Philosopher Wittgenstein says that "the limit of my language means the limit of my world". One theory that supports this statement is that people couldn't see the blue colour until they have the word blue. However, it has been proven to be false in Skeptics: Could people perceive the color blue in ancient times?
So, is there any scientific evidence that prove (or at least agree with) this statement?
There is this quote from a cognitive linguistics book.
we introduced the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the idea that language might play some role in determining non-linguistic thought, and that speakers of different languages might therefore have different conceptual systems. We concluded that, while the strong version of this hypothesis is rejected by most linguists, there is some evidence in favour of the weak version of the hypothesis. Although cognitive linguistics makes the case for a common conceptualising capacity, accounting for general cross-linguistic patterns, such a position is nevertheless consistent with and even predicts substantial cross-linguistic variation. Given that the linguistic system both reflects the conceptualising capacity, and in turn influences the nature of knowledge by virtue of the language-specific categories it derives, cognitive linguistics is consistent with a weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
This is not quite your question, but it's the closest thing I know of. There's a significant amount of work suggesting that purely morphological attributes can shape conceptualization: looking at the impact of grammatical gender on the attributes assigned to the nouns that have a specific grammatical gender--that is, grammatically male nouns are rated higher on stereotypically masculine attributes and lower on stereotypically feminine attributes. You could argue that morphological sway on the semantic content of the noun is a "limit", I suppose.
Some studies have done nice pairing of languages to demonstrate reverse effects on the same nouns according to different grammatical gender. If you're interested in reading the studies, Konishi 1993 is a good place to start.
First some linguistic theory background.
Noam Chomsky has hypothesized that language developed internally to facilitate certain aspects of human cognition. According to Chomsky's hypothesis, human ability to articulate language audibly for communication appeared much later. Chomsky claims that the rather sudden emergence of language as communication points to the longer evolution of this internal language as an underpinning of human cognition.
Further, Chomsky holds that this evolution of language results from an "organ" in the human mind, which evolved to provide the facility of language. That is why a child of 18 months can begin to speak, despite rather sparse informational language context.
This all suggests that human cognition is tied intimately to language, and that human language is a narrower facility than might otherwise be thought.
Therefore, the limits of human language, generally, almost certainly limits your cognition, perception of the world, and capacity to cognitively model reality.
There are, however, other cognitive systems than language. The system that allows temporal spatial imaging, for example. Another example is the visual system that perceives color, which is almost certainly much older than the human cognitive system, evolutionarily speaking. Therefore, even prior to having the capacity of speech, our evolutionary ancestors could perceive blue, even without a word for it. However, they lacked the capacity to imbue the perception with meaning beyond the drives that color perceptions trigger, such as eating ripe fruit.
Does this mean that they really did not see what we call "blue"? That is an interesting point for further discussion.
"Blue" exists in a context of blue. If the mind presented itself with the linguistic expression (word) "blue" at every perception of the colour blue, then the world is limited to the expression. The context of blue-ness (the experience at 10 fathoms below the surface of the sea), and the complexity of expressions incorporating blue-ness is Wittgenstein's point. The richness of blue-ness and language comes from the unlimited ways to which it (a concept/perception) may be referred or expressed.
Language development in children as an indicator of social advantages would support this view of the merits of richness for setting limits to a world... Language and Social Disadvantage: Theory into Practice, or The Contribution of Early Communication Quality to Low-Income Children’s Language Success
In terms of the origin of the colour.. Why would the word "blue" be necessary if the colour was imperceptible? Perhaps this is an ease-of-use linguistic negation. For example: blue replaced the "not red", "not crimson" naming scheme - a world limited by nouns.
Very interesting question! Patrick Winston - profesor at MIT said: "If you can name something, you get power over it!" Prove by contradiction: Suppose someone cannot explorer new things. Then give 3 cards (pink, blue, green) to that person who does not know blue as a color. The person will recognize "blue" as a color. If you don't tell the name "blue" it will be some other words, for sure, but we have the ability for generalization which leads to no limits of our world.
There is actually whole field dedicates for this: Cognitive linguisitics
Cognitive linguistics (CL) an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from both psychology and linguistics. It describes how language interacts with cognition, how language forms our thoughts, and the evolution of language parallel with the change in the common mindset across time.
