Hi, in the previous video we talked about semantics, we talked about the semantics of color terms. And I've talked a little bit about the fact that although all people presumably have the same eyes, and therefore they see the same colors unless they are for instance colorblind, they may give different names to those colors. And in particular some languages would have only three different color terms, and those would be something like dark, something like light, and something like red. In this video we are going to discuss this a little bit more with my students Martin and Ingrid. >> Yes, so I've been thinking about these color terms and I was wondering if some languages only have three color terms, how does this relate to English? How many color terms does English have? >> Well, can you answer the question yourself? How many color terms does English have? >> To me it seems a difficult question to answer, to be honest. Because what do you do with words like salmon or light blue? >> Yeah, right. Well, I think that's actually spot on. So you initially you might think, well, the color terms of English, they are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple, and maybe one or two others. These are sometimes called the basic color terms. But then indeed some speakers will have more than just these very few color terms. So if you are a painter, if you otherwise work with a lot of colors in your work, well, you may know many different color terms. And you may even know what they mean. So I know the color term mauve in English and I have no idea what it actually refers to, even though I'm not colorblind. So it's actually too simple to say English has so many color terms. There are many, many different speakers of English, and they may have more or less interesting colors. They may have more or less interest in colors expertise, all these kinds of things, and they all count. So you would have to count the number of color terms for an individual speaker. And that's even true for something like light blue and dark blue. Are they two different words? Well, it depends a little bit on how much expertise you have and how easy it is for you to recognize those different words. >> In fact, this reminds me of something I heard somebody say. Somebody told me that the Inuit have like a hundred terms, a hundred words for snow. >> [LAUGH] Right, yeah. This is a very famous story. It's actually hotly debated by linguists. So you'll read this in the newspaper. I think you can read this in, if you follow enough newspapers, you can read this in the newspaper at least once a week. That the Inuit have 100 words for snow. The only difference is sometimes you read they have 200 words for snow or 50 words for snow or 150 words for snow. They have many words for snow. It's actually not completely clear what that means. In the first place, there's many different languages or dialects of languages which are spoken by Inuit. And they probably also each have their own different kind of number of words. But some linguists have gone to dictionaries and found just only about three or four different words for different kinds of snow. So again, to some extent, I think it's very intriguing this, you can see that it's just not clear. It seems very easy to count something like the number of words to describe a certain concept. But if you look at it in detail in any given language, it's not that simple. And that's because the boundaries between individual objects are never really simple. >> So but then surely, I mean, colors, that's a spectrum, and I can see how you can divide that up in different ways, and even something like whether, I can see that in different places in the world. It may be more salient, it may be more important to distinguish between different types of snow or different types of rain or sunshine, for example. But there are things of which it seems very clear that this is the thing and this is its name. >> Like what? >> Well, so I brought with me my book. Now, it's very clear that this is a book and I don't think we have to quarrel about this. I mean, this is a book. >> I'm not going to quarrel with you. But actually I think still it's not so clear why this is a book. So for instance, could you give a definition of a book? What would be your definition of a book? >> So I would say probably that it is an object and that there are words in it written by someone or more people, and that the words are a description or that they tell a story. >> Like a magazine. >> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] Yes, okay. So there's a difference, of course. But yeah, so you'd have to revise the definition to exclude magazines. >> All right. >> And the newspapers of course. >> Right, and then, is it necessarily an object? So nowadays you can have electronic books which are not really objects either, right? >> That's true. >> And then you think, okay, well, we're going to revise it again and again and again. And the problem is, if you try to do it every time, you can find some kind of counter example. Actually, I would urge you to do that. So to just find some everyday very simple objects and try to describe them and go to the forum and discuss it with each other. Try to find holes in the definitions of these everyday objects you find around you. And I guarantee you, you always will. It's actually, it's mysterious, it's very interesting. Why is that the case? We don't really know, right? So why is it the case that we can't make real definitions? It's different from scientific terms. So for scientific purely scientific terms, we can make definitions. That's where we can be very precise. But in our everyday language is not just that we don't use definitions or we don't know the definitions, it seems almost impossible to do the definitions. Here we have actually reached something which is not a miracle of human language, but I would say a mystery of human language. And there's another dimension to that, and that's a term like this, a term like a book. This is a book, this is what happens to be a novel written by Italo Calvino, an Italian Nobel Prize winner. Okay, that's one dimension of it. So that's a book written by somebody. It's also a physical object, as you said. So it's a physical object, which has the properties of a physical object. It has a certain size, it weighs about 200 grams. Now I can say in one sentence, I can say Italo Calvino's novel ways about 200 grams. And if you think about it, that's actually very strange, is very strange that you can say such a thing. Because what Italo Calvino wrote, what he wrote was just some words, is completely an abstract thing that doesn't have any weight to begin with. So if you say this thing, Italo Calvino's book weighs about 200 grams, you're using the word book in two slightly different senses at the same time. And that's another thing which many words seem to have in common. It's not just that they have a vague meaning, but the meaning can shift very easily, and you co can go back and forth between one thing and the next. That's something which word meaning has in common. Again, I believe from all the topics we are discussing in this MOOC, word semantics is still the most mysterious for scholarship. There's many things we have discovered about it. There's many things we know about it. But there's also many things we just don't understand. We just don't see how people work with it. In this video we've seen there's many problems connected to word meaning. In the first place, it turns out to be almost impossible to count the number of color terms for English. It depends on the speaker. It depends on what exactly we consider to be a color term. In the second place, it turns out that even for objects, which at first sight seem to be completely obvious, like a book, it's impossible to give a definition. And more generally, I have claimed we cannot give definitions for any of the words of the non-scientific terms we use. If you're still not convinced try to define the term red. Imagine you have a friend who's colorblind, who doesn't see the color red, try to define it. How can you say in words what red really is? You will not be able to do it. Word meaning is definitely one of the most interesting topics for many people in human language. It's also still one of the most mysterious ones. In the next video we're going to look at the other layer of meaning we have seen, which is pragmatics. We're going to discuss how, on top of this ordinary meaning of words and sentences, we can determine a meaning which is dependent on the context in which words and sentences are used.
