Xin
Imagine that there are a group of people who have various, distinct linguistic repertoires. Then an apple is showed in front of them with a question “What’s this?”. There is no doubt that everyone who has eaten or seen apples before will agree that it’s an apple, right? But what if they are represented with a picture of colour or a record of sound? Will they reach an agreement as well? Probably not. For example, Himba people use the word “zoozu” to refer to a wide variety of colors in English such as dark blue, dark green, dark brown, dark purple, dark red or black (Oaster, 2017). And for Candoshi, the indigenous people from Upper Amazon, there might be no terms for colors in their language (Surralles, 2016). It’s interesting to notice that representation of color is part of the objective reality, but people’s perceptions towards it may vary largely.
