Duck rabbit

I saw a recent documentary concerning perception of colour, and how it appears that we each do not necessarily see, or perceive exactly the same thing. One fascinating experiment concerned a particular tribe in Africa that had a limited number of words to describe colours, far less than were used in English. However, some of the words were quite specific. When shown a swatch of colours that were predominantly of one shade of green, but had a single patch in a different shade and asked to point out the one that was different, they did so with ease. The interesting thing is that to Western eyes it is almost impossible to spot the difference – honestly. We have no word to describe the subtlety of difference between those two shades of green. They did. The next experiment had all except one of the colours to be the same shade of green, and the one other colour to be blue. To our eyes the difference was blindingly obvious, yet these people had extreme difficulty to finding the odd colour out. Why? Because they had no word to differentiate between green and blue. Bizarre? Yes. But true. Look it up.

This adds experimental evidence to Wittgenstein’s idea that, boiled down, the mind can only perceive or imagine something for which it has the words to describe it. (Sorry for ending that sentence in a preposition – it just came out.)

So anyway, this got me thinking. Different natural languages must be better at certain jobs over others. Not every language has the words to describe certain things that can be described easily in others. Poetry, for example, is almost impossible to translate. Why? Because it contains concepts that literally cannot be described in another language (nah – it’s because you can’t make the same rhymes. Silence, fool). For centuries the language of diplomacy was French, and this was not necessarily because France was internationally dominant. Quite the contrary, It was England’s time. Yet the world chose to use French as the lingua franca of international diplomacy.

In an ideal multi-cultural, multi-lingual world we would use the right language for different jobs. One for engineering. Another for science and/or medicine. One for literature. One for intimacy, and so on.

What do you think? What language do you think would be best for:

• Engineering
• Literature
• Diplomacy
• Romance
• Medicine