Why does the language we speak affect the way we see colors?

Pedro_P

Depending on what language you speak, your eye perceives colours – and the world – differently than someone else.

▼ The human eye can physically perceive  millions of colours. But we don’t all recognise these colours in the same way.
Some people can’t see differences in colours – so called colour blindness – due to a defect or absence of the cells in the retina that are sensitive to high levels of light: the cones. But the distribution and density of these cells also varies across people with ‘normal vision’, causing us all to experience the same colour in slightly different ways.
Besides our individual biological make up,  colour perception is less about seeing what is actually out there and more about how our brain interprets colours to create something meaningful. The perception of colour mainly occurs inside our heads and so is subjective – and prone to personal experience.
Take for instance  people with  synaesthesia,who are able to experience the perception of colour with letters and numbers. Synaesthesia is often described as a joining of the senses – where a person can see sounds or hear colours. But the colours they hear also differ from case to case.
Another example is the classic  Adelson’s checker-shadow illusion. Here, although two marked squares are exactly the same colour, our brains don’t perceive them this way.
Since the day we were born we have learnt to categorise objects, colours, emotions, and pretty much everything meaningful using language. And although our eyes can perceive thousands of colours, the way we communicate about colour – and the way we use colour in our everyday lives – means we have to carve this huge variety up into identifiable, meaningful categories.
Painters and fashion experts, for example, use  colour terminology to refer to and discriminate hues and shades that to all intents and purposes may all be described with one term by a non-expert.
Some languages only have two terms, dark and light
Different languages and cultural groups also carve up the colour spectrum differently. Some languages like  Dani, spoken in Papua New Guinea, and  Bassa, spoken in Liberia and Sierra Leone, only have two terms, dark and light. Dark roughly translates as cool in those languages, and light as warm. So colours like black, blue, and green are glossed as cool colours, while lighter colours like white, red, orange and yellow are glossed as warm colours. (▪ ▪ ▪)

► Read the full note here: Source

srinivasbala

Interesting Theory....Thanks

soothsayer

Strangest Stuff I have heard. Never knew that we could hear different colours!

Buddha480

Yes, there is a whole school of psychology built on this insight. Read Kandinsky if you wish to delve deeper into this fascinating area