Transcript

Speaker 1: (Singing)

Jad Abumrad: Hey I'm Jad Abumrad.

Robert Krulwich: I'm Robert Krulwich.

Jad Abumrad: This is Radiolab, we're gonna keep going with our show on colors now with a story about, well-

Speaker 1: (Singing)

Robert Krulwich: The color of the sky.

Jad Abumrad: Most beautiful color.

Robert Krulwich: Well.

Jad Abumrad: I think so.

Robert Krulwich: Except red.

Jad Abumrad: Nah.

Robert Krulwich: Yeah (affirmative). Well, you got it.

Jad Abumrad: It's a story that we find really surprising, frankly. And it comes from our producer Tim Howard.

Tim Howard: Yes. Hello.

Jad Abumrad: Who [inaudible 00:01:09] heard it from... Do you want to set up who this guy is?

Tim Howard: So, Guy Deutscher is a linguist [crosstalk 00:01:14] and a writer. I came across his book.

Guy Deutscher: Called Through the Language Glass.

Tim Howard: And he tells this one [crosstalk 00:01:19] particular story in it that starts in, I think, 1858 with this guy, William Gladstone who was an incredibly famous politician in England.

Guy Deutscher: He was four times Prime Minister in the second half of the 19th century.

Tim Howard: Every schoolkid knows who he is, even now.

Jad Abumrad: Hmm.

Tim Howard: But, there's one thing that not many people know about Gladstone.

Guy Deutscher: Well, he was a Homer fanatic.

Speaker 2: As the soldiers marched, the glean went dazzling from the magnificent bronze all about through the upper air to the heavens.

Guy Deutscher: He was a deeply religious man. And, for him, the Iliad and Odyssey were almost like a second Bible.

Speaker 2: Sipping the black blood, the tall shade perceived me and cried out sharply -

Guy Deutscher: He read them over and over again throughout his life.

Jad Abumrad: So, he was into Homer.

Tim Howard: Yes! And so, early on in his career, Gladstone decided to write the definitive history of Homer.

Guy Deutscher: This huge book, actually three books -

Tim Howard: Thousands of pages.

Guy Deutscher: - where he discussed a whole range of issues relating to Homer and his world.

Tim Howard: And, here's the thing: As he was reading, doing his research and everything -

Guy Deutscher: He made this very strange discovery that the way Homer talks about color in the Iliad and the Odyssey is extremely odd.

Tim Howard: It's odd?

Guy Deutscher: Very, very odd.

Tim Howard: How so?

Guy Deutscher: To start with, he uses extremely strange terms for colors of simple objects. The most famous one, perhaps, is -

Speaker 2: The wine dark sea.

Tim Howard: The wine, wine dark -

Guy Deutscher: The wine dark sea. It's -

Tim Howard: It looks like wine.

Guy Deutscher: Looks like wine.

Tim Howard: Is it possibly like a poetic kind of thing?

Guy Deutscher: That's what you would naturally think, but the other thing he calls wine-color are oxen.

Tim Howard: But, it's more than just wine. Take the color violet, which to me, and probably to you is -

Jad Abumrad: Purple? Purple?

Tim Howard: Yeah.

Jad Abumrad: Light purple?

Tim Howard: When Homer uses it -

Guy Deutscher: He talks about the sheep.

Speaker 2: The cyclops rams were -

Guy Deutscher: In the cyclops caves as having -

Speaker 2: A dark violet.

Jad Abumrad: Well, but that's just fantasy, I mean -

Tim Howard: But, the other thing that he also says is violet is iron.

Jad Abumrad: Iron.

Tim Howard: So.

Jad Abumrad: Okay.

Tim Howard: Chew on that. How about this one. What is both the color of honey and the color of faces pale with fear?

Jad Abumrad: I have no idea.

Tim Howard: If you ask Homer, those are -

Guy Deutscher: Green.

Speaker 2: Green honey?

Guy Deutscher: He didn't call his forests green. He didn't call his leaves green. It all seems to be wrong.

Tim Howard: And this was totally puzzling to Gladstone.

