Does what you say affect what you see?
We consider how your words may affect your eyes.
Some time ago our astronomer, prompted by our photographer, pointed out that what you see in a scene depends on why you’re looking at it. If you’re going to take a photograph, make a drawing, or write a description you’ll notice different things. It’s at the same time almost obvious, and actually startling when you carry out the experiment.
If you’re writing a description or making a color drawing you’ll notice things like the blue sky and the green grass. Supposing you have to translate into one of the languages most familiar to us, the words present no problems: “azul” and “bleu,” “verde” and “vert” in Spanish and French respectively. But translating into Russian you have to choose between sinii and goluboy, dark blue and light blue, for the sky. Russian has no simple word for light-or-dark-blue. Of course it has complicated words for the idea, as every language has; otherwise even writing this post would be impossible. But a modified or combined color is not what people think in. It’s the same as, in English, we have no simple word for either-blue-or-green-or-both. We have “turquoise” and “cyan,” but both mean a mixture, and we would use neither for something obviously blue or green.
The Gaels, however, have such a word. In Scottish Gaelic, gorm can be applied to an obviously blue object, as well as healthy grass. Meahwhile, red is split up: dearg covers scarlet to orange, while ruadh is a more reddish-brown. And there are shades (and hues) of gray.
Our astronomer has been trained to think in terms of the scientific spectrum, a continuum in which certain sections may be called by various names, and a specific color means a restricted wavelength. Sodium glows brightest in a double-emission we see as orange, oxygen in certain nebulae prefers green, hydrogen in many places red. Our photographer is used to one-third of the visible spectrum each being blue, green and red (and their absence from white light being, respectively, yellow, magenta and cyan). It’s the photographer’s understanding that leads to the strange picture at the beginning of this post: color made up of separate blue, green and red images. (This is explained in more detail in his essay on color photography.)
Our astronomer and photographer could not decide whether a Gael could have produced a color picture like this one, at least while thinking in Gaelic. But they asked a question that is, to us, fascinating. Of course when looking at a scene and thinking to describe it in words, you’d think differently in English, Russian and Gaelic. But if you were only taking pictures, only using the visual centers of your brain, would the language you use affect what you see? We can’t really answer the question by looking at English, Russian and Gaelic photographers; they vary too much in other ways, there are schools and tendencies in each country that have nothing to do with language, and many are so uncooperative as to photograph in black-and-white. But it would be a fascinating experiment to find a trilingual photographer and set out on three separate monolingual expeditions.
