is contained in the work of Guy Deutscher (2011). A number of provisions Deutscher criticized the English linguist .

Controversy in Germany

Gladstone’s book and Darwin’s theory made a deep impression on German linguists. August Schleicher, in the book Die Die Darwinische Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft (1863), writes that “what Darwin established for animal and plant species also applies, at least in his most important features, to language” ^[11] . The report of the German linguist Lazar Geiger “ Ueber den Farbensinn der Urzeit und seine Entwicklung ” at a conference in Frankfurt am Main in September 1867 is considered the beginning of a new direction in linguistics , “linguistic archeology”. In 1871, this report was published in German. The purpose of his research, Geiger set the definition of whether there is a history of human perception, whether it developed in the course of evolution . Based on the analysis of a large number of languages, Geiger developed the Gladstone hypothesis, giving it an evolutionary character. He noted that in many ancient texts there is no mention of blue color , and in the oldest of them there is no green one . In his main work “ Ursprung und Entwicklung der menschliehen Sprache und Vernunft ” (1868–1872), he notes that neither in the Vedas , thousands of lines of which are devoted to events in heaven, nor in the Bible , where the sky is mentioned 430 times, he did not find indications its color In the older Rigveda there is no mention of the green color. In even more ancient literature there is no yellow, and in the most ancient - red. According to him, the development of the human mind can be traced through the history of a language, and the universal law is the order in which the words appear in languages ​​to designate colors in the order of the spectrum ^{[12] [13]} . According to Geiger, the absence of a word for blue means the inability to see it and, thus, a small number of words to designate the color of “primitive” peoples means their psychological underdevelopment ^[14] .

In 1877, the German ophthalmologist, Hugo Magnus, published the work “ Die geschichtliche Entwickelung des Farbensinnes ” based on the ideas of Lazarus Geiger. Wondering how primitive peoples, whose high sensitivity of hearing and smell and visual acuity are well known, may not distinguish between certain colors, Magnus suggested that there is a difference between the elemental sensitivity of an organ and its more advanced functions, such as distinguishing colors or melodies. According to him, these functions are acquired in the course of evolution. To assess color perception, he decided to abandon the traditional color nomenclature, as a result of later evolutionary acquisitions, instead introducing a color scale according to their color intensity. Red, orange, and yellow were assigned to high-intensity colors, green to low-intensity, and blue and purple to low. Magnus also postulated four stages of color perception evolution: at first people perceived only red color - in his opinion it was the color with the most energy , then the retina gained the ability to distinguish orange from red, since these two colors did not seem to be equally bright. At the third stage, colors of medium brightness began to stand out, primarily green, since the eye was able to distinguish them from darkness and light green and dark yellow colors. At the last stage, low-intensity colors emerged from the general perception of darkness. In his next work, Die Entwickelung des Farbensinnes , he clarified his theory. The oldest opposition "red / white - dark" was associated with the era of the Rig Veda , the selection of yellow dates back to the time of Homer . The fact that the third stage in the days of Homer has not yet been completed explains the frequent confusion of green and blue colors with this author. Here, Magnus drew attention to the message of the traveler Adolf Bastian about the confusion with the blue and green flowers in the inhabitants of Burma . In conclusion, Magnus suggests that the evolution of human vision will continue, and in the future the colors of the ultraviolet part of the spectrum will become available for direct perception ^{[15] [comm. 1]} .

Doubts that such evolutionary changes could occur in such a short time, expressed many German scientists. In a number of articles from 1877–1878, the well-known biologist expressed his disagreement, noting that color vision appeared in insects and lower vertebrates . Accordingly, its absence is unlikely in even the lowest human races. In the preface to the German translation of the book about the color vision of the English popularizer of science Grant Allen (1879), Krause blamed Magnus for misunderstanding Darwin's theory . Krause also reported this discussion directly to Charles Darwin, who was interested in this issue. Magnus rejected this criticism ( Farben und Schöpfung , 1877), refusing to recognize the equivalence of animal and human vision, insisting that his theory does not contradict Darwin's teachings. In this interpretation, Krause agreed with him, recognizing as true the idea of ​​the appearance of color concepts in the language in accordance with the color spectrum . Allen himself also spoke out against the evolutionary theory of color. His two main arguments were as follows: first, in his opinion, the sense of color existed long before the Iliad and the Book of Genesis , which is confirmed archaeologically; secondly, survey reports of wild tribes from Asia , Africa , America and the Pacific Islands indicate the absolute identity of the perceptions of their representatives with all other people. Criticizing the one-sided philological approach of Gladstone, Geiger and Magnus, Allen argued that the perception of all people a priori should be the same, and more careful research should make it completely obvious ^[17] . According to Allen, color terminology develops when the need arises to distinguish between objects, otherwise indistinguishable. The availability of dyes leads to an abstract concept of color, and obtaining a blue dye is extremely difficult ^[18] .

Other scholars who took part in the discussion about color include , Rudolf Hochegger , Hermann Kohn , and others ^[19] .

Field Research

Without responding to Allen’s criticism, Magnus decided to go to a field test of his assumptions. The original method was tested by him together with his students from the University of Breslau . In the 1877–1878 academic year, the Leipzig ethnologist Edward Pöchuel-Lesche suggested that he should start a large-scale project with the support of the Leipzig. Magnus contacted Swedish physiologist Alaric Holmgren , who had experience with Sami color blindness research, to consult. Then more than 60 color questionnaires were made for all 5 continents inhabited by people. The questionnaire included the following colors: white, black, red, green, yellow, brown, purple , orange, and gray. Primitive tribes that had little interaction with civilized humanity were examined. Among them were the tribes of Challam, Sioux , , Maca, in North America ; Tambukki, , Fingu, , Damar , Fulbe , Mandingo, Crobo in Africa ; Toda , , Badaga , Telugu , Batta and Olon in Asia , as well as the peoples of Australia and Europe . After analyzing the data, Magnus was forced to admit that the lack of a precise term for color does not mean that there is no corresponding perceptive ability. However, the material collected made it possible to make several important observations, for example, that some peoples do not have an abstract concept of color, which is regarded as a property of the surface or material of an object. Without abandoning his theory of the physiological evolution of vision, Magnus refined it, suggesting that, under the influence of external conditions, certain aspects of the color sense were better learned. As a supporting example, he considered the case of an African tribe of kuffirs , who have 31 words to designate flowers, mostly related to livestock, while blue and green are combined in one word ^[20] .

A new theory at the beginning of the 20th century was proposed by the English anthropologist on the basis of observations of the Egyptian peasants, the Papuans of the Torres Strait Islands, native speakers of the , and Toda in India . In the languages ​​of the Papuans, he found both an early stage with the selection of only white, black and red colors, and advanced with a distinction between green and blue. Rivers also found a complete lack of color nomenclature in several languages ​​- instead of indicating the color, people said that some object was similar to some other ^[21] . At the same time, Rivers was a supporter of the theory of lower color sensitivity to the color of primitive tribes, and linked it precisely with their primitiveness and the color of their skin: “Murray islander differs from Englishman in two important aspects: he is more primitive and more pigmented, and his insensitivity to blue color may be a result of his primitiveness, or his pigmentation . ” According to (1910), Rivers' opinion was quite reasonable, since the phenomenon he observed could be due to the fact that the mechanism of action of the retina is associated with pigmentation, and the macula of the retina is colored by itself ^[22] . At the same time, however, the theory of color vision , including about different types of cones (1892), has already been sufficiently developed.

• Psychology of color perception
  • The phenomenon of blue or white dress
• Color name

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