Guy Deutscher: Homer was Gladstone's absolute hero, so he found it difficult to understand or accept why someone who was so perceptive would use such defective terms, as Gladstone called it.

Tim Howard: So, he starts going through the Iliad and Odyssey again, page by page. And he counts how many times each color appears.

Jad Abumrad: You mean like how many times he uses the word black or blue or whatever?

Tim Howard: Yeah. And it only takes a couple pages for him to notice -

Guy Deutscher: The predominance of black and white.

Tim Howard: That the term black -

Speaker 2: Black days. Black carrion flies. Black blood. Under his black brows. Black, black black, black, black, black, black black.

Tim Howard: Occurred about 170 times in both books.

Jad Abumrad: Huh.

Tim Howard: White -

Speaker 2: White arms. White clad. The white sail. White ram.

Tim Howard: Occurred about 100 times.

Speaker 2: White white white -

Tim Howard: But, red?

Speaker 2: A blood red serpent.

Tim Howard: Only clocks in at about 13 times.

Speaker 2: - the red wine to the gods.

Jad Abumrad: That's a big drop.

Tim Howard: Yellow?

Speaker 2: Dawn in her yellow robe.

Tim Howard: Under 10 times. Green?

Speaker 2: His teeths chatter in green fear.

Tim Howard: Also under 10.

Jad Abumrad: Hm.

Tim Howard: And then, Gladstone realizes something crazy. The color blue?

Speaker 2: Um...

Tim Howard: Zero times.

Jad Abumrad: What?

Guy Deutscher: There's just no word that describes the color blue in any of Homer's poems.

Jad Abumrad: He does not use the word blue at all?

Guy Deutscher: No blue.

Tim Howard: No blue.

Jad Abumrad: Not even once?

Tim Howard: Nope. So, Gladstone thought, "Huh, bizarre."

Jad Abumrad: Yeah.

Tim Howard: And he started looking in other classic Greek texts too. And there? He kept finding all of these strange uses of color.

Guy Deutscher: Violet hair and things like that.

Tim Howard: And after [crosstalk 00:05:37] thinking about this for a long time -

Guy Deutscher: Gladstone concluded that Homer was colorblind. But, also, that all the Greeks were colorblind.

Jad Abumrad: Wait, he thought all of them were colorblind?

Guy Deutscher: Yes. That they saw the world in black and white, maybe with a touch of red.

Tim Howard: His thought was that they were straining to see these other colors that were kind of just outside of their reach. And then, their [crosstalk 00:06:03] kid would inherit that effort, or their kid would just be a little bit better.

Jad Abumrad: Oh, so that's how we got color.

Tim Howard: So, Homer Junior would be able to see a little bit of yellow because Homer tried really hard to see yellow and -

Jad Abumrad: And then Homer the third would be better than Homer the second and so on.

Tim Howard: Yeah. And then this would happen again and again every generation down 3000 years to the present day.

Guy Deutscher: It just seemed the only possible explanation.

Jad Abumrad: That's ridiculous. That's ridiculous!

Guy Deutscher: We know today, of course, that our color vision goes back probably about 30 million years.

Tim Howard: You know, so like when we were still in the jungle climbing trees.

Guy Deutscher: Exactly. So, generally -

Tim Howard: People mocked him.

Guy Deutscher: No one took him seriously.

Jad Abumrad: So, then how did people explain the no blue in Homer thing?

Tim Howard: Well, here, the plot thickens. Ten years after Gladstone's Homer debacle, this other guy -

Guy Deutscher: A German-Jewish philologist called Lazarus Geiger.

Tim Howard: Lazarus Geiger.

Jad Abumrad: A German-Jewish what did he say?

Tim Howard: A philologist, which I thought was a linguist. It basically means he studies ancient texts. He finds pretty much the same kind of weird stuff that Gladstone did. But, he finds it not just in Ancient Greek texts, but all over the place.

Speaker 3: Sorry, this one?

Guy Deutscher: He looked at the old Icelandic sagas.

