# No "Blue" in the ancient world? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 1, 2016, 1:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-blue-in-the-ancient-world/764653 "2016-09-01T13:39:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 8:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-blue-in-the-ancient-world/764653/41 "2016-09-01T20:35:38Z")
In the context of the developing English Language, it is interesting (but may just be coincidence) that there were not many orange things to talk about. England has only a couple of native orange-coloured flowers and no native orange-coloured edible fruits. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-blue-in-the-ancient-world/764653/42 "2016-09-01T20:38:02Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > In the New World: [Maya Blue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_blue). Youra blue? My dogsa blue. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 8:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-blue-in-the-ancient-world/764653/43 "2016-09-01T20:39:18Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > In the context of the developing English Language, it is interesting (but may just be coincidence) that there were not many orange things to talk about. England has only a couple of native orange-coloured flowers and no native orange-coloured edible fruits. OTOH, we do have a thousand terms for grayish-greenish-brownish. (Only half kidding.) ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 8:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-blue-in-the-ancient-world/764653/44 "2016-09-01T20:58:12Z")
> [@](#): > > Quoth **Mangetout** : > > Interestingly, we did though. > > 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’ In other words, the pink/red distinction is a fairly recent one. That’s part of why I thought it might be an easier example for people to grasp. And surely, a low-intensity red would not be “light red”; it would be “dark red”? ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 9:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-blue-in-the-ancient-world/764653/45 "2016-09-01T21:04:09Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Nobody ever calls “light red” by that name; we instead call it “pink” and think of it as a different color. Pink is actually a light red with some blue added in. It’s more like a light magenta. ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 9:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-blue-in-the-ancient-world/764653/46 "2016-09-01T21:17:56Z")
> [@Amateur\_Barbarian](#): > > That blue and green form a fairly continuous spectrum and that we have representations and understanding of that spectrum doesn’t mean a bright green spring tree against a bright blue spring sky somehow blurs into the same base color. But they do in some languages. Consider looking at a landscape that has trees and grass. The trees are easily distinguished from the grass because they’re a much darker green, while the grass is lighter and yellower. Yet both are indisputably green. In English that is. Suppose there’s a language which has yellow-green as a distinct basic color word, which we’ll call _lime_. For them, the trees are green and the grass is lime. They’re not the same color at all. They’ll think “How can you say those are the same color? Those are clearly and totally different colors. There’s no way lime is the same as green.” You’re doing the same as these hypothetical people except with blue and green. My Latin-English dictionary translates blue as _caeruleus_ and green as _viridis_. Here’s a scholarly paper (pdf) ([Diachronic Trends in Latin’s Basic Color Vocabulary](http://www.google.com/url?q=http://uncw.edu/csurf/explorations/documents/volume%25209%25202014/gering.pdf&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwiM3trFie_OAhVE6WMKHW6zC8AQFggUMAA&usg=AFQjCNGiA2kLNkPE9NJ4bWzlNQ00reikJA)) that says that caeruleus is much less common than viridis in Classical Latin texts. If they were both basic color words, you’d expect them to be of about the same frequency. So clearly caeruleus was not a basic color word in Classical Latin. ---
**Author:** ![Cartoonacy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/848f3c/32.png) [@Cartoonacy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cartoonacy)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 9:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-blue-in-the-ancient-world/764653/47 "2016-09-01T21:30:55Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > What are first tier colors for you? … To me, “first-tier” colors are red, orange, yellow, blue, green, violet. Oh, and brown. ETA: Black, gray, white, too, depending on whether you call them “colors” or not. FWIW, to me a first-tier color would be one that has its own name (red, yellow, green, blue, brown, black, white, gray) and a second-tier color would be one named after a fruit (orange), flower or plant (violet, pink, indigo), dye (purple), etc. In other words, if the color name is just a color name, it’s first-tier; if it was taken from the name of some object or substance of that color, it’s second-tier. Of course, that’s only in English. “Brown” may be first-tier in English, but other languages use their words for coffee, tea, or chocolate to describe the color. