it is—in principle—entirely sensible to ask whether our culture could affect our thoughts through the linguistic concepts it imposes. But while the question seems perfectly kosher in theory, in practice the mere whiff of the subject today makes most linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists recoil. The reason why the topic causes such intense

“the organ of colour and its impressions were but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age.”

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.

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.

Does the complexity of a language reflect the culture and society of its speakers, or is it a universal constant determined by human nature?

The belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics was virtually universal until the mid-1880s.

grammar as over the concepts of language. Are the rules of grammar—word order, syntactic structures, word structure, sound structure—encoded in our genes, or do they reflect cultural conventions?

Geiger went further than Gladstone in one other crucial respect. He was the first to pose explicitly the fundamental question on which the whole debate between nature and culture would center for decades to come: the relation between what the eye can see and what language can describe.

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