Speaker 4: [Icelandic 00:07:23]

Guy Deutscher: Ancient Chinese.

Speaker 5: [Chinese 00:07:28]

Guy Deutscher: Ancient Vedic hymns.

Speaker 6: [Vedic 00:07:32]

Guy Deutscher: The Bible.

Speaker 7: [Hebrew 00:07:34] [crosstalk 00:07:37]

Guy Deutscher: And, surprise surprise, what did he find there?

Tim Howard: No blue.

Jad Abumrad: Even the Bible had no blue?

Tim Howard: In the original Hebrew.

Brooke Watkins: [Hebrew 00:07:44]

Tim Howard: It has no blue.

Jad Abumrad: Huh.

Tim Howard: So, wait, where - what's this room?

Brooke Watkins: Right now, we're in the public catalog room.

Tim Howard: I actually went to the New York public [crosstalk 00:07:54] library and talked to this librarian.

Brooke Watkins: [German 00:07:57]

Tim Howard: Who can speak German. So [German 00:08:01]. And we got out Geiger's book.

Brooke Watkins: So, literally the Development History of Mankind.

Jad Abumrad: Wait a second, I know this voice. Really?

Tim Howard: Yeah, that's my girlfriend.

Brooke Watkins: My name is Brooke Watkins and I'm a librarian at the New York Public Library.

Tim Howard: [crosstalk 00:08:15] She helped me find some very cool passages in Geiger's book.

Tim Howard: Let's see it first. Let's do it in German.

Guy Deutscher: Geiger has this amazing quotation.

Brooke Watkins: Okay. [German 00:08:22]

Guy Deutscher: About the Indian Vedic poems.

Brooke Watkins: [German 00:08:30]

Tim Howard: And what does that say?

Brooke Watkins: These hymns of more than 10 thousand lines are brimming with descriptions of the heavens. Scarcely is there any subject about more frequently the sun and reddening dawns play of color, day and night, cloud and lightning, the air and the ether are unfolded before us. And over and over in splendor and vivid fullness.

Brooke Watkins: But there's only one thing that no one would ever learn from those ancient songs who do not already know it. And that is that the sky is blue.

Tim Howard: Hmm-hmm. It gets weirder.

Jad Abumrad: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tim Howard: You ready?

Jad Abumrad: I'm, yeah.

Tim Howard: You all ready for this?

Jad Abumrad: I'm totally ready.

Tim Howard: All right. Because Geiger then wondered, "All right, if there's no blue in any of these old texts, then when did blue come into these languages?"

Jad Abumrad: Yeah.

Tim Howard: So, he did this massive analysis to trace when each color term was first introduced to each language. And what he found was -

Guy Deutscher: The order at which languages seem to acquire these color terms is not entirely random.

Tim Howard: First, black and white. Every language has black and white. Then, when they get their first color term -

Guy Deutscher: Red always comes first.

Tim Howard: Always red.

Guy Deutscher: After red, it's always yellow.

Jad Abumrad: Really?

Tim Howard: Yeah.

Guy Deutscher: And then green, and blue only at the very end.

Jad Abumrad: So, black, white, red, green, yellow, and then blue?

Tim Howard: Yeah.

Jad Abumrad: And that's universal?

Tim Howard: Well, as people discovered more and more languages, they found some exceptions. But, a couple things held, even from Geiger. Out of these colors, red is always first and blue is always last.

Jad Abumrad: Why?

Tim Howard: Well.

Jad Abumrad: I mean, why would there be an order at all and why would blue always be last?

Tim Howard: Well, here's where you get to the guessing part.

Jad Abumrad: Okay.

Tim Howard: Guy thinks it might have to do with a couple of things. First, in Homer's world, you wouldn't have actually been exposed to a lot of blue things.

Guy Deutscher: Actually, if you think about it, blue is extremely rare in nature.

Tim Howard: Blue foods?

Jad Abumrad: No.

Tim Howard: Blue animals?

Jad Abumrad: Blue animals -

Tim Howard: How about plants?

Jad Abumrad: There's a few blue plants.

Tim Howard: Like what?

