For any here who are both multilingual and also experience synesthesia/ideasthesia – concepts such as numbers, days of the week, educational subjects, music, etc. being felt or experienced to have a specific color, taste, smell or whatnot – is the color, etc. of that thing different depending on which language you’re thinking in?
It has just occurred to me that while I’ve always pictured Thursday to be a kind of prussian blue, the turkish word for thursday (Perşembe) is bright carnation pink. Sunday is yellow (for obvious reasons), but Pazar is white. Same with anything else. Phys Ed has always been blue, but beden eğitimi is coffee-colored.
The differences with numbers, I could chalk up to relating them with whatever pictures I was given when I was first learning their names, but one cannot present an educational depiction of the concept of Tuesday.
I’d be dying to hear anyone else’s experience with this. I’m super curious, especially, to hear if this difference still stands in people who grew up bilingual.
I don’t really have anything useful to add to the conversation but it’s nice to see a fellow Turk.
As a a multilingual I don’t really associate anything with colors…however, for some reason I often mistake “9” for “D” … in Bosnian, the number 9 is called “devet” where the emphesis is put on the letter “d” … and whenever I have to type a combination of letters and numbers, and 9 comes up, i think of “Devet” and write “D” instead.
