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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    people are relatively less sensitive to the violet, and more sensitive to the red end of the spectrum than are more advanced communities, this difference is probably insufficient to account for the surprisingly common absence of a specific word for blue in primitive colour- vocabularies1. Moreover, there are unquestionably other factors at work in determining the differentiation of the names of sensations. In the first place, it is quite conceivable that a sensation may not be of sufficient value or interest to receive a special name, although it is capable, nevertheless, of being fully experienced and discriminated. Were we, for example, to ask of a civilized community what objects they would describe by the words grey or bitter, the variety and incongruousness of their replies would be generally surprising. Yet such confusion is clearly not the expression of deficient sensitivity or discriminability; these people could easily learn the exact difference in meaning between the words grey and buff or between the words bitter and acrid. And in the second place, even when a lack of discrimination is found, the absence of discriminability is not necessarily implied. Certain instances of confused nomenclature may be simply due to insufficient pains having been taken to analyse sensory experiences. The ability to differentiate may exist potentially, and may, if occasion later arise, be carried into actual effect; just as any one of us can be taught by practice to resolve an impure tone into its constituent fundamental and higher partial tones. But the attempt to explain the imperfections of primitive sense- vocabularies will be seen to involve a discussion of the play of psychological factors in the process of sensation generally; and into this obscure subject we cannot enter now. All that we would do here is to draw attention to a certain, though imperfect, correspon¬ dence of the features of taste- and of colour-nomenclature in primitive languages, and to the consequent possibility that their true explanation will be ultimately found to have a psychological rather than a merely physiological basis. My attention came to be drawn to the taste-vocabularies of primitive peoples in the course of a few experiments which I made during my visit to the islands of the Torres Straits. Dr Seligmann and I tested the islanders with dilute solutions of sugar, salt, acid and quinine, and 1 For a full discussion of primitive colour-vision see the following papers by W. H. E. Eivers,—Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. n. pt. 1, Cambridge, 1901, pp. 48—96; Popular Science Monthly, vol. lix. 1901, pp. 44—58; Journ. Anthrop. Inst. vol. xxxi. 1901, pp. 229—245.
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