It may sound like a self-evident truth (at least to me), but now there’s scientific evidence to back it up – native speakers of Russian, a language with no single word for the colour blue, are better able to distinguish between different shades of blue. While that’s not the most useful statistic when taken on its own, the psychological implications are quite impressive – our vocabulary directly effects our perceptions of the world around us. Doubly interesting, when you consider that human vocal languages may well have evolved directly from the gestural languages of apes, rather than from primitive experiments with sound. I wonder if chimps have a gesture for the colour blue?