Blue–Green Distinction in Language
This is true of the whole Sotho-Tswana branch of languages. They mention it for Tswana, albeit briefly.<p>It is also one of the reasons why English is taking over (and in less serious cases, borrowed from). English is fully developed for social, scientific, technical, complex, specialised and precise communication to an extent rivaled maybe by only a dozen other languages.<p>On the Northern Sotho radio stations you often hear kids say, when asked about colours, &quot;Ke ye blue&quot; (&quot;It is blue&quot;). The radio presenter would sometimes correct the kid and say &quot;Aowa, ka Sesotho re re ke ye tala.&quot; However, there is something deeper at play and something perhaps unassuming yet complex: <i>the kid is more accurate</i>.<p>The value of languages like these is not the ability to convey or store technical or scientific information. But if a language disappears is like losing in one shot the whole of Beethoven&#x27;s work (and a bit more than that). Sotho may have less colour words (yellow=brown too) and also it doesn&#x27;t have delimiters in the sense of &quot;far, further, furthest&quot; (having only &quot;far&quot;, &quot;further&quot;, and then emphasis) but it has... verb modifiers!<p>For example: use = to cause to work. Repair = to cause to be good. Understand = to cause to hear.<p>Wow, am I telling you that verbs convey and encode causality in these languages? Yup, that&#x27;s right.