I’ve always hated the word “ginger”.
I know that people use it as a descriptive term, but there’s just something about the way the vowels can be elongated that make it sound like it was destined to be a sneer across a school playground (at least, the playgrounds I frequented in the 1990s).
“Redhead” always seemed a much more affectionate term, even if it is wildly inaccurate. Growing up, I assumed that was deliberate misdirection. I thought “red” was a euphemism, like saying someone has “passed wind” when it’d be impolite to use the real word.
I only recently discovered this is not the case at all. Redheads and redbeards are called “red” because we glorious genetic mutants have been around much longer than the word “orange”.
I’m sure you know this bit of pub trivia already: the colour orange was named after the fruit, and not the other way around. But until about 1500, the English language just didn’t have a way to describe anything with that particular hue. People lumped gingers, squirrels and demonstrably purple cabbage in with the closest colour they could think of: red.
Less well known is that even basic colours don’t appear in all languages. Search through Homer’s texts and you won’t find the word “blue” anywhere, because the ancient Greeks didn’t yet have a word for the colour. That’s why whenever he tried to describe the sea, he’d have to tie himself into linguistically satisfying but ultimately inaccurate descriptions, like calling it “wine-dark”.
In the 1960s, the perceived wisdom was that different languages had picked which colours to name and which to ignore at random. But then two Berkeley researchers, Paul Kay and Brent Berlin [pdf], realised that as languages grew more intricate over time, there was a particular order in which specific colours (and the associated concepts) would appear. It was as though they’d found a clue hidden in language that the human brain has a hidden list of priorities: the word yellow is more fundamental than pink, the word green more fundamental than brown.
The pattern uncovered by Kay and Berlin holds true for around 83% of languages: if there are two basic colour words they will refer to light and dark. This is true of Dani, spoken in Papua New Guinea, and Bassa, spoken in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and the ancient versions of some more modern tongues.
The next colour to appear is red. Then, green and yellow emerge as more complex concepts. Followed by blue. Then brown.
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The English language has, by now, developed 11 basic colour words. Others have more: such as Russian and modern Greek, which have a distinct word for light-blue – similar to the way we use the word pink for light-red.
I think there’s something really lovely about this pattern. It’s a little glimpse at something universal about how humans make sense of the world, regardless of what language we speak. And, now that large language models have exploded on to the scene, this is an idea that is rapidly gaining traction in linguistics.
The AI in those language models doesn’t understand what words mean, only the relationships between them. It creates a sort of map – like a galaxy of stars – which charts all of the internal relationships between words in a language. Put simply, words that share a similar meaning are positioned close to one another. (For instance, “table” and “chair” will be much closer than “table” and “epiphany”, or “table” and “oblivion”.)
In this map, you can travel between words that are related – like “man” and “king” – using the same directions as other similar pairs; like “woman” and “queen”. To get from “eat” to “ate”, the same as from “run” to “ran”. No one programmed this in. It’s something that appears automatically just from the way that languages and concepts have evolved as people spoke them.
So, in 2017, two independent groups of scientists decided to take a look at the overall shape these maps of different languages make. You would expect them all to be wildly different. After all, why should the English language map look the same as the Spanish one, say? They have different cultures, different histories, different cosmologies.
Except, when they overlayed one over the other, they discovered they almost perfectly matched. And not just European languages: Japanese. Urdu. Aramaic. These fundamental structures – the same shape of the maps – reappear again and again, regardless of the language. Although the words themselves might be different, the way we make sense of our world is incredibly similar.
Whereas these commonalities were once opaque, AI has brought them into the light. We now live in a world where smartphones, such as the Galaxy Z Flip6, come with AI powered translation tools, which allow you to have bilingual conversations in real time.
Not that long ago, if you travelled without speaking the local language you would struggle to be understood and limited to very basic exchanges. Having that kind of translation tool makes it an entirely different experience and gives us a way to explore that connection that we all share.
Every human, everywhere, is somehow united by how they see and experience the world and what they have to say about it.
I think there’s something quite beautiful about that. Something quite profound, even. Although for me it mainly raises a more important and personal question: which languages have a better, more affectionate term for ginger?
