On whether languages reflect the characteristics of their speakers, he writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nMany a dinner table conversation is embellished by such vignettes, for few subjects lend themselves more readily to disquisition than the character of different languages and their speakers. And yet should these lofty observations be carried away from the conviviality of the dining room to the chill of the study, they would quickly collapse like a souffl\u00e9 of airy anecdote-at best amusing and meaningless, at worst bigoted and absurd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
— p. 2<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The basic argument of the book is this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The effects that have emerged from recent research, however, are far more down to earth. They are to do with the habits of mind that language can instill on the ground level of thought: on memory, attention, perception, and associations. And while these effects may be less wild than those flaunted in the past, we shall see that some of them are no less striking for all that.<\/mark><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nI think it is correct, but that the subtitle of the book \u2013 Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages \u2013 is a bit of an exaggeration. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/span>C1-5: <Reprise of history and status of color terms> <\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\nC1: Naming the Rainbow<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This chapter reprises now-unknown work by William Gladstone (now remembered as an English prime minister) on Homer and his writings, and focuses in on particular on one chapter in Gladstone’s monumental 3,000 page work: a chapter on Homer’s use of color terms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nGladstone’s scrutiny of the Iliad and the Odyssey revealed that there is something awry about Homer’s descriptions of color, and the conclusions Gladstone draws from his discovery are so radical and so bewildering that his contemporaries are entirely unable to digest them and largely dismiss them out of hand. But before long, Gladstone’s conundrum will launch a thousand ships of learning, have a profound effect on the development of at least three academic disciplines, and trigger a war over the control of language between nature and culture that after 150 years shows no sign of abating.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Gladstone notes that Homer uses color terms in odd ways — the famous “wine dark sea” (really “wine-looking” sea) being just one example. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mostly Homer, as well as other Greek authors of the period, use color very little in their descriptions: mostly they use black or white; terms for colors are used infrequently and inconsistently. For example, the only other use of “wine-looking” is to describe the color of oxen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nGladstone’s fourth point is the vast predominance of the “most crude and elemental forms of color”-black and white-over every other. He counts that Homer uses the adjective melas (black) about 170 times in the poems, and this does not even include instances of the corresponding verb “to grow black,” as when the sea is described as “black-ening beneath the ripple of the West Wind that is newly risen.” Words meaning “white” appear around 100 times. In contrast to this abun-dance, the word eruthros (red) appears thirteen times, xanthos (yellow) is hardly found ten times, ioeis (violet) six times, and other colors even less often.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n