Rainbows and Thermometers: How Languages Divide Spectrums

Wed, Apr 20, 2022, 8:00 PM EDT

Part of our new monthly speaker series NYC Resistor: Live Circuit!

Most humans see color the same way – but our languages divide up the color spectrum very differently. Some languages group all darker shades of the rainbow under 1 single basic color term, and all the darker shades under another – a light sunny sky and a fresh grass would be described with the same term. Some languages thus have fewer color terms than English, while others (Greek, Russian) recognize more partitions of the rainbow.

And color is just one of the fascinating sensation domains that human languages partition differently – the English way of dividing the temperature spectrum is far from standard.

Researchers have has fascinating (and often wrong) ideas about why this is for centuries – Susanne Vejdemo (PhD), who has published both academic and pop-scientific articles on the subject, will challenge the way we think our perceptional world is structured.

This event will be online via Zoom, and tickets will be Pay-What-You-Wish.