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Ancestral state reconstructions on consensus tree. Haynie HJ, Bowern C (2016) Phylogenetic approach to the evolution of color term systems. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 113(48):13666-13671. link
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Biology, meet
philology: First application of phylogenetic evolutionary framework to color
naming
I have been an art teacher for ten years, and always took
notice of what happened to the box of colored pencils in my classroom. In
September, it had all the colors, and as the year went on, a distinct pattern
would emerge. The red pencils were always the first to go, and by the end of
the year, the only things left were brown, orange, yellow. It always made me
wonder if we each had our own subjective color preferences, or if we were
hardwired for some over others.
So, I’m very excited to read this article on color
evolution. This has been a recurring topic on Network Address, the companion blog to Limbic Signal. This work in particular looks at the way that
color-names enter or drop-out of a language. In the image above, we see that
everyone has names for the black and white, and red comes next. After that,
green and yellow vie to be in our mouths. The authors explain that there tends
to be names first for things that are maximally distinct. Hence black and white
first. Why does red come next? There’s plenty of reasons, some simple, some
confusing, but we know that in just about every culture, every situation, red
comes next – or first, depending on whether you consider black and white as
colors.
I will take a contradictory stance to something one of
the study authors states. Prof. Claire Bowern says, “humans aren't very good at
smelling (compared to hearing or seeing), so it's not surprising that we don't
have a lot of smell-based vocabulary.”
Actually, that's not the reason. Instead, we don't have
names for smells because the language-parts and the smell-parts of our brains
are so separate, and because of reasons that took me an entire book to
enumerate. (See Hidden
Scents.)
Later on, however, she drops a shiny gem while making a
point about the lifelike behaviors of the language of color:
"It's uncontroversial that language changes; it's
also uncontroversial that languages aren't organisms. The point is that from
Darwin on, language and biology have had a long history of cross-pollination
and co-inspiration."
This is one of the most beautiful discoveries I came
across in working on Hidden Scents, which is that the very concept of
evolution, of natural selection, developed by Darwin, was based on the taxonomy
of languages across the world. Language may not be alive, but our cultures are,
and for some of us, we can say that by extension the products of those cultures
are also alive. Regardless, it is hard to deny the influence that such
potentially ‘inorganic entities’ have on our concepts of all things organic. In
other words, we assigned what we now know as the process of biological
evolution to language before we understood it regarding living organisms.
I’m just going to requote this whole section from my
other blog, it’s good stuff so why not:
Darwin:
“It may be worthwhile to illustrate this view of
classification, by taking the case of languages. If we possessed a perfect
pedigree of mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would
afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout
the world... The various degrees of difference in the languages from the same stock,
would have to be expressed by groups subordinate to groups; but the proper or
even only possible arrangement would still be genealogical…”
Darwin, C. R. 1859. On the origin of species by means of
natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for
life. London: John Murray. [1st edition]
[page] 422 CLASSIFICATION. CHAP. XIII. [link]
via Steven Pinker - The Genius of Charles Darwin: The Uncut Interviews. BBC, 2008
POST SCRIPT
Cultural Evolution
of Basic Color Terms
Seeing Red
Color-Brained
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