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 9:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-blue-in-the-ancient-world/764653/48 "2016-09-01T21:45:27Z")
It’s amazing that nobody has noted the obvious and well-documented reason why blue is an unnecessary word. People simply call blue things sky-colour or sky-green. Everybody in the world is intimately familiar with what colour the sky is, so it’s really simple to use an unambiguous compound word for blue. Modern English does the same thing with many colours. Very few people actually use the word scarlet, we just say blood red. The same goes for colours like pink, buff, violet, rose, duck egg and so forth. they aren’t actually colours, they are comparatives that people understand perfectly well to be colours just from context. Sky is a perfectly valid colour in many languages. Of course, no poet is going to describe anything as sky-dark. It’s an oxymoron because the sky is light. Which is where the need for extra colours may come from. You can describe a colour by comparatives, but it corrupts imagery. > [@Amateur Barbarian](#): > > Green trees against a blue sky clearly register as different things Dry grass against green shrubs even more clearly register as separate things, and would have been seen a lot more by humans of the first 100, 000 years of our existence. Nonetheless, the colour of dry grass was only given a name until a couple of hundred years ago. before that it was just straw coloured or dry-grass coloured or dung coloured. > [@](#): > > 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… Really? You think that when someone on the plains of the Kalahari wanted to describe a blue ox, she went and found some blue pigment and then stripped the bark off a tree and drew picture of a blue ox just so she could describe it? That sounds so absurd that I need to ask for a reference. > [@](#): > > …or colored the ideogram blue. Truly early cultures didn’t have ideograms. Writing is a very recent invention. > [@](#): > > Only when you reduce written language to character/ideogram shapes do you start needing descriptive colors for most things. Once again, I’ll need a reference for this. You are saying that when someone on the Asian steppes was looking for their bay horse, they had no need for a descriptive colour because they had no writing? > [@](#): > > 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.” Oxen are black, white, grey, brindle, roan, tan, yellow, red, blue and about a thousand other colours. The idea that all oxen are or ever have been brown has no basis in reality. And ancient farmers were even more particular about the colour of their livestock than modern people. It was usually of great significance to them. ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 9:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-blue-in-the-ancient-world/764653/49 "2016-09-01T21:52:41Z")
> [@Cartoonacy](#): > > FWIW, to me a first-tier color would be one that has its own name (red, yellow, green, blue, brown, black, white, gray) and a second-tier color would be one named after a fruit (orange), flower or plant (violet, pink, indigo), dye (purple), etc. In other words, if the color name is just a color name, it’s first-tier; if it was taken from the name of some object or substance of that color, it’s second-tier. I’m afraid that’s not an adequate rule. If we could trace the etymology of what you call first-tier colors back to their ultimate origin, we’d almost certainly find that they come from the name of some object or substance. Most such origins are lost in prehistory. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 9:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-blue-in-the-ancient-world/764653/50 "2016-09-01T21:55:09Z")
The argument I heard on Radiolab was that you only bother having a name for a color if you can make that color. Egyptians did have a way to make blue, so they had a name for it. Most other cultures around that time did not. I’ll note that there are languages to this day that don’t actually have the distinction. They use secondary modifiers. Cherokee uses basically sky bluegreen and plant bluegreen to separate the colors. They also refer to orange as basically super-yellow. I’ll also note that you don’t need to see a difference in the hues to see a contrast between the sky and green leaves. The leaves are a much darker color. You can easily see them in black-and-white photos. You need situations where the brightness is the same and color is the only distinguishing feature. Finally, I’ll note two other things from [the Radiolab podcast](http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-isnt-blue/). There is that tribe that they actually showed green and blue color swatches and found they had trouble telling them apart (but could more easily distinguish shades of green). And that one researcher taught his kid all the colors, but avoided letting her know what color the sky was. And it took her a long time to call the sky blue. At first, she couldn’t even figure out what he was pointing at. And her first attempt was "white."So the idea of assigning a color to the sky is not inherent. ---
**Author:** ![MichaelEmouse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/michaelemouse/32/101_2.png) [@MichaelEmouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MichaelEmouse)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 9:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-blue-in-the-ancient-world/764653/51 "2016-09-01T21:57:54Z")
Blake, For what reasons was livestock color of great significance to them? Is there something to the idea of some colors being associated with particular concepts, moods etc from a biological or anthropological point of view (i.e.: more broadly and deeply than the influence of individual cultures)? ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 10:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-blue-in-the-ancient-world/764653/52 "2016-09-01T22:01:54Z")
I’m always amused that Japanese says “tea-color” for brown. Like really, we never needed to talk about brown until there was tea? More likely that whenever we talked about brown things, we already knew what color they were. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-blue-in-the-ancient-world/764653/53 "2016-09-01T22:03:35Z")
Then there’s also [this Tom Scott video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TtnD4jmCDQ) that gives a nice summary. And it has a ton of sources you could look at for more info. According to it, the ancient Greeks seemed to group colors by light and dark more than via hue. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 10:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-blue-in-the-ancient-world/764653/54 "2016-09-01T22:19:12Z")