Jad Abumrad: I...

Guy Deutscher: Flowers that are really blue are extremely rare.

Tim Howard: Lot of flowers that we think of as blue - they're actually -

Guy Deutscher: Artificial flowers.

Tim Howard: We made them blue.

Jad Abumrad: Genetically, you mean.

Tim Howard: Yeah.

Jad Abumrad: What about blue eyes?

Guy Deutscher: Blue eyes at the time were in short supply, among the Greeks.

Tim Howard: But, here's where we get to Guy's main point. He says you don't really need a word for a color until you can make that color reliably. And the reason that red might have been first is that red -

Guy Deutscher: Is apparently one of the easiest to produce.

Tim Howard: You can just take a dried piece of red clay and you can use it as a crayon, which is why paints made out of ochre go back something like 60 thousand years. And blue? Blue is the hardest of all. For thousands of years, no one had it.

Guy Deutscher: One exception: the Egyptians.

Tim Howard: Ooh. The Egyptians. And they, and only they, had their own word for blue.

Jad Abumrad: So, that's it? That's your answer?

Tim Howard: Yeah.

Jad Abumrad: Like, tell, no blue dyes, no blue words?

Tim Howard: That's not interesting?

Jad Abumrad: I want more than that.

Tim Howard: Wait, what do you mean more?

Jad Abumrad: I don't know, something more to say than just it's about dyes.

Tim Howard: All right, well - Here you go. As I was calling around, I ran into something that made me think -

Speaker 8: Hey, is that two?

Tim Howard: - a little differently about Gladstone's whole theory of color blindness.

Jad Abumrad: Hm.

Tim Howard: Called this guy named Jules Davidoff.

Jules Davidoff: Professor of Neuropsychology, London University.

Tim Howard: And, a few years back, he got interested in this particular tribe in Namibia called the Himba.

Jules Davidoff: The Himba. Like many languages in the world, they don't have a different word for blue.

Tim Howard: You might think of them as like a very poor stand-in for Homer.

Jad Abumrad: All right.

Tim Howard: And to make a long story short, Jules went to Namibia. He sat down with a bunch of members of the Himba tribe, whipped out a laptop, and showed them 12 colored squares.

Jules Davidoff: All identical except for one.

Tim Howard: And there's actually some really cool video footage of his research assistant doing this. And they asked them very simply -

Jules Davidoff: Which one is different?

Tim Howard: Now, you look at this and you see that 11 of these squares are green.

Jules Davidoff: A color we would call green -

Tim Howard: Very green. And the other one is blue. This blue one, it's shouting. It's like, "Hey! I'm blue! Over here, I'm blue!"

Jules Davidoff: It's easy enough for us to do.

Tim Howard: It's a no-brainer. But, the Himba, who don't have a separate word for blue in their language -

Jules Davidoff: They find this distinction a little difficult.

Tim Howard: When they stare at this screen, they just stare. And stare.

Jad Abumrad: They don't see the difference [crosstalk 00:12:55] between the blue and the green?

Tim Howard: No.

Jad Abumrad: Well, is there something wrong with their eyes?

Jules Davidoff: No, definitely not. We completely rule that out. They don't see color - the individual colors differently.

Jad Abumrad: But, then wait -

Jules Davidoff: It's so easy to say that they'r seeing different colors to us, and they're not.

Jad Abumrad: Well, then how does he explain it?

Jules Davidoff: Okay. When we decide to put colors together in a group -

Tim Howard: - And then give those colors a word, like blue -

Speaker 9: (Singing)

Jules Davidoff: Something happens.

Tim Howard: He says what happens is that now that there's a category for that thing, the thing in that category jumps out. It gets louder and louder to your eyes. The category actually feeds back on your perception so you notice it more.

Jad Abumrad: You're saying that having the word for blue unlocks your ability to see blue?

Tim Howard: I mean, that's how it feels to me and Jules says -

Jules Davidoff: No, it's not quite that.

Tim Howard: He says without the word you're still seeing the blue no matter what. You're just not noticing it. Your eyes are just kind of glossing right over it.

