The other day I heard bits of this RadioLab bit while during errands in the car on the lack of the concept “blue” in the ancient world. I was skeptical.
But it doesseemthat there is rarely a word for blue in ancient languages and primitive societies. There is instead a word for the concept that is green and blue -“grue”.
Blue sky commonly around … so why not?
I think this is GQ but could be IMHO so please move if appropriate, but my guess is that this is culture impacting actual perception, as happens with language sounds. Discriminating the sky from anything else is unimportant in the hunter-gatherer societies and was in the ancient world, no word, no practice, decreased actual perception.
As someone who just had reason to do an extensive lookup on “blue” and related words in Egyptian, I call bullshit. The word ‘khesbed’ means blue in a number of contexts and when paired with the “strong/powerful” ideogram, means “blue like the heavens.”
This is a large subject. You might think that every language has a word for red, a word for blue, a word for yellow, a word for green, etc. - but this is not the case.
In essence, all human beings (who are not colourblind) see colours the same, but different languages may have different terminologies for colour which cannot necessary be easily translated from one language to another.
Different ranges of different spectra of colour can have terms, or lack terms, in different languages.
As a culture advances in sophistication, this can be measured by how many color terms their language has. So early language (and early cultures) would have just Light and Dark. Whereas England today names 11 colors, thus a far more advanced culture.
Of course the good ol’ USA has millions of words for different colors; �C578, &#FF569D, 󊁽, etc etc etc …
But as any Russian can tell you, the word for the color of the sky is different from the word for “blue”.
An example from closer to home might help. In English, we can recognize and describe the distinction between, say, “blue” and “light blue”, or “green” and “light green”. But we still consider “blue” and “light blue” to be different shades of what’s fundamentally the same color. We do not, however, do the same thing with “light red”. Nobody ever calls “light red” by that name; we instead call it “pink” and think of it as a different color.
Similarly, Homer would never actually mistake the color of wine for the color of the ocean. But he might say that they’re basically two different shades of the same fundamental color.
That’s right. The spectrum is continuous - and different cultures break it up different ways. It seems absurd to me that green and blue could be thought of as the same thing, but there’s really no natural dividing line between the two.
Green trees against a blue sky clearly register as different things; looking at a prism spectrum, which few if any ancient humans would have ever seen, is a distortion of the setting.
A lot of early cultures lack words for colors because they simply used the colors instead - if they saw a blue ox, they drew an image of an ox in blue, or colored the ideogram blue. Only when you reduce written language to character/ideogram shapes do you start needing descriptive colors for most things. (A converse: oxen are brown, so there’s not a lot of need to include color value when writing or drawing “ox” or “steer” or “bull” or “cow.”)
I read an anthropological anecdote, about a researcher who was in contact with some isolated tribe, and asked them what the color of the sky was “in between the clouds.” The native person looked at her like she was crazy and declared that there was “no color” at all there.
The fact that the sky is blue doesn’t mean one needs a word for blue. Think about someone per-civilized* person in central Europe, on a savanna in Africa, central Asia, etc.
How many blue-like-the-sky things are there that are important enough that there’s a need for a color name? A. There has to be several such things. B. The common color of such things is important enough to talk about.
Once civilization kicks in and people starting making a bunch of dyed/colored stuff, then color naming takes off. To me, ancient Rome, ancient Egypt, etc., aren’t ancient enough for this topic.
Just for the sake of current pedantry - the hue would be red, the chroma would be the intensity or saturation. When it comes to value or brightness, we have tints and shades - a tint is the color + white and a shade is the color + black.
Pink is really a tint of red and something like burgundy would be a shade of red. Technically, “light red” would be a low intensity red, not pink.
This part makes a lot of sense. There’s not much of any shade of blue in nature. The sky, some waters, gems, some people’s eyes, some birds, not many people ever see a mandrill, some berries. Most of those blues are pretty dark too. There are a lot of reds and greens in nature in varying shades.
Then as mentioned in various ways, we understand how colors combine now, without that knowledge I wouldn’t understand pink and red and orange to have that much in common, or purple and blue. My eyes are somewhat insensitive to blue so I see the sky to be more like gray than distinctively blue. I think it’s difficult from our modern perspective to understand how people long ago perceived colors.
Sure, barring rainbows, ancient humans wouldn’t have contemplated the spectrum a lot, but the colour gamut is still continuous - so even if ancients were only looking at a collection of ‘blue’ things such as the sea, blueberries, the sky (on a clear day, in England?), and the wing feathers of a jay, the decision to group these colours together or apart is a decision, not an observation of some natural boundary.
The colour pink is named after a flower called Pinks. Before we started calling pink ‘Pink’, people called it ‘light reddish’ or ‘white flushed with red’