Did people really never see the colour blue until modern times?

[editor]

This is a fascinating article:

This isn't another story about that dress, or at least, not really.

It's about the way that humans see the world, and how until we have a way to describe something, even something so fundamental as a color, we may not even notice that it's there.

Until relatively recently in human history, "blue" didn't exist, not in the way we think of it.

As the delightful Radiolab episode "Colors" describes, ancient languages didn't have a word for blue — not Greek, not Chinese, not Japanese, not Hebrew. And without a word for the color, there's evidence that they may not have seen it at all.

Every language first had a word for black and for white, or dark and light. The next word for a color to come into existence — in every language studied around the world — was red, the color of blood and wine.

After red, historically, yellow appears, and later, green (though in a couple of languages, yellow and green switch places). The last of these colors to appear in every language is blue.

The only ancient culture to develop a word for blue was the Egyptians — and as it happens, they were also the only culture that had a way to produce a blue dye.

If you think about it, blue doesn't appear much in nature — there are almost no blue animals, blue eyes are rare, and blue flowers are mostly human creations. There is, of course, the sky, but is that really blue? As we've seen from Geiger's work, even scriptures that contemplate the heavens continuously still don't necessarily see it as "blue."

http://uk.businessinsider.com/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2

 

[Puddy_Tat]

 

[FridgeMagnet]

Oddly enough this came up before all the dress bollocks when I was researching Chinese colour symbolism for Chinese New Year. Traditionally there is no word for "blue".

Although Chinese now has a separate word for "blue" (蓝), it traditionally grouped most shades of blue together with green under the name 青 (qing), whose character derives from the idea of sprouting plant life. This color corresponds to the Chinese element of wood (i.e., vegetative life), represents nature and renewal, and often indicates spring. The color implies vigor and vitality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_in_Chinese_culture

 

[DotCommunist]

dothraki couldn't see red often enough

 

[maomao]

Oddly enough this came up before all the dress bollocks when I was researching Chinese colour symbolism for Chinese New Year. Traditionally there is no word for "blue".



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_in_Chinese_culture

Yes, the character 蓝 lan originally refers to a kind of plant and 青 covered blue and green.

 

[Mumbles274]

Didnt the Greek call the sky colour 'bronze'

/end QI info

 

[Maurice Picarda]

Didnt the Greek call the sky colour 'bronze'

/end QI info

Rosy fingered dawn, as well.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

I've seen a few people on the net saying "oh this must be rubbish" about this article but really it seems perfectly believable to me. Why would you develop words for things you don't need to refer to? If the only blue thing you see is the sky you can say "sky coloured during the day when it's not cloudy"—not like the sky isn't lots of different colours anyway. People would have thought "oh that's a different shade of qing", it wouldn't be that they couldn't tell the difference.

In the other direction, people who deal with colours a lot—artists, designers, paint technologists etc—have specialised vocabularies for colour that are much more specific than ones in general English.

 

[Maurice Picarda]

Sea. Plenty of early, Mediterranean, seafaring cultures.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

Historically people seem to have described the sea mostly in terms of its state but not referring to colour, though that's just my impression tbh (but there are many more words for the state of the sea than land dwellers understand).

 

[Yu_Gi_Oh]

In The Odyssey the sea is referred to as wine coloured quite frequently. Never blue though.

 

[Mumbles274]

I found the R4 piece mentioned on the dress thread interesting.. In how the brain filters out colours that ate predominant so we can visualise the world effectively. Well that's how I understood it

 

[Yu_Gi_Oh]

Wine-dark, specifically.

There is a land called Crete in the midst of the wine-dark sea

 

[Mumbles274]

As an aside.. I remember Tripping years ago and for some reason I had taken a sign from college that was advertising the "trips' coming up.. Well, think its clear why I had this piece of card in my hand.. But it was blue card with orange letters.. And although I was tripping the contrast of colours meant that in light one colour was bright and one was dark, but in shade the opposite was the case.. I'm sure this can be replicated without psychedelic drugs.. Light and colour is relative

 

[FridgeMagnet]

Wine-dark, specifically.

Like the deep blue sea I suppose, except without a word for blue.

 

[Maurice Picarda]

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/201...ls-hacked-the-rainbow-and-got-stumped-on-blue

And animals that look blue, aren't blue. They cheat.

The butterflies have tiny transparent structures on the surface of their wings that bounce light in just the right way to make them appear a vibrant blue that's so bright it almost hurts your eyes. But if you grind up the wings, the dust — robbed of its reflective prism structures — would just look gray or brown

 

[The Boy]

Rosy fingered dawn, as well.

I'm sure she did.

 

[Maurice Picarda]

I'm sure she did.

Homerphobe.

 

[DotCommunist]

This early saga mentions blue quite a lot

 

[kabbes]

More weirdness: magenta, being a combination of two colours of light that are at opposite ends of the spectrum, doesn't actually exist.

 

[Chilli.s]

Blue is quite a rare colour in nature, earliest blue pigment used in UK was woad used since ancient times. Must have had a name, long lost.

 

[DotCommunist]

lapis lazuli was well known in ye ancient days.

 

[Yetman]

The colour orange, is named after the fruit orange. Until relatively recently, orange things were called red.

Some women can also see some shades of colours that no men, and only some other women can see.

 

[Plumdaff]

http://www.boreme.com/posting.php?id=30670#.VPSFwS5N-Oc

Link to an excerpt from a really interesting Horizon on this topic, looks at how our understanding of colour is linked directly to language development and great bit where some people from the Himba tribe (who have a very different linguistic understanding of colour) undergo some colour wheel testing. Shows how an ancient Greek might not have spotted blue, as modern Himba can't either.

 

[Pickman's model]

given the prominence of blue on eg the death mask of tutankhamun it's clear the antient egyptians saw it.

 

[bi0boy]

Old English used the word for woad to describe blue, as I guess it was the main blue thing that most people would encounter.

Similarly orange is named after the fruit.

 

[skyscraper101]

Oranges are not the only fruit.

 

[smmudge]

Makes you wonder what colours we're still not seeing.

 

[weltweit]

Makes you wonder what colours we're still not seeing.

I think Deer see in black and white. At least hunters and photographers are told they can wear bright colours when stalking them to no negative effect. IIRC

 

[weepiper]

Oddly enough this came up before all the dress bollocks when I was researching Chinese colour symbolism for Chinese New Year. Traditionally there is no word for "blue".



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_in_Chinese_culture

The Scottish Gaelic word for blue (gorm) also means green. For example, the sky and grass can both be described as 'gorm'.