Of late, Maya has begun to insist that she wants her milk in the blue milk bottle rather than the yellow one.
“Azul”, she cries, as I reach out for the yellow milk bottle.
“But Maya, the blue bottle is dirty. It still has to be washed”, I say.
“No”, she starts to whine, “Azul”.
The process repeats for every item which we have in blue, exactly two: a blue water glass and a blue bowl. My father was thrilled with the news. Many moons ago, some fortune teller told my dad that blue was his lucky color. He immediately proceeded to paint everything he could blue, as I and my mother shuddered and thanked god that the fortune teller hadn’t picked some more easily off-putting color like pink or purple.
When Maya first began naming the world, I wondered how we would teach her the colors. Pointing at a dog or a ball or a car and naming it was easy. How could we point to the color of the thing ? Intuitively, I felt that naming colors would come after naming the things.
Scientific American carried an article last week about the acquisition of the language of color in humans. Melody Dye, the author of the article and a researcher at the Cognition, Language and Learning Lab at Stanford University, begins with an anecdote on testing a two year old for his color naming competence. She says that most two year olds have difficulty naming their colors, despite their parents’ insistence on their complete mastery (she narrates how the parents of the infants being tested had to be blindfolded because many got aggravated and started helping when their kids failed to be as stellar as they were hailed to be). Children even as old as six continue to have difficulty naming colors correctly, despite training.
Maya can confidently, almost dismissively, identify a dog or a cat or a bird, no matter what shape, color or size the animal is. She can even identify one from cartoons and caricatures. But identifying colors is a lot more difficult because identifying colors has a cultural component: not all cultures identify the colors and its hues the same way. The author quotes how in a Namibian dialect, Himba, their name for a color “zoozu” amalgamates the colors English speakers identify as black, green, blue and purple or how another name, “serandu” does the same for what we would distinguish as red, pink and purple. The linguistic erudites know well how the Russians have not a single name for the color blue but instead use two different words, one for the lighter shades of blue and one for its darker shades (but, apparently vodka is a cure for either shade).
The author of the article also points to the problem I pondered about. Children can learn the names of things quickly because they’re used within a context. Cats and dogs have usually easily distinguishable characteristics (Maya did get confused initially with some small dogs) and so can be called out easily. But colors can’t be called out that easily, at least not until the names of the objects have been mastered first.
The denouement of the article is fascinating, another insight into how language shapes thought. Here is Melody Dye:
“As it happens, English color words may be especially difficult to learn, because in English we throw in a curve ball: we like to use color words “prenominally,” meaning before nouns. So, we’ll often say things like “the red balloon,” instead of using the postnominal construction, “the balloon is red.”
When kids were trained using the postnominal construction, they mastered the color much more quickly.
“What color is the traffic light, Maya”, Shanthala asks.
“Red”, says Maya confidently.
“What does red mean”, I ask.
“Go, go, go!”, Maya shouts exultantly.
