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by glenngillen
2340 days ago
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I put together a image to try and explain the difference: http://a.gln.io/blue.png There's 16 different shades, or colours, there. If I was to point to any one of them individually and ask my young children what colour it was they'd almost certainly say "blue". And I'd understand them fine and consider it correct. Likewise if they were explaining something they saw during the day and said it was "blue" I might make an assumption about which of these shades it was, but I intuitively know it could have been any of them. And most of the time the distinction isn't that important for understanding and sharing experience. When the distinction is important my kids would probably simply say "light blue" or "dark blue". Additional adjectives will get used to clarify the relative difference between the colours. Soon they'll learn "sky blue", "baby blue", "navy blue". Then teal, turquoise, aqua, cyan, cerulean, etc. Assuming the language has those words. That only occurs when the need to distinguish is common enough to established a shared understanding across a large enough group of people that they effectively reach a consensus that it's now a thing, like English speakers did a few hundred years ago with the introduction of the colour orange. Nobody invented a new colour, we started using a new word to describe something that had always been. |
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I read a book a few years ago called Alex's Adventures in Numberland (https://www.amazon.com.au/Alexs-Adventures-Numberland-Alex-B...). In it he has a story about a group in South America who have no words in their language for a number greater than two (or maybe it was three? It's been a while since I read it). Anything larger than that was just referred to as "many". It's not as though seeing more than two of anything was uncommon, most families would have a half dozen to a dozen children. But if you asked how many children they had it was just "many". Whether it was eleven or twelve just wasn't an important distinction to them.
He goes on to discuss how language can expose what's important to a group and shape thinking. The introduction of a concept and word for zero was hugely important for our advancement in all number of fields. He also discusses how our constant pursuit for ever increasing levels of specificity has it's trade-offs: we seem to be becoming increasingly bad at estimating (which is both language, social expectations around what we value, and a reliance on tools).
Anyways, it was a story about language and numbers that I thoroughly enjoyed.