Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/59

Rh for the colors of horses, though they tend to confuse the designations for green and blue.

I have had an opportunity of examining the color vision of the Eskimos who have lately been in London, and have found that their language presents a very striking contrast to that of the tropical people, to whom my previous work had been limited. The terminology for color appears to be extremely well developed; there are definite names for red, yellow, green and blue, and modifications of these colors are expressed by means of suffixes or by compounding two names; thus, by more than one individual a purple was called 'aupaluktaktungalangaijuk,' which means bluish-red, while a violet was called 'tungajuktakaupalangaijuk,' which means reddish-blue. This recognition of the fact that violet and purple are mixtures of red and blue shows a high degree of definiteness in the nomenclature of both colors. I have only met with one other individual who behaved in a similar way, viz., a Tamil, who called purple 'sikapu-nilam,' red-blue.

Another peculiarity which appears to characterize a very large number of languages is the absence of a word for brown. In Torres Strait a native would call one brown by a name meaning 'reddish'; another brown by the same name as yellow, while others would be called dark or gray. It was quite clear that they had no generic name for brown. In the Australian and Melanesian languages, I have had the opportunity of studying, as well as in Tamil, Singhalese and Eskimo, I have failed to find any definite term for brown, and the same defect is found in Welsh and in many other languages. The word given for brown in many vocabularies is obviously the same word as that used for red or dark or gray. There is always a danger that one may accept, as a generic name for brown, a word which is only a name for a special brown. This was very well shown in Mabuiag, where brown wools were by some natives called by such names as 'wamauwibadgamulnga' (honeycomb colored), or Vabadgamulnga (Draæena colored), but it was quite certain that these were names used by certain individuals for special browns and were in no sense names for brown in general. Similarly, in other languages in which there is no word for brown there may be names for special browns, such as names for the colors of horses or cattle, but such terms are limited to those objects. We have in our own language similar examples in the words 'bay' and 'dun.'

The idea of brown is so definite with us that it is surprising that a word for brown, and apparently the generic idea of brown, should be