The taste-names of primitive peoples / by Charles S. Myers.

  • Charles Samuel Myers
Date:
[1904?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The taste-names of primitive peoples / by Charles S. Myers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    f H L R o CHARLES MY LI LRAEY NATIONAL INSTITUT i Jf ikUJS.,, ,l PSYCHOLOGY 14, WELBECK STREET. L.'.OON, vV 1 THE TASTE-NAMES OF PPIMITIVE PEOPLES. By CHARLES S. MYERS, Lecturer in Experimental Psychology at King’s College, London. I. The cautions to be observed in drawing conclusions from primitive vocabularies. Experiments in the Torres Straits. II. Indo-Germanic taste-names. III. The results of inquiry and experiment in other parts of the world. IY. General comparison of the vocabularies denoting gustatory and other sensations. The phylogenetic antiquity and the con¬ sequently difficult analysis of the fused product of gustatory, tactual and emotional experience. I. The study of the words given by primitive people to describe their sensations has hitherto been confined for the most part to a single field, the colour-sense. But the results warrant an extension of such inquiries to other senses. The colour-vocabularies, collected from various regions, show instances where a single word does duty for two or more colour- sensations, e.g. for black and blue or for blue and green; where brown receives no definite name; and even an instance where there is ap¬ parently but one specific colour-name, a word for red. A similar lack of differentiation exists, as we shall see, in primitive taste-vocabularies \ One. is naturally prone to conclude that such features of confused nomenclature imply corresponding limitations in the degree of sensory acuity or discriminability. Yet, even if it be certain that dark-skinned 1 While these pages were in the press, my friend Professor A. F. Chamberlain published an interesting paper on the taste-vocabularies of American Indians (Amer. Journ. of Psychol. 1903, vol. xiv. pp. 146—153), which confirms the general conclu¬ sions I had previously communicated to him. J. of Psych, i 8
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