Taste the Rainbow
The Language Log’s discussion of umami got me thinking about Berlin and Kay’s research on basic color terms. An explanatory quote from their post:
[H]ere’s a quote from I.E.T. de Araujo, M. L. Kringelbach, E. T. Rolls, and P. Hobden, Representation of Umami Taste in the Human Brain, J Neurophysiol 90: 313-319, 2003:
Recently, the taste referred to by the Japanese word umami has come to be recognized as a “fifth taste” … (after sweet, salt, bitter, and sour; umami captures what is sometimes described as the taste of protein). In fact, multidimensional scaling methods in humans … have shown that the taste of glutamate [as its sodium salt monosodium glutamate (MSG)] cannot be reduced to any of the other four basic tastes. Specific receptors for glutamate in lingual tissue with taste buds have been also recently found. Umami taste is found in a diversity of foods like fish, meats, milk, tomatoes, and some vegetables, and is produced by the glutamate ion and also by some ribonucleotides (including inosine and guanosine nucleotides), which are present in these foods.
So Japanese has a word for a whole dimension of taste that goes almost unrecognized in English. This is a great example of cultural relativity, which would claim that the categories by which we define tastes are different because we’re lacking a word for a certain basic taste.
One could make the same argument about colors. English speakers have a set of basic colors like red, yellow, blue and orange. All other colors seem to come from those colors: teal is a “type of” blue. Who’s to say that another culture can’t have teal as one of its basic colors, and that the color we call blue is, for them, a type of teal? To put it another way:
“There is a continuous gradation of color from one end of the [color] spectrum to another. Yet an American describing it will list the hues such as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple–or something of the kind. There is nothing either in the spectrum or human perception of it which would compel its division in this way.” (Gleason, 1961, from Palmer, 1999)
In the same way, there’s nothing in the “spectrum” of flavors that would incline a language to divide it up into the sweet/bitter/salty/sour classification we’ve got in English.
Or is there?!?!
Well, the cultural relativity of color took a beating from Berlin and Kay, who basically discovered that every culture has approximately the same set of basic colors. There’s no culture that teaches its kids about fuschia and ochre before it teaches them about red and blue. Red and blue are universally important. This discovery about categorization has a basis in the structure of our visual hardware. If we have neurons in our retinas that respond to red, yellow, green and blue (which it looks like we do), that would explain why those colors are so salient for us. In other words, it seems like our retinal receptors do much of the categorization for us, and so our basic color categories are determined by the fact that we’re human, not by the fact that we speak English.
But the same setup has been found in the biology of taste, and yet taste words don’t exhibit the same phenomena. There are receptors for five types of taste, so every language should have around 5 basic flavor words. What gives?
There are essential differences between sight and taste. Flavor has always been a bit trickier to describe than color. Colors can be arranged on a spectrum, tastes cannot. Still, it’s hard to see how these differences account for the difference in categorization.
Another possibility: Berlin and Kay talked about languages that gain new color terms as the language develops. Perhaps the addition of “savory” to our taste lexicon is a step in the evolution of English, or something. Again, that sounds iffy.
It’s terribly inconsistent and I demand to know who is responsible.
Update: I must be new at this. (Palmer, 1999) is Vision Science by Stephen Palmer (MIT Press). Encyclopedic textbook of all things vision-related (”visionary”?).
April 10th, 2005 at 11:49 pm
Weeeell… my thought as to why this isn’t a word we usually see is that - in my opinion - there aren’t a lot of foods that are specifically, quintesentially, umami-ish in flavor. Some cheeses, maybe, and some meats… but in my experience most umami flavors are generally mixed with others, like salty or sweet. The other four major flavors have something naturally occuring that we can point to: sugar, or salt, or some types of citrus, or other plant matter. With the exception of MSG, which I don’t think anyone generally tastes plain, there isn’t much that people would’ve experience that would make them think of umami… not on a basic level, at least.
But given that, I’m not sure why it develops in some places and not others; perhaps this is connected to how subtle the cuisine generally is? This might explain why one sees it in Asian cooking but not in Western foods, generally.
I would also argue that in our culture, we’ve tended to use more specific words - “tangy,” “savory,” “tingly,” etcetera.
April 11th, 2005 at 10:05 am
As far as I know there are no neurons that respond to yellow. The rod cells do dark and light, and there are three types of cone cells for red, green and blue. Otherwise we would need more colors of light to make all the colors that we can see, but computers and televisions both just use red, green and blue.
also, you should notify people that name and e-mail are required fields. It’s bad user interface not to inform people when they have to fill out a certain field. As you well know.
I frankly find it silly to require e-mails, anyway.
April 12th, 2005 at 11:50 pm
The best theory of color processing we’ve got is a dual-process theory in which RGB cone cells feed into three other types of receptors (also in the retina). Those receptors pair up the colors red/green, yellow/blue and white/black.
(Among the facts this accounts for is this: although you can technically make yellow out of red, green and blue, it doesn’t look like yellow is a combination of any of those colors.)
April 14th, 2005 at 2:36 pm
The first explanation to occur to me is that while the vast majority of cultures in the world see the vast majority of major color groups (and therefore share them conceptually), flavors very widely across the world. I imagine there exists a place in the world where one could live most of one’s life and not experience, for example, sourness. Flavor is much more culturally-dependent than color, the existence of umami is a perfect example of this (though, of course, a circular argument under the circumstances).
April 16th, 2005 at 11:35 am
Ah, I dig that theory. I’d be really interested to see how that matched up with a survey of languages. I mean, American food has always had a lot of meat and umami, as have the Europeans. I’m pretty sure that European languages don’t have a word for umami, because if they did, English would have one.
But this would totally square with cultures that don’t eat a lot of cooked meat or protein.
June 17th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
electronic games poker hold em…
convulsion subsection exhaled?…