Colors

Name some colors in the English language…

Red, Pink, Maroon, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet, Purple, White, Black, Brown, Grey, Tan, Biege.

We even have ways of describing colors that we don’t have specific words for like “red-orange.” But some languages don’t have words for all of these colors… they categorize them differently. Does this affect their perspective on these colors? Do they see them the same way we do as English speakers? Probably not. Colors DEFINITELY don’t hold the same sociolinguistic (cultural) meaning in other cultures as they do in American culture.

For example, White in English generally means pure, good, etc., whereas black generally means bad, evil, death. However, in the Chinese culture, White symbolizes death. Don’t T.P. a Chinese person’s house btw…

Anyway- in the English language we differentiate red and pink but not so much dark blue and light blue. Does this give us a different perspective on the color red and its spectrum? I think so. We see all shades of blue as “blue” but we don’t see all shades of red as “red.”

There is a hypothesis called the SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS which says that Language determines how we see the world. One study by Benjamin Whorf was on the Hopi language where “he determined that they have no tense in their language, and, therefore, must have a different sense of time.”

(For more of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis See: http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/cultural/language/whorf.html)


So if this is true… does our language affect our perspective of color? If it does then does it affect our perspective of nature? God? Life? Many critics argue that even if you don’t have a word for a color… you can still see and comprehend that color, and because of this language doesn’t necessarily “determine” your perspective. But I believe that it has a great influence on our perspective and how limited we are in defining things… Once again... we have the “illusion of comprehension.”


-Alisyn <3