1088: Untranslatable Colors Dec 1, 2017

Linguistics requires a lot of scientific analysis, but since there are certain cultural elements that influence the way people speak, unless one who is studying a language understands this, linguists can misunderstand the way that people talk, due to their own biases. For example, some languages have fewer words for colors than others, which is fairly easy to describe, but sometimes comparing words for colors is not so simple. Hanunó’o, a Filipino language, has terms for ‘light’ and ‘dark’ which is understandable from an English-speaking perspective, but colors can also be described as ‘wet’ and ‘dry’, which has no equivalent in English. Without knowing this, it could seem that Hanunó’o has fewer words for colors than it actually does.