The color blue

Can anyone out there enlighten me about the history of the color blue? I’ve been told that up to about 2,000 years ago, human beings could not see the color blue, or did not have the distinction “blue” to define that color, seeing it instead as a shade of something else, like green or maroon. Bunk?

Cecil Adams sez:

Could early man only see three colors?

His conclusion: insufficient evidence to support that theory.

The column (including Slug Signorino’s illustration) can also be found on pages 168-171 of Cecil Adams’ book «More of the Straight Dope».

If it is any help, the Mayan word for green is the same as the word for blue.

I tend to like Berlin and Kay’s results - more primitive cultures didn’t take notice of colors because they didn’t need to. Much of cognition is a matter of screening information, learning to not pay attention to irrelevent differences. As the world you interact with changes, exactly what is relevent may change, too.

Ties nicely into one of Cecil’s columns on color perception in dogs and cats:

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_004.html

Suggests that cats CAN see color, at least to some degree, they just consider it so unimportant a feature that it’s difficult to get it through their heads that you want them to pay attention to it.

I would say that anatomy (what kind of retina you have) determines whether you can physically percieve color, and homo sapiens has always been able to. However, culture determines whether you will consider it worth noting or not. You may not, if there’s no need to “color code” anything to interact with your environment.

Oh, and the commentary on the Celtic tales that form the basis for “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” often points out that ancient Irish used the same word for “green” and “grey”.

Here’s a rather fascinating discussion that I started, spawned by Cecil’s column.

(Note: I didn’t add too much fascinating stuff to the thread, so I’m praising those who replied to me.)

My son Zachary is unable to distinguish between most greens and blues. He can catch the bright Toys “R” Us primary tones, but anything else is very difficult for him. Also with oranges and reds. Browns are brutal for him. This has been confirmed more than once in testing.

Perhaps there is some validity to the theory that we couldn’t distinguish some color values? He can’t. I don’t know stats at all on genetics and background,and color difficiency ( sp?). He’s full blooded Korean, but I can’t see as how race background would matter at all.

Cartooniverse

In Chinese Qing (Chi’ng) means either blue or green. So what if some cultures didn’t have differentiated names for some colors?

We didn’t have a name for Magenta until science decided they needed a name for it and it is one of the primary colors. In everyday life nobody uses the name magenta and they still manage to live fulfilling lives.

Not true. This word is not directly translatable, I think that’s why you’re having a problem comprehending it. The closest I can translate it, it means a light color, that’s all.

>> This word is not directly translatable, I think that’s why you’re having a problem comprehending it. The closest I can translate it, it means a light color, that’s all

Well, I’ll let you take that up with the authors of the two dictionaries that I have and with several online dictionaries like http://www.zhongwen.com/ and others at http://zhongwen.com/zi.htm

I had a Chinese friend whose name was Qing and she also translated as blue-green but I guess she could be mistaken.

FWIW, in Japanese the word “ao” can mean either blue or green. However, my dictionary says that in ancient Japanese, it may have just meant a light color.

Well, as I have said, I am not a fluent speaker of Chinese but all my indications are that the primary meaning of Qing is blue-green with further references to the color of the sky, the color of lush vegetation etc. I think it may have a connotation to clear light etc but I have strong doubts that it would be used to denote a light red or light brown color. Only a light blue or green.

I will also mention that what we consider pure green and pure blue are very uncommon in nature and what are more common are a range of green-blue tones which can be considered a range of one basic central blue-green color.

My two cents:

In Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide, the name Quing-jao means ‘Gloriously Bright.’ I’m assuming that Quing means ‘bright’, unless the word changes slightly in differing contexts.

As for the OP: Nobody mentioned the sky yet? I don’t have the time (or inclination) at the moment, but perhaps you’d consider a web search for early references in literature or poetry to the sky’s color.

It’s silly to think that ancient people were less inherently (physically) chromatic in their visual sensory perception of the world than we are now. People could certainly “see” the same range of colors thousands of years ago that we can now. As others have pointed out the necessity (and ability) to name intermediate color values is determined by the ability produce those values and the need to use them.

One might as well ask if there are finely graduated differentiations in faint smells that we could distinguish thousands (or tens of thousands) of years ago because we needed to in order to track game or determine sexual responsiveness, that we can no longer “sense” in modernity. The smell “sense” ability is still there but largely unused (and insensitive) for these purposes in the modern world.

Genetics has something to say about both color sense and smell.

From what I understand, the most recently added of the three color pigments is the red. There is only one copy of the gene for it and since it is on the X chromosome, it is the most likely of the three to be defective, especially in men. The genes for blue and green pigments have more than one copy in the genome and this makes them less likely to be defective. I don’t know how long ago the red pigment was added, but since the ancient Greeks did have a word for red, it was more than 3000 years ago.

Recently, someone studied the active genes for olfactory receptors. They compared the genes from 10 primate species plus mice. What they were looking at was what percentage of these genes were deactivated by mutation, which are also known as pseudogenes. It seems that primates in general had more disabled olfactory receptor genes than mice. Furthermore, apes had more pseudogenes than monkeys and humans more than apes (70% disabled for humans). So it’s not just that humans ignore or fail to utilize their sense of smell, we really do have what’s probably the worst sense of smell of any land mammal.

“Of the colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn up. Among the ancient elements, blue occurs everywhere: in ice and water, in the flame as purely as the flower, overhead and inside caves, covering fruit and oozing out of clay. Although green enlivens the earth and mixes in the ocean, and we find it, copperish, in fire, green air, green skies, are rare. Gray and brown are widely distributed, but there are no joyful swatches of either, or any of exuberant black, sullen pink, or acquiescent orange. Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright thin quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet thich dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling.”

–William Gass, On Being Blue

Well you are right in that regard. When you say Qing color, it would mean a light color such as blue or green or clear. Red and brown automatically disqualify themselves from being a light color by Chinese definition.

When you say “light brown” or “light red” in Chinese, basically you are saying “the absence of a dark color in brown”. Like I said, it’s not directly translatable.

The meaning of Qing however is more than “light”. When you say Qing it means a brightness, a virginal, a clean, a clear color.

You can use Qing as an adjective and say “Qing Lan” or “light blue”, but you cannot use Qing with red, brown or even green.

It’s strange but true. Chinese is not only a different language, it’s a different way of thinking.

Blue-green, or sort of bluish: Us sophisticated moderns still apparently don’t have a proper word for the blue-greenish color of a certian stone. Instead, we use an adaptation of a French term for something Turkish to describe it: Turquoise. I suppose the French were the first to make special note of the color in Turkish artwork, so they came up with the description.

It’s not a question of not being able to see the color in some biological way; it’s a question of not having the words to describe it.

To say that humans couldn’t see the colors in anicent times is like saying humans then lacked the physical capability to invent airplanes, computers, etc. because the ancient records don’t have a term for such things.