Greetings Ven. Dhammanando
I did read the article, but not all the way to the end. So for that, my apologies. I had a memory of seeing this information years ago, so searched it up to post a link that someone could conveniently digest. I will ensure that I read any linked articles more thoroughly in the future.
Having read to the end I can see why the author casts doubt upon the idea. Still, I could not believe that the BBC would have shown a documentary to this effect unless there was at least some supporting evidence.
Having dug a little more, I’ve found my way through the dead end that the author of the original article, Mark Liberman, found himself at.
From what I have found, the link between language and perception is very real. I’ve posted the trail of breadcrumbs I followed and what I found at the end. I will edit my original reply to incorporate this new information.
Given the information at hand, it seems my conclusion in the previous post is still warranted. Replacing multiple Pali words with a single English word is a bad idea.
The author of the article, Mark Liberman, casts doubt on the experiment
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17970
The same author contacts Serge Caparos, named in the BBC, to find nformation on a similar experment
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18237
In the letter, Serge names Debbie Robertson as the main experimenter.
Hello,
I recently read your post on Language Log about a recent Business Insider article that claimed (via a link to BBC documentary footage) that the Himba people of Namibia could not distinguish blue from green.
I was looking into this for my own purposes, and I contacted Serge [Caparos], who was the person shown in the video. He wrote me back as follows:
In 2011, the BBC approached Jules Davidoff about his published colour work (that he did with Debi Roberson between 1998 and 2008). They wanted to send out a team to film something on it. Jules explained to them that they had not done any colour work in Namibia for several years, but that the field site was still active as I was there collecting data on visual attention. So Jules asked me to set up a demonstration for the BBC. The colour work is not actually my work, it’s mostly Debi Roberson’s, so any question you have might best be sent to her.
Debbie Robertson’s published research paper
ProgressInColour.pdf (213.1 KB)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/43627151_Colour_categories_and_category_acquisition_in_Himba_and_English
The research paper provides a more nuanced view, however concludes that language affects perception:
A series of cross-cultural studies of adult colour categorization have found consistent differences in a range of perceptual and memory tasks, systematically linked to the colour categories in each culture (Davidoff, Davies & Roberson 1999; Roberson, Davies & Davidoff 2000). Most recently, Roberson, Davidoff, Davies & Shapiro (2005) have shown that, even though two coding systems may appear to be superficially very similar, speakers of the two languages encode, remember and discriminate colour stimuli in different ways. Himba, a language spoken by a semi-nomadic, cattle-herding people in South West Africa, shows similarity in its number of linguistic categories for colour to Berinmo, the Papua New Guinean language previously studied by Roberson et al. (2000). Both languages have five basic colour categories, according to the criteria of Kay et al. (1991). However, Himba participants showed categorical perception only for their own linguistic categories and not for either the supposed universal categories, as occurring in English, or to those of the Berinmo language.