Living with the Rongkong people all those standard cultural cues went out the window, if there even were windows. And let me tell you that colour is not perceived the same culturally around the world. Come on Ian, that can’t be true. Blue is blue and green is green and red is red. You just have to learn the new word for a colour and substitute it. Don’t believe it. It is not true. There are cultural differences in colours. Playing Uno with the Rongkong taught me that. We would take Uno cards with us to the villages we lived in or surveyed and would teach the people to play Uno. They loved it but confusion reigned. They learned you played (or put down) Uno cards by following the number or following the colour. So you could change suit or number according to the card you played. However constantly my daughters would complain that a card played was wrong. You can’t play a green card on a tabled blue card unless the number is the same. We soon learned the Rongkong word for blue was [maido]. But the Rongkong word for green was also [maido].
Hang on a moment that can’t be true. There had to be a subtle difference in those words to distinguish blue from green. Maybe green is [maidoh] with a silent [h] or [ma’ido] with a glottal stop. Perhaps the difference was related to vowel length as in [maaido] or [maiido] or perhaps there was a voiceless vocoid in there somewhere like [maiIdo]. There must be something in the pronunciation of the word which is different and thus making the distinction between “blue” and “green”. But after extensive investigation I realized there wasn’t. I tested the range of vowel sounds with the international phonetic alphabet to see if there was minimal pairing between words with vowels not in standard use. No, that wasn’t the answer. On another occasion I took a colour wheel to one village in order to go through the range of colours in the spectrum. Finally, one old man I was working with turned to me and said, “They are the same you fool.”
“No!” How can an entire people group see blue and green as the same colour? I pointed at the sky and said what colour is that? “Maido”. While pointing to tropical rainforest I asked, “What colour is that?” “Maido” of course. Rongkong people as a language group don’t distinguish between blue and green in all of its variety or shades. They are all classified as maido. It came as a shock to me but I soon learned there are other language groups which do the same around the world and not just with the blues and greens.