Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

particular implications for teaching of vocabulary at the beginning stages.
Are meanings universal?
So far as meaning is concerned, the interesting question that has been raised over
the years is whether speakers of all languages possess the same concepts, despite
variation in the words used to express them, or whether meanings vary from one
language to another as well as the words that convey them. The well-known
example is how people see colours. Languages have rather different colour vocab-
ularies; Greek, Italian and many other languages have two ‘blue’ colours where
English people see only light blue and dark blue; Japanese has names for colours
that to an English eye are either in between two colours or are different shades of
the same colour. Originally research showed that languages could be arranged on
a single scale, as seen in Figure 3.2 (a colour version can be found on the website).
Learning and teaching vocabulary
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orange
grey
purple
pink
black
white
green
yellow
red
blue
brown
Dani/Welsh
Tiv
Navajo/Hununoo
English/Hebrew
Figure 3.2 The universal colour scale, according to Berlin and Kay (1969)
This means that the two languages Dani and Welsh only have two basic colour
words, for black and white; Tiv has three, black white and red; Navajo and Hununoo
have five, adding green and yellow; English and Hebrew have eleven. All the lan-
guages of the world fit into this scale somewhere. Learning another language may
mean dropping some colour distinctions, say, ‘red’ if you are learning Welsh, adding
some colour distinction, say, ‘blue’ if you are a Navajo learning English. Again, it is
not just the words that you are learning in another language but their meaning rela-
tionships; ‘black’ in Welsh means ‘not white’, in English, additionally, ‘not
red/blue/. . .’: the borders may be different. For example, to an English eye the green
in a Japanese traffic light looks blue; an Englishman who had never driven in Japan
stopped at a traffic light and his wife said, ‘Don’t forget to go when the green light
comes on’; he sat without moving off for some time till she said, ‘Why don’t you
go?’ and he replied, ‘There’s a blue light but it hasn’t turned green yet.’
So do people who speak Japanese see the world differently from those who speak
English? Or do they see it in the same way but speak differently? This question is

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