Agreed. They saw the same rainbow as us (assuming their eyes and the principles of optics were the same) but there no particular reason to divide the spectrum into seven colours, neither is there any ‘distinct’ about it. It’s continuous.
Right, you could just as easily say that they discerned the same six colors as we do, or the same three, or the same five thousand.
In this image, for example, there are only really three colours: reddish, greenish and bluish.
Wow do I disagree. That is one of the few pictures I’ve seen where I’d actually say I did see 7 distinct colors.
I think that just proves the point. There is objectively nothing distinct in that image.
Your terminology belies your prejudice. “ish” means you see variations in those colors. I redily see at least six distinct colors, although there are three primary colors and three lighter variations of those colors.
Sure it does. That’s the point; assigning ‘distinct’ colours to a continuous spectrum is prejudice. We’re all doing it - we just don’t all seem to be admitting it.
I could just as easily have said there are 8 distinct colours visible there:
Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Turquoise, Blue, Indigo, Violet
Or 9:
Maroon, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Turquoise, Blue, Indigo, Violet
The point is that they’re not at all distinct. You’re arbitrarily drawing lines between continuous ranges of colors.
Different languages divide the spectrum in different ways, but there is an interesting underlying universal pattern first described by Berlin & Kay in their famous Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Some languages, hard as it to believe, only have basic terms for black and white; other colors are considered shades of black and white. For languages with more than two colors, they follow these rules:
All languages contain terms for black and white.
If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red.
If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both).
If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow.
If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue.
If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown.
If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains terms for purple, pink, orange, and/or gray.
One language that violates these rules (deliberately, since it was created by a linguist) is Klingon.
–Mark
Probably not thousands. If we’re sticking just with the spectrum we can only discern about one hundred. And a rainbow is not a cleanly refracted spectrum.
The fun part of what markn+ has shared with us is that people have trouble recalling colors when they don’t have words for them. So if you give someone an infinite color paint set and ask them to draw a rainbow, there is no reason to expect them to use seven colors unless they were taught that there are seven in a rainbow.
You would think that blue would be one of the first colours to get a name. Look up, what colour is that?
Apparently, the Ancient Greeks didn’t have a word for the colour blue, so they described it as bronze; which would add extra complexity to the colour of a certain dress.
The Radiolab podcast covered this.
First, the evidence suggests that a color doesn’t become culturally significant—and thus become identifiable and needing a name—until the society in question has the means to reproduce it. Blue dye was technologically difficult to invent and so it was one of the last colors to be identified.
Second, experimentation showed that people don’t necessarily see the sky as blue, unless “blue” is already a concept. They asked people from isolated cultures what the color of “that” was (pointing to it), and the first answer was “the color of what? there’s nothing there with a color.”
Once it was established that the “sky” was a thing (as opposed to clouds or something in the sky), blue was not the first color identified. It was white.
Doubly weird in that (most of) the Ancient Greeks were sailors extraordinaires to boot. “Deep bronze sea ? Sure, let’s go with that, Aeneas !”
In Homer, the most common epithet for the sea is “wine-dark sea”. Scholars have been struggling for years to understand why he used such a (to us) odd description. Was some Greek wine blue? Were all the Greeks color blind? (Yes, this was really proposed.) Was the Aegean a different color in Classical times? I don’t think there’s any consensus on this.
–Mark
I think it’s reasonably clear to scholars that (1) Greek wine wasn’t blue, (2) the Greeks weren’t all color-blind, and (3) the water in the Aegean didn’t radically change color from the 8th century B.C.E. to the Renaissance.
It’s pretty clear, from observing extant languages and societies that dividing up the spectrum of colors is an arbitrary exercise and that the names used for colors affects human perception of what two colors are the “same” and what two colors are “distinct.”
Yes, all of those ideas are somewhat nutty, but people are still proposing things like that. This article from 1983 describes a letter in Nature in which a classics professor and a chemist propose that Greek wine was actually blue due to alkalinity in the ground water.
–Mark
The deeper parts of the Aegean can seem so dark as to be almost black.
I think it’s a problem with translation. Think “bluetooth”: the technical term is named after Harald Bluetooth, whose tooth was much more likely to be black.
I’ve got the hypothesis that the original two terms aren’t so much “black” and “white” as “dark” and “light”, later differentiation makes then end up meaning black and white. And there is a step in between where that “black” means “sky colored”… which is a whole lot of colors!
As for “bronze sea”, I give you a 3yo child: “why do we say the sea is blue? Here it’s brown and there it’s green!”, two colors which are found in bronze (the green is from copper carbonate). He was looking at the Mediterranean, in an area where it was very shallow.
It seems clear that orange was a late addition to English, doubtless named after the fruit (called Chinese apple in some other languages, such as German). What color is a redhead? What color is red rust?
that’s bike night. Also explains the lack of haircuts.