Jad Abumrad: So, you don't see it.

Tim Howard: It's harder to spot, says Jules.

Jad Abumrad: Whatever, I don't quite understand that difference but -

Tim Howard: The blue would not jump out and say, "Hi five," the way it does with us.

Jad Abumrad: But if it doesn't jump out to that extent, then, this is starting to sound very Gladstone-y to me.

Tim Howard: Yeah.

Jad Abumrad: I mean, maybe he was a little right. Because if Homer had no word for blue and the word somehow enables the blueness of the blue, then maybe his world was less blue than it would be for us. I mean, maybe the blue went through his eyes in the same way but it, perhaps didn't get into his mind in the same way.

Tim Howard: Yeah. Blue didn't matter.

Jad Abumrad: Wait a second. Do you know where this breaks down?

Tim Howard: Where?

Jad Abumrad: The [beep] sky! I mean, you look up and there's the bluest blue in the world and then it's right there above our heads. It's been there since the dawn of time. So, why wouldn't blue matter more? I mean why wouldn't it be the first color instead of the last?

Tim Howard: Well, that's what I thought too and I asked Guy about that.

Tim Howard: Yeah, "Why is the sky blue?" is the first question that you always think of.

Guy Deutscher: Allegedly, the first question that all children ask.

Tim Howard: Yeah.

Guy Deutscher: But, I wanted to see how obvious or striking this blueness of the sky is. So, I decided to make an experiment.

Tim Howard: Guy has a very young daughter.

Guy Deutscher: About 18 months. She was learning to speak.

Tim Howard: What's her name?

Guy Deutscher: Alma. I talked a lot about colors with Alma and taught her all the colors, including blue. And we would play all these games that dads play with their children.

Tim Howard: You know, pointing at objects.

Guy Deutscher: I would point at a blue object and ask her what's the color of this. She would say, "boo." Boo for blue.

Tim Howard: Oh, okay.

Tim Howard: Soon enough Alma was a total pro. She could identify any color.

Guy Deutscher: Show me the red object, show me this, and -

Tim Howard: Right.

Guy Deutscher: The only thing I didn't do, and I asked my wife not to do, was ever mention that the sky was blue. That was the setup.

Tim Howard: So, one day Guy and Alma were taking a stroll and they're practicing the colors.

Guy Deutscher: "What's this tree? What's this? What's this?" And then I pointed at the sky and said, "What color is that?" And...she wouldn't give me any answer.

Tim Howard: Huh.

Guy Deutscher: Although, she had just, a second before, was happily telling me that something was blue and red or green. She just looked up and looked at me incomprehendingly. Sort of, "What are you talking about?"

Tim Howard: She thought you were kidding?

Guy Deutscher: I think she didn't understand what I was on about.

Tim Howard: Huh.

Guy Deutscher: In retrospect, there was no object there. There was nothing with color for her.

Tim Howard: You're just pointing into the void basically.

Guy Deutscher: Pointing into nothingness. So, she wouldn't say anything.

Tim Howard: But, Guy kept asking every single time they went out.

Guy Deutscher: Of course, I would do it only when the sky was blue.

Tim Howard: And she would never answer him. And this went on for two months.

Guy Deutscher: And then, finally, she did consent to give me a color name, but it wasn't blue. It was white.

Guy Deutscher: For a few times, she said white. And then, finally, after a month and a half or two more months, she said blue for the first time.

Tim Howard: Wow.

Guy Deutscher: But, even then it wasn't consistently blue. So she, then she said once, "blue, mm, no white, mm, no blue."

Tim Howard: Did she eventually decide though, "You know what, Dad, it is blue."

Guy Deutscher: Well, no, she never said it this way, but eventually, when I asked, it became consistently blue. So, she just would say blue.

Tim Howard: Okay.

Guy Deutscher: This was, for me, really the point where I could convince myself, convince at least my heart, that this sort of allegedly perfect example of blue is not -

Tim Howard: - Not so perfect.