> [@HMS\_Irruncible](#): > > I’m always amused that Japanese says “tea-color” for brown. Like really, we never needed to talk about brown until there was tea? More likely that whenever we talked about brown things, we already knew what color they were. Have you ever looked at the [etymology of the word “brown” in English?](http://www.dictionary.com/browse/brown) \*Word Origin and History for brown Expand adj. Old English brun “dark, dusky,” developing a definite color sense only 13c., from Proto-Germanic \*brunaz (cf. Old Norse brunn, Danish brun, Old Frisian and Old High German brun, Dutch bruin, German braun), from PIE \*bher- (3) “shining, brown” (cf. Lithuanian beras “brown”), related to \*bheros “dark animal” (cf. beaver, bear (n.), and Greek phrynos “toad,” literally “the brown animal”). \* Emphasis added. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Strangelove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr.strangelove/32/6613_2.png) [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)\ **Post date:** [September 1, 2016, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-blue-in-the-ancient-world/764653/55 "2016-09-01T22:29:34Z")
I searched a [word frequency list](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists/PG/2006/04/1-10000) gathered from Project Gutenberg. Here are the color words I found (excluding ambiguous ones like “gold”): white 268 322465 black 437 191272 red 571 141588 green 633 126431 blue 710 109449 brown 905 85875 gray 1352 60200 yellow 1377 59051 purple 2959 25912 pink 3549 20698 orange 3569 20573 violet 7614 6939 First number is rank, second is frequency. You can see that frequency drops off pretty quickly. There are only two gaps that look larger than usual; after orange there’s a drop from 20573 to 6939, or about 3x. That’s the “traditional” 11-color break. But there’s another significant-looking one, over 2x, between yellow and purple. Going by that, there are only 8 “first-tier” color words. The choice seems arbitrary to me. ---
**Author:** ![glowacks](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/glowacks/32/5548_2.png) [@glowacks](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/glowacks)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2016, 2:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-blue-in-the-ancient-world/764653/56 "2016-09-02T02:15:10Z")
> [@Dr.Strangelove](#): > > I searched a [word frequency list](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists/PG/2006/04/1-10000) gathered from Project Gutenberg. Here are the color words I found (excluding ambiguous ones like “gold”): > > … > > orange 3569 20573 “Gold” is ambiguous but not “orange”? ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2016, 3:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-blue-in-the-ancient-world/764653/57 "2016-09-02T03:12:53Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > Have you ever looked at the [etymology of the word “brown” in English?](http://www.dictionary.com/browse/brown) > > \*Word Origin and History for brown Expand > adj. > Old English brun “dark, dusky,” developing a definite color sense only 13c., from Proto-Germanic \*brunaz (cf. Old Norse brunn, Danish brun, Old Frisian and Old High German brun, Dutch bruin, German braun), from PIE \*bher- (3) “shining, brown” (cf. Lithuanian beras “brown”), related to \*bheros “dark animal” (cf. beaver, bear (n.), and Greek phrynos “toad,” literally “the brown animal”). \* > > Emphasis added. Says who? ---
**Author:** ![Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/earl_snake-hips_tucker/32/3269_2.png) [@Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2016, 3:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-blue-in-the-ancient-world/764653/58 "2016-09-02T03:31:25Z")
I think I’ve read that the Greek word that Homer used did not literally mean ‘wine dark,’ but more like ‘wine-looking.’ Whether that was meant to imply a bluish color (blue wines?) or a possibly a frothy appearance, or something altogether different is another question. ---
**Author:** ![Atamasama](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/atamasama/32/12961_2.png) [@Atamasama](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Atamasama)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2016, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-blue-in-the-ancient-world/764653/59 "2016-09-02T17:15:25Z")
The word for green in Japanese is “midori”. But it’s a relatively recent word, in the past the word “ao” meant both blue and green. Midori as a concept didn’t enter Japanese culture until the Heian period (about 1,000 years ago) and while that seems like a long time ago, consider that Japan has been inhabited by a single, evolving culture for around 15,000 years. And Midori was still considered just a shade of Ao. Imagine that teal was a primary color, and green was just a shade of teal. Green wasn’t fully considered a separate color until after World War II (during the US occupation). Even now, what we in the western world would consider to be green doesn’t quite match up to the Japanese concept of it. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [September 2, 2016, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-blue-in-the-ancient-world/764653/60 "2016-09-02T17:24:28Z")
> [@Atamasama](#): > > …consider that Japan has been inhabited by a single, evolving culture for around 15,000 years. To stretch a point. It’s just as accurate to say the US is the end product of a 15-20,000-year-old local culture. (Consider, for example, the First Nations’ influence on the Constitution.) But that is of course largely absurd; US history as we know it begins in the 1500s. Leaving out traditional claims, Japanese culture as we currently know it began about the same time as the Romans. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-blue-in-the-ancient-world/764653.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-blue-in-the-ancient-world/764653.md?page=4)