Gladstone as linguist

Abstract

Anyone who urges that differences between languages may correlate with differences in societies' perceptions of the world is open to misunderstanding by those who do not recognise the arbitrariness of their own socially-conditioned perceptions. A striking example is the reception of William Gladstone's nineteenth-century analyses of the vocabulary of the Homeric epics, Europe's first literature. Gladstone anticipated themes that are commonly seen as original advances of twentieth-century anthropology and linguistics; but this achievement has been obscured by a longstanding misinterpretation, according to which Gladstone ascribed Homer's surprising use of colour words to colour-blindness. At present, that misinterpretation is being disseminated more widely than ever before. In fact, Gladstone explicitly did not believe that Ancient Greeks were colour-blind. He did express a range of ideas standardly credited to much more recent scholarship. The reception of Gladstone's Homeric writings demonstrates the strength of the human disposition to trivialize significant cultural differences.