Guy Deutscher: So, you know, for Homer who never ever probably saw a blue object except the sky and the sea, never had a dad who sort of went on about blue objects and asking what the color of the sky was, the fact that he didn't lose sleep over it doesn't seem so strange anymore.

Jad Abumrad: You know, now that I've heard this, I'm a little... ruing the moment when Alma decided the sky was blue. Let her have whatever color she wants it to be. Doesn't have to be blue.

Robert Krulwich: Weirdly, then, color is a loss of innocence.

Jad Abumrad: Yeah, kind of.

Robert Krulwich: It's like having something fixed that, for a while, is just between you and your frenzied heart, you know -

Jad Abumrad: And the sky is many colors, truthfully. On the other hand, though, I'm disagreeing with myself now. If we all agree the sky is blue, then that's something we can share, that she can share.

Robert Krulwich: And then, she's in conversation.

Jad Abumrad: And then, eventually, she'll understand, you know, this kind of blue.

Speaker 1: (Singing)

Robert Krulwich: Yeah, there aren't blue moons but there, but you know what one would, know what it feels like.

Jad Abumrad: Oh yeah.

Robert Krulwich: It's not a happy night.

Jad Abumrad: Mm-mm (negative).

Speaker 10: (Singing)

Jad Abumrad: Still think it's the most beautiful color.

Robert Krulwich: Hmm. I just took red just to be contrary. I'm trying to think what my favorite color is, I don't -

Jad Abumrad: I want to thank all the musicians who were so generous to let us use their music this hour and joined in in our covers of the rainbow project.

Jad Abumrad: You heard Reggie Watts with Rainbow Connection. Barbara Bennery with Over the Rainbow. Lonesome Organist with Green Onions. Nymph with Brown Rice. Yellow Ostrich with Sound and Vision. Rya Brass Band with Painted Black. Nico Mulley with Big Yellow Taxi. Sherwater with Black is the Color. Eric Freelander with Blue in Green. Marcie Playground with Whiter Shade of Pale. The Heat with Mellow Yellow. Tao Win with Blue. Snow Blink you just heard with Blue Moon. Dan Deacon right here with Colors. Busman's Holiday, Mr. Blue. And our very own Tim Howard, a.k.a. Soultero, performing Green River.

Speaker 11: (Singing)

Jad Abumrad: We'll be doing some cool things with these songs for the moment. Visit Radiolab.org.

Guy Deutscher: Hello, Radiolab, this is Guy Deutscher.

Brooke Watkins: This is Brooke Watkins.

Jason Lecroy: This is Jason Lecroy.

Guy Deutscher: Here's the message. Radiolab is produced by - I don't know how to pronounce this - Jad Abumrad.

Brooke Watkins: Our staff includes Ellen Horne, Soren Wheeler.

Guy Deutscher: Pat Walters, Tim Howard

Jason Lecroy: Brenna Farrell.

Brooke Watkins: Lynn Levy.

Guy Deutscher: Dylan Keefe.

Jason Lecroy: Melissa O'Donnell and Sean Cole.

Speaker 12: With help from Douglas T. Smith, Brendan McMullon, and Rafael Bennin.

Guy Deutscher: Okay.

Speaker 12: Special thanks to Sarah Montague,

Jason Lecroy: Paul Heck, Nick Capudiche,

Speaker 12: Ryan Levitt,

Jason Lecroy: Ivan Zimmerman,

Speaker 12: [inaudible 00:21:38]

Guy Deutscher: [inaudible 00:21:38]

Brooke Watkins: Winter Woodie.

Jason Lecroy: [inaudible 00:21:41]

Speaker 12: And Carver Throdson.

Guy Deutscher: Thanks, bye.

Speaker 13: End of message. [Beep]

Trevor Weller: This is Trevor Weller calling from Park City, Utah. Radiolab is supported by the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, where physicians see more types of cancer in a day than many will treat in their whole career, providing expertise in cancer research and treatment. MD Anderson's dedicated team of nearly 21 thousand strong is solely focused on ending cancer and finding new ways to give more hope to patients and their families. More at MakingCancerHistory.com.