wanderlust

When a name for a colour is absent from a language, it is usually blue. When name for a colour is indefinite, it is usually green. Ancient Hebrew, Welsh, Vietnamese and until recently, Japanese, lack a word for blue….the Icelandic word for blue and black is the same, one word that fits sea, lava and raven.

It is shown that the words for colours enter evolving languages in this order, nearly universally: black, white and red, then yellow and green ( in either order), with green covering blue until blue comes in to itself. Once blue is acquired, it eclipses green. Once named, blue pushes green into a less definite version. Green confusion is manifest in turquoise, the is-it-blue-or-is-it-green colour. Despite the complexities of colour names even in the same language, we somehow make sense of another person’s references. We know colour as a perceptual ‘truth’ that we imply and share without its direct experience, like feeling pain in a phantom limb or in another person’s body. Within every colour lies a story, and stories are the binding agent of culture.

ellen meloy, the anthropology of turquoise

Among the Thaayorre of the northern coast of Australia, there is no word for ‘left’ or ‘right’; instead all orientation is done according to compass points, so that you might tell someone, ‘Your southeast shoe is untied’. What’s more, in the Thaayorre language, the way to say ‘hello’ translates as ‘Which way are you going?’ and the proper response is along the lines of ‘West-northeast, in the middle distance,’ so that if you don’t know which way you’re pointed, you can’t even get past hello.

lera boroditsky, how does our language shape the way we think

Mars was a stoplight in the north sky, the only real meat on the night’s black bones, and I said: Mars, why be parsimonious? You’ve got a million tricks stashed in your orbital back hills; chicory suns bobbing in viridian lagoons; quasars dwindling near the speed of light; pinwheel, dumbbell, and impacted galaxies; epileptic nuclei a mile long; vampiric moons; dicotyledon suns; whorling dustbowls of umbilical snow; and milky ways that, on the slant, look like freshly fed pythons.

diane ackerman

In the Inuit language family, orientation to places is a very exacting and constantly practiced science; where English has here and there, the Inuit system has fully eighty words, and there is no way to say simply ‘there‘ without specifying who it’s there relative to; whether it’s up, down, or over there; whether the shape of there is roundish or longish; and how the thing that’s there is or isn’t moving.

nathanael bonnell, some notes on cartography and storytelling

Sometimes someone grinds ink, mixes it with water, arranges paper, takes up a brush to record our time, our days, and we are given another life in those words.

guy gavriel kay