To what sense experience does one refer to when uttering the name of a colour?
The Optical Society of America classifies between 7.5 and 10 million colours which can theoretically be discriminated. A trained artist can discriminate and name a great many hues, which the pigment industry supplies and designates with numbers. But the Farnsworth–Munsell test, which includes a hundred hues, demonstrates that the average discrimination rate is highly unsatisfactory. Not only do the majority of subjects have no linguistic means with which to categorise these hundred hues, but approximately sixty-eight per cent of the population (excluding colour defectives) make a total error score of between twenty and a hundred on the first test, which involves rearranging these hues on a continuous gradation scale. The largest collection of English colour names runs to over three thousand entries, but only eight of these commonly occur.
Thus average chromatic competence is better represented by the seven colours of the rainbow, with their corresponding wavelengths in millimicrons. This table could represent a sort of chromatic metalanguage which guarantees the translation between natural languages, a sort of international jargon, according to which everybody could make clear to what portion of the chromatic spectrum they are referring.
800–650 Red
640–590 Orange
580–550 Yellow
540–490 Green
480–460 Blue
450–440 Indigo
430–390 Violet
Unfortunately such a metalanguage does not help us to understand what Gellius and his companions wanted to say. This segmentation corresponds to our common experience, but probably not to the experience of Latin-speakers. I think that Russian-speakers segment the range of wavelengths we call ‘blue’ into different portions, goluboj and sinij. Hindus consider red and orange a unified pertinent unit.
According to Conklin,9 the Hanunóo of the Philippines have a peculiar opposition between a public restricted code and a more or less individual, elaborate one. They distinguish two levels of chromatic contrast. Let us disregard the second level, which seems to be a case of many elaborate codes differing between males and females and even between individuals.
The first level is represented by four unequal parts, mutually exclusive. The boundaries separating these categories cannot be set in absolute terms, and the focal points within the four parts correspond more or less, in our spectral terms, to black, white, orange-red and leaf-green. In general terms, mabi:ru includes the range usually covered for us by black, violet, indigo, blue, dark green, grey, and deep shades of other colours; malagti covers the spectral space of white and very light tints of other colours; marara corresponds to maroon, red, orange, yellow, and mixtures in which these tints predominate; malatuy is light green and mixtures of green, yellow, and light brown.
Clearly such a segmentation of the chromatic continuum depends on symbolic, i.e. cultural principles, as well as on the material needs of the Hanunóo community. First, there is an opposition between light and dark (lagti vs biru), then another one between dryness and wetness or freshness and succulence (rara vs latuy), which is relevant for plants (since most of them have succulent and often ‘greenish’ parts). Thus a shiny, wet, brown-coloured section of newly cut bamboo is malatuy and not marara. On the other hand, parts of dried-out or matured plants such as kinds of yellow bamboo are marara. A third opposition, which seems to divide the two aforementioned ones transversally, is that of deep, unfading, indelible substances, against pale, weak, faded, bleached substances, so that we see an opposition between on one side malagti and malatuy and on the other side mabi:ru and marara.
Let us now try to organise the Hanunóo system in order to make it comparable with our spectral one.
Such a reconstruction represents a complex system of oppositions and reciprocal borderlines. Geopolitically speaking, a national territory is a negative concept: it is the class of all the points which are not included in the territory of the surrounding nations. In every system, whether geopolitical, chromatic or lexical, units are not defined in themselves but in terms of opposition and position in relation to other units. There can be no units without a system. The space of malatuy is determined by its – so to speak – northern boundaries with marara, and its southern boundaries with mabi:ru.
It is by considering this scheme (whose responsibility is mine and not Conklin’s) that we can try to solve Aulus Gellius’s puzzle. Let us simply complicate our previous diagram by inserting into it a hypothesis on the organisation of colours such as the one suggested by Gellius.
In this second diagram I consider not only the difference between different cultures, but also possible structural shifts within the same culture through the ages.
Rome, in the second century AD, was a very crowded crossroads of many cultures. The Empire controlled Europe from Spain to the Rhine, from England to North Africa and the Middle East. All these cultures, with their own chromatic sensitivities, were present in the Roman crucible. Gellius was trying to put together the codes of at least two centuries of Latin literature and, at the same time, of different non-Latin cultures. He must have been considering diverse and possibly contrasting cultural segmentations of the chromatic field. This would explain the contradictions in his analysis and the chromatic uneasiness felt by the modern reader. His colour show is not a coherent one: we seem to be watching a flickering TV screen, with something wrong in the electronic circuits, where tints mix up and the same face shifts, in the space of a few seconds, from yellow to orange or green. Determined by cultural information Gellius could not trust his personal perceptions, if indeed he had any, and appears eager to see gold as red as fire, and saffron as yellow as the greenish shade of a blue horse.
We do not know, and we shall never know, how Gellius really perceived his Umwelt; unfortunately, our only evidence of what he saw and thought is what he said. I suspect that he was a prisoner of his cultural mish-mash.
Conclusions
This historical episode demonstrates that: (i) there are different segmentations of the spectral continuum; (ii) a universal language of colours does not exist; (iii) in spite of this it is not impossible to translate from one system to another; (iv) by comparing different ways of segmenting the continuum one can guess what the non-European natives or our European ancestors meant by a given colour name; (v) to set up a table like this means to become able to speak many languages at a time; (vi) certainly, in order to elaborate on this table we have been obliged to choose a parameter, in this case the scientific division of the spectrum: in this sense we have shown a certain ethnocentrism – but we have done the only thing one can do when elaborating a translation manual, that is, to start from what we know in order to understand what we do not know as yet.10
If however we have more or less succeeded in understanding the Hanunóo system, we feel more perplexed apropos our conjectures about the ‘poetic’ segmentation or segmentations Gellius was thinking of. If we assume that the reconstruction of the Hanunóo system is correct, we would be able to use different Hanunóo terms to tell a fresh apricot from a dry one (even though in our language we would normally use the same colour term). With the terms of Latin poets, on the contrary, we have not tried to set up a system but have rather suggested that they established informal and imprecise sections of the spectrum.
In other words, the column of Latin poetry suggests that Latin poets (not necessarily as perceiving beings but certainly as poets) were less sensitive to clear-cut spectral oppositions or gradations, and more sensitive to light mixtures of spectrally distant hues. They were not interested in pigments but in perceptual effects due to the combined action of light, surfaces, the nature and purposes of objects. Thus a sword could be fulva as jasper was because the poet saw the red of the blood it might spill. Besides, we have seen in a previous chapter that Valéry saw the sea as having the silvery glare of a slate roof.
Gellius, decadent and synchretist, tends to interpret poetic creativity and invention as elements of a socially accepted code and is not interested in the relationship which colours had with other content oppositions in different cultural systems. But it seems evident that in every example in which Gellius quoted the poet, he tried to neutralise, so to speak, his everyday chromatic reactivity, in order to see and to show an unfamiliar universe of tints, in the sense of das Fremde, or of the ostrannenija effect advocated by Russian Formalists. Those poetic discourses invited us to see the continuum of our experience as if it were never segmented, or as if our customary segmentation had to be radically changed. He was asking us to reconsider a horse, the sea or cucumbers in order to realise that perhaps they had no shades in common, irrespective of the chromatic province where our colour codes have situated them.
I think that a translator of these poets, in order to say what it means for a sword to be fulva, needs recourse, more than to a dictionary, to a table like my last figure. Only thus can one decide how to translate, in a given context, such terms as rutilus, luteus or spadix.
