Basic color terms
Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution is a book by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. Berlin and Kay's work proposed that the basic color terms in a culture, such as black, brown, or red, are predictable by the number of color terms the culture has. All cultures have terms for black/dark and white/bright. If a culture has three color terms, the third is red. If a culture has four, it has either yellow or green.
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- Add to that the idea that some cultures have fewer color terms than others. This actually impacts upon their perception of color.
Check out "Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution" by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay.
- An in-depth analysis of basic color terms across languages:
https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Color-Terms-Universality-Evolut...
(Noting that different languages do have differing numbers of basic color terms.)
- See also:
> Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (1969; ISBN 1-57586-162-3) is a book by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. Berlin and Kay's work proposed that the basic color terms in a culture, such as black, brown, or red, are predictable by the number of color terms the culture has. All cultures have terms for black/dark and white/bright. If a culture has three color terms, the third is red. If a culture has four, it has either yellow or green.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms
And:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...> Berlin and Kay also found that, in languages with fewer than the maximum eleven color categories, the colors followed a specific evolutionary pattern. This pattern is as follows: > > All languages contain terms for black and white. > If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red. > If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both). > If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow. > If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue. > If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown. > If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains terms for purple, pink, orange or gray. - Some fellows named Berlin and Kay put forward a colour term development hypothesis/theory:
> Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (1969; ISBN 1-57586-162-3) is a book by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. Berlin and Kay's work proposed that the basic color terms in a culture, such as black, brown, or red, are predictable by the number of color terms the culture has. All cultures have terms for black/dark and white/bright. If a culture has three color terms, the third is red. If a culture has four, it has either yellow or green.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue–green_distinction_in_lang...
- Ahh, I see the source of the confusion. Finnish is a Nordic language, but not a Scandinavian language.
If someone wants to appreciate differences in color perception, is it better to learn Scottish Gaelic or read Berlin and Kay's "Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution" or similar works since 1969? See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_of_blue_and_green_i... for the differences in blue and green across many different languages.
This is why I argue that if the goal is to "think and reason differently" then learning a new language should not be high on the list. Instead, learning a new language has a side effect of thinking and reasoning differently, but so do many other topics. I believe there are easier ways achieve that goal than learning a new language.
Your 'key' example is resolved in Swedish with a special term for his/her own X. Compare "Han öppnade dörren med sin nyckel" (He opened the door with his own key) with "Han öppnade dörren med hans nyckel" (He opened the door with some other male's key.)
GEB is also all about recursion. I remember in my own learning how tough it was to understand recursion and induction. I consider that a mode of thought.
There's also the essay in GEB about the difficulties of language translation, such as the street name in Crime and Punishment. He goes into several pages about the different aspects of that translation. I consider that an aspect of the same mode of thought you are talking about. Further, in "Metamagical Themas" he covers aspects of gender neutrality in Chinese. Reading his essays seems much easier than learning Finnish.
I'm not arguing against your conclusion, which is that "Learning _and internalising_ a construct in a non-native language gives you a new way to think about things and expands your mental toolkit" but against the implication that learning a new way to think is one of the reasons to learn a new language. I think that's poor advice given other methods to learn new ways of thinking.
Further, languages are not equal. The Swedish mode of thought is very similar to English, so you might end up after a couple of years of study with only a few small insights that could have been more easily learned by reading a linguistics textbook.
- Yes, the book described in this Wikipedia article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Unive...
(which I read years ago) makes a case for a language-universal gradation of color terms in the spectrum of visible light, with some languages having few of the terms, and some languages having more, and some languages having quite a few. (In the languages I know best, English has more color terms than Chinese, but Russian has more than English.)
