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Do the Himba exist if I don't have a name for them?
Speaking of names, a FB Friend (and RL friend) linked to this affecting first-person essay about growing up in the USA with an "ethnic" name. As someone with an extremely rare surname (less than ten bearers in the entire country), I can relate. There's not a sound in mine that isn't a part of any English-speaker's repertoire and the spelling is a close to "phonetic" as anything ever comes in English orthography, yet people mangle it constantly.
Of course, as a linguist, I simply couldn't overlook this part:
Tasbeeh Herwees' claim about them "not know[ing] what the color blue is" is, of course, bullshit. You don't need to have a specific word for "the colour of a cloudless daytime sky" to recognise that it is not the same colour as a fresh acacia leaf any more than you need to have a specific word for the taste of a young coconut to know that it isn't the same as the taste of a ripe mango. The Himba have two basic terms, zoozu and burou (both referring to cool dark colours), which encompass those shades which we would label "blue". But these are not the only words they have at their disposal when it comes to describing the colour of something, just as we're not limited to calling something only "blue", "green", or "purple".
When I pointed this out in the ensuing discussion, I was told it didn't have anything to do with her point. I disagree. I can't be the only one who sees some irony in illustrating a plaint about thoughtless people not getting your name right with a reference to "a tribe in some remote, rural place" and not mentioning their name. Yeah, she only heard it on the radio in passing. But I've just illustrated how trivial it would've been to look it up. But then other readers could've done what I have and looked up the reference to find how she'd badly misrepresented the situation to add punch to a poignant observation. Her emotional truth is more important than the lived experiences of actual people.
Of course, as a linguist, I simply couldn't overlook this part:
On the radio I hear a story about a tribe in some remote, rural place that has no name for the color blue. They do not know what the color blue is. It has no name so it does not exist. It does not exist because it has no name.I presume here she's talking about the Himba of Namibia. The reason I presume this is that if you Google "tribe can't see blue" you get lots of hits for references to Debi Roberson's pioneering longitudinal study which not only subjected colour perception among the Himba to a series of the tests but repeated these tests regularly among a cohort of children as they grew up and some began attending school, comparing the results to those of a control group back home in England. As a result, we now have data which demonstrate not only that colour perception is language-dependent but that the two are learned in tandem.
Tasbeeh Herwees' claim about them "not know[ing] what the color blue is" is, of course, bullshit. You don't need to have a specific word for "the colour of a cloudless daytime sky" to recognise that it is not the same colour as a fresh acacia leaf any more than you need to have a specific word for the taste of a young coconut to know that it isn't the same as the taste of a ripe mango. The Himba have two basic terms, zoozu and burou (both referring to cool dark colours), which encompass those shades which we would label "blue". But these are not the only words they have at their disposal when it comes to describing the colour of something, just as we're not limited to calling something only "blue", "green", or "purple".
When I pointed this out in the ensuing discussion, I was told it didn't have anything to do with her point. I disagree. I can't be the only one who sees some irony in illustrating a plaint about thoughtless people not getting your name right with a reference to "a tribe in some remote, rural place" and not mentioning their name. Yeah, she only heard it on the radio in passing. But I've just illustrated how trivial it would've been to look it up. But then other readers could've done what I have and looked up the reference to find how she'd badly misrepresented the situation to add punch to a poignant observation. Her emotional truth is more important than the lived experiences of actual people.
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