Russian speakers see more colour than English speakers-Experiments have found that whether or not you can register a color depends on whether or not you have a name for it in your language. You can see the color, it just doesn't register in your mind.

One study compared some young children from England with kids from a tribe in Nambia. In the English language, young kids usually learn 11 basic colors (black, white, gray, red, green, blue, yellow, pink, orange, purple and brown) but in Himba it's only five. For instance, they lump red, orange and pink together and call it "serandu."


If you showed the Himba toddler a pink card and then later showed him a red one and ask if they're the same card, the kid would often mistakenly say yes -- because they're both "serandu." Same as if you showed you "Eggshell" and an hour later showed you "Bone" and asked if it was the same card from before. Now, again, they can see the colors; if you hold up a pink card and a red card next to each other, the English kid and Himba kid both would say they're different. But not when they see them one at a time.

But if you teach him the new names for the colors, that one is "pink" and the other is "red," from then on he can identify them when seen by themselves, without the other one for comparison.
Likewise, Turkish and Russian both split what we call "blue" into two different colors, for the darker and lighter shades. Therefore they consistently do a better job than English speakers when given the same "is this blue card the same as the last blue card" test. Even weirder, when testing the Russians they found that by giving them a verbal distraction (making them try to memorize a string of numbers while doing the color test) the advantage disappeared. It was the language part of their brain that was helping them "see" the colour.

This is very interesting. My own experience with wazungus is that they are very wordy. They have words for everything so when communicating they seem to know more than waafrika therefore they appear more intelligent. Waafrika while in my opinion having the same information substitute gestures for words so they do not need to have a word for things that they can show with a gesture. A good example is giving directions.

Ask a Nairobian or a Kenyan how to get from one point to another and he will most likely point you in the direction you ought to go then use words like when you see the blue building turn this way, again pointing instead of using the words left and right, go straight and you will see the place it is not far.

A response from a mzungu will probably be: Head North along X street. Go five blocks. Turn west on Y street. Go two blocks and the destination will be on your right. All this without using his body to point out anything. So if like most new people to Wazunguland you have no idea where North is, umepotea tayari.

If we were to ask you to come pick us up so we could crash at your place, because our El Camino was in the shop, and we gave you the directions as, "turn north at the Citgo station, go six blocks, then turn west at the Hooters, then south down the alley ..." would you tell us to go f*** ourselves? Hell, without a compass some of you can't even point which way is north from your own living room, let alone in a strange city.


"What the f*** did that airport security guard mean by 'east'?"

But you could go kidnap an Aboriginal tribesman from Australia and he'd immediately know which way is which. He'd know at any given second which direction he's facing. He has to know, because in the Aboriginal Guugu Yimithirr they also don't have words that mean "left" or "right" or "in front of" or "behind." They give all directions in terms of north/south/east/west. Seriously. If you're trying to hang a flat-screen TV on their wall they won't say, "Move it two inches to the left." They'll say, "Move it two inches east."

Now you'd think that, in practical terms, this would be pretty freaking annoying. But it turns out sticking to the compass gives them an almost supernatural sense of direction, and it's because they have to -- their language doesn't work otherwise. Because they speak in terms of geocentric directions, they also think in those terms. They could probably get around most cities better than you, even if they've never been inside of a car.

Very interesting.

Most Kenyans speak at least 3 languages with varying degrees of fluency..English, Kiswahili & the mother tongue. I wonder how this affects / shapes our thinking.

I was wondering the same. What becomes of our thinking with our smattering of English, Kiswahili and a mother tongue?