Merely to be exposed to the haphazard colors of nature, Gladstone concludes, may not be enough to set off the progressive training of color vision. For this process to get going, the eye needs to be exposed to a methodically graded range of hues and shades. As he puts it, “The eye may require a familiarity with an ordered system of colours, as the

Consider first the realm of abstraction. What happens when we move away from simple physical objects like cats or birds or roses to abstract concepts such as “victory,” “fairness,” or “Schadenfreude”? Have such concepts also been decreed by nature?

Gladstone shows in fact that the color descriptions of later Greek authors, even if not quite as deficient as Homer’s, “continued to be both faint and indefinite, in a degree which would now be deemed very surprising.”

John Locke recognized that in the realm of abstract notions each language is allowed to carve up its own concepts—or “specific ideas,” as he called them

Perhaps the most conspicuous example is the way Homer talked about the color of the sea. Probably the single most famous phrase from the whole Iliad and Odyssey that is still in common currency today is that immortal color epithet, the “wine-dark sea.”

For decades, linguists of all persuasions, both nativists and culturalists, have been trotting out the same party line: all languages are equally complex. But I will argue that this refrain is merely an empty slogan and that the evidence suggests that the complexity of some areas of grammar reflects the culture of the speakers, often in unexpected

His own answer was that it is highly unlikely that people with the same eyesight as us could nevertheless have made do with such strikingly deficient color concepts. And since it is so unlikely, he suggests that the only plausible explanation for the defects in the ancients’ color vocabulary must be an anatomical one.

Could language have more than a passive role as a reflection of cultural differences and be an active instrument of coercion through which culture imposes its conventions on our mind? Do different languages lead their speakers to different perceptions? Is our particular language a lens through which we view the world?

This suggests that at an earlier period in the history of all these languages, “blue” was not yet recognized as a concept in its own right and was subsumed under either black or green.