The Color Blue is Actually a Relatively Recent Hue to Humans

[riversedge]

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-color-blue-is-actually-a-relatively-recent-hue-to-humans?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us





By Max Bennett May 27, 2024 8:00 AM

Despite the blue seas and skies of Greece, the ancient Greeks lacked a word for "blue." (Credit: hydra viridis)


Why so blue? This most calming color has woven itself into the fabric of our language, and it’s hard to imagine a world without the azure hue of the ocean or sky. However, there’s some evidence to suggest that the people of the past didn’t see the same world that we do, or, at least, didn’t describe it in the same way.

Historical records in various languages, from ancient Greek to ancient Hebrew, make no explicit references to blue, despite having terms for other hues like black and red. Its absence from these records suggest that the color may have simply come out of the blue.


In the 1850s, British scholar and soon-to-be Prime Minister William Gladstone became one of the first to claim that ancient works were written in a blue-less era. Perhaps the most infamous instance of this omission was in Homer’s Odyssey, an ancient Greek poem cataloging the trials and tribulations of mortal humans in a world of gods and myth.

Despite being over 12,000 lines long, the epic makes no attempt to reference the color blue. Instead, the vast expanses of ocean the characters cross are described as “wine-like.” Even the sky, notorious for being blue, is likened to “copper” and “iron” when directly translated. Were the ancient Greeks simply incapable of perceiving all the colors we know today?

If so, they may not have been alone. Emboldened by Gladstone’s postulation, scholars have also noted a profound lack of “blue-ness” in Chinese and Icelandic stories, the earliest Hebrew versions of the Bible, and complex Hindu Vedic hymns. Some groups today, like the indigenous Himba people of Namibia, don’t even have a separate term for blue. Linguistically, it is indistinguishable from green......................................

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White Beach in Ithaca Island, Greece

[FirstLight]

1. Fascinating!!!

I'm studying anthropology and linguistics, and this is going in my bookmarks for that lecture!

It's interesting to think about the translations, but there not being any reference to it in other places is really REALLY interesting.

reading it now...very cool

[Jim__]

2. It may be related to language.

From The Curious Case Of The Missing Color Blue

...

Author of the book Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, Guy Deutscher, writes that perhaps the reason for the lack of distinction between colors is because blue just isn’t a color that appears frequently in nature, so we didn’t need a word for it. The only ancient language with a distinct word for blue was that of the Egyptians, who used blue dyes.

So, what about the sky?! That great blue thing looming above us all the time! How did people not have a distinct word for it? Well, maybe it’s not as obvious as we think.

Deutscher performed an informal experiment on his daughter, never inquiring about the color of the sky or ask her what color it is. He taught his daughter the colors, but intentionally never mentioned the color of the sky. Once she was confident in her learnings, Deutscher took her outside, pointed at the sky, and asked her, “What color is that?” To which she had no response.

Deutscher’s daughter had no hesitation pointing out other objects that were blue, but it took about four more months before she gave him the answer: white. It would be a whole other month until she called the sky blue for the first time, but even then she went back and forth between blue and white, depending on when she was asked. She eventually settled on blue, but it was about 6 months after she had first started recognizing blue objects in earnest.

...

There is a also short discussion at How Language Changes our Perception of the World. An excerpt:

Our language affects what we see and how we process that information. The grammar and vocabulary of each language instills in its speakers a particular way of looking at the world. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, also known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis, proposes that the particular language one speaks influences the way one thinks about reality. How does that influence work?

...

I don't believe the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is generally accepted, but it is interesting to think about.

[DJ Synikus Makisimus]

3. It can also vary by culture.

The standard work is, or at least was when I was in grad school, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. Not exactly a page-turner.

[Igel]

6. Yes.

"Orange" is a new word in English. It's named after the fruit. But they clearly saw the shade, which was "yellow" or "orange", depending or whether it was more yellow or more red.

So's "brown." What we call brown was either "dark" or "black", but not necessarily a "dark black", and depended on the shade of brown.

There's a fairly universal hierarchy to color terms. Most languages get by with a fairly small number. (From when I was in grad school.) But as your language's lexicon increases, so do terms that express finer gradations. "Teal," "burgundy", "celadon", "lapis" or "turquoise."

Even now, a lot of native speakers don't know what "celadon" is, and my father, not highly educated, stared when asked whether he preferred the blouse that was "teal" or the one that was "malachite".

Most civilization's literature refer to things that everybody knows. You refer to them and you know the color. Worf-Sapir is oft proven right but never to within plausible belief. Unless you "want to believe" you stare and think, "Interesting, but what's the rest of the non-cherry-picked data have to say?"

[DJ Synikus Makisimus]

7. I think the problem with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

is in the application, since some tend to be determinist about it. Because humans are rather complex beings, it's better IMHO to say something like "language CAN (or MAY) influence thought and behavior (and perception)," rather than "language DOES." Yeah, there are a few who reject it wholesale, but that goes for almost anything - it gives academics something to fight over.

Me, I always wondered what Sapir thought about his name being attached to it.

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. 'celadon' is new to me, and I reckon my vocabulary is pretty good

Looking it up, it seems it's mainly used for pottery. As for "malachite", I knew it is a copper ore, but the first 2 dictionaries I looked in only define it as that (one describing it as "light to dark green", so not very useful to describe a shade of green), and not as a colour. So I'm with your dad.

[FakeNoose]

4. They also had no concept of wearing sunglasses or protecting their eyesight from the sun

It's possible that early humans were born with the ability to see blue, but their retinas were damaged at an early age. By adulthood the ability to see the color blue would have been (could have been) destroyed and therefore they had no word for blue.

I'm just spitballin' here.

[jgo]

5. Radiolab episode on this from 2012 worth listening to, or reading the transcript

https://radiolab.org/podcast/211213-sky-isnt-blue