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Message: <blockquote data-quote="looksharp65" data-source="post: 3322440" data-attributes="member: 83771">To be honest, I didn't dig very deep into the subject, but the article points out the fact that our minds depend on language to describe phenomena.If a phenomenon or sensation for some reason lacks a verbal description, whether based on comparison or just a randomly chosen new combinations of sounds, there is no way to communicate to other people how you perceive it.How and why could it be that a sensation as common as the colour of the sky on a clear day allegedly lacked a word in ancient days? I don't know.But it is obvious that the need for a name comes with the expansion of the instances when it's needed.If the sky has a certain colour a clear day, the name could refer to it as sky-coloured. But then, the description would be most confusing as the overcast sky is white, at dusk or dawn it might be orangey, a stormy day it can be dark-grey and so on.So the need for giving the perceived colour a name comes with the ability to reproduce it, i.e. someone invents a dye that reflects "blue" light, regardless of weather conditions.Who can describe the taste of water? Is there anything with a comparable flavour to link it to?If clean water was very scarce, no one had tasted it, and if it then became available in limited amounts, then the taste would become tagged with a name. Since there are no comparable flavours, the name would probably refer to clean water itself. It would be self-explanatory.I'm convinced that most of us Birdforum binocular bums have access to drinkable water since before we can remember, so we don't need to tag the taste with a name. I guess it was something similar with the "clear-day-sky-colour", it was trivial and not reproduceable, so it had no name.//L</blockquote>

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