TIL most cultures and peoples all over the world have historically had trouble recognizing the color blue
TIL most cultures and peoples all over the world have historically had trouble recognizing the color blue
Historical evidence reveals that humans possess the remarkable ability to render certain physical appearances invisible if they do not focus on them, including something as fundamental as a color. Specifically, the color blue. While our eyes can perceive among approximately one million colors, it re...
You're viewing a single thread.
I want to better understand this because the sky is clearly a specific color that has been there since the beginning.
How did proto humans not look up at the sky and considered in their feeble brains, "everything above the ground is this very unique color. It's different from the ground, and the plants."
I get that sea and lakes really don't look blue. But did they look up and not see some shade of blue on a clear day?
My understanding is that they don't distinguish blue and green as separate colours. Kind of like pink is just light red and not every language has a separate word for pink and red.
I'm here for this, I recently found out that I can't really distinguish shades very well, so pink just looks mostly red and I have a really hard time telling blue from green, but can usually make it out if I look hard enough and get at least 2 guesses.
Either that or my wife got my doctor in on a really intense year long prank.
I think I have this same issue with red/pink and when a color is one or the other in that in-between area. I also do this with blue and green as well, though I feel less so than pink/red. I also have done colorblindness tests myself and do not test as colorblind (either variety).
For the longest time orange was just called yellow-red so it tracks.
Humans didn't really care much about details until lately.
Iirc either Greek or Latin use the same word for hands as they do arms or something like that.
Orange being seen as shades of either red or yellow is also why they're called redheads, it predates the word Orange entering the english language and being a better descriptor of most of the shades in that range of hair colors.
In modern Greek there's still no distinction between arms and hands, or feet and legs.
So I started skimming the article and:
Gladstone noticed Homer described the sea color as “wine-dark,”
I KNEW IT
It's the fuckin Greek thing again.
Listen, I'll tell a story in three parts.
- People started saying a few years ago that ancient Greeks didn't make a distinction between blue and red, because look at what Homer said, and the sea is obviously not wine colored. Or maybe they had blue wine? But anyway we think they thought they were the same color.
- I always thought it was a bunch of shit. Blue and red are different. They're so clearly different that some people morphed the whole thing into a lack of distinction between blue and green, since that makes quite a bit more sense sense and there definitely are cultures that don't have different names for similar colors like blue and green that English has different words for. But anyway, the issue here was blue and red, and to me, I was always convinced that it was a bunch of shit.
- And look - I WAS RIGHT. I was all ready to write up #1 and #2 in answer to your question and agreeing with you, but without the punchline, but just now I looked it up to be able to bitch about it a little more effectively, and learned that smart people have in the meantime figured out that the whole "wine dark sea" thing was talking about the sea being dark in brightness, like wine is dark, i.e. not light and clear and happy like the Mediterranean often is. But still colored blue presumably. So, not a bunch of surprising and confusing stuff about "blue=red" that sounds suspiciously like nonsense, but something that's perfectly sensible.
TL;DR you are correct. Blue is blue and always was. The people who are telling you blue and red used to be the same are probably just confused, and if Homer comes into the equation then that's a telltale sign that they are absolutely confused and you don't have to listen to them.
That's not what the article is saying though? It doesn't say the Greeks thought the sea was red, it says they didn't have (or at least rarely used) a word for what color it is, so they only described it by its other attributes (like how dark it was).
It says that they couldn't process the entire concept of blue, because they didn't have a name for it. Actually it goes further than that:
Extending his research, he discovered that references to the color blue were absent from all Greek literature. German Jewish philosopher Lazarus Geiger followed Gladstone's lead, analyzing ancient Icelandic sagas, the Koran, Hindu, Chinese folklore, Arabic, and an ancient Hebrew version of the Bible. Geiger found that blue was missing in these texts too. His findings underscored a widespread absence of blue in ancient writings, reshaping our understanding of historical color perception.
In the absence of specific terminology to describe the color blue, scholars were compelled to entertain the possibility that ancient societies didn't perceive this hue, leading to its omission from their lexicon. Were the visual faculties of ancient peoples markedly distinct from our own? What accounts for the apparent oversight of blue in their observations?
I mean she's sort of doing the Tucker Carlson thing here; she doesn't exactly come out and say that all of those cultures didn't have blue because they didn't have the word blue. But she does say in the headline that they couldn't see blue.
I did one DDG search for "word for blue in ancient hebrew," and found this. If what she was saying was what you were saying, I would think it made quite a bit of sense, but as it is I stand by my assessment.
Like reading the wikipedia article about how did this myth develop and what is the actual linguistic shift that was what was going on and some other examples, that was cool to me. And also I learned something from it. I'm not trying to be super critical of this person just writing an article but it just seems like way too much of it is just wrong, but then phrased in this "wouldn't it be cool if" type of way that shields it from being a problem that it's wrong.
There's been research that language shapes how we perceive the world around us. Because there was no word for "blue" there was no concept of blue, the color still existed but their brains just lumped it into "green". Sight works by the visual centers brain taking data from the eyes, throwing most of it out, then building a model which is what the rest of the brain gets to actually "see". That's why optical illusions work.
A commonly cited source for language shaping our perception of color is Jules Davidoff's studies on the Himba tribe. The Himba have no word for blue, and they struggled to pick out the blue square from this color wheel. However, they do have many distinctions for shades of green so when given this color wheel they could easily pick out the square that's a different shade of green (and yes I opened it in MSpaint to check and one of the green squares is a different shade.)
Depending on where you are, water can definitely look very blue or even vivid green.
It's just terminology. People make a much bigger deal out of it than it is.
Homer referred to the ocean as "wine dark", if you've seen pictures of the Mediterranean around Greece, that shit's as Blue as Blue can be, so what it probably boiled down to is that they could "see" blue, but they always understood it as a blackish color or Green if they had distinguished that by that point.
Basically, there wasn't a lot of necessity use in distinguishing blue, so most people didn't until recently.
I think part of this phenomena is that the color of the sky on a clear day just wasn't considered as a color, it was 'blank', the absence of clouds, stars or sunset. Kind of like how water has a flavor but we consider it to be neutral.
