[The following is speculation based upon what I believe, know, and perceive. As I am not an expert I therefore do not hold myself to as high a standard of evidence as I would if I were.]
I suspect that humans have had color perception since well before they had the vocabulary to describe anything whatsoever. Color perception is an important ability when part of your diet is composed of fruits whose ripeness is readily apparent to the eye when the nose and tongue can’t tell for sure. Ever eat a green apple? Tasty, but with unpleasant side effects that very likely negate much of it’s nutritional value.
I can’t believe that color vision only came about during the last 10,000 years or less. How did it propagate throughout the world’s population so rapidly? How did Australian aborigines acquire the gene, if it first manifested outside of Australia, or how did it get here from there if that’s where it developed?
Our simian siblings have color vision, and (apparently) have no vocabulary of color. I think that perhaps in ancient Greece, color was considered an inseparable characteristic of the thing that had it. The color of the sky is “sky”, and therefore it’s color is moot. Ya wanna know what color it is? Look!
[The above was not a rant. Really it wasn’t. Honest.]
Paucity of color-terminology probably results from a lack of need to describe the unnamed colors. As pointed out previously, you don’t need the equivalent of the word “blue” if you can just say “sky-colored,” “sea-colored,” etc. By extension we could have “orange-colored,” “banana-colored,” and “earth-colored.” Sometimes, a culture might even just reduce that to “orange,” “earthen,” etc.
Once you start to paint, or glaze tile or pottery, you start to need more terms, perhaps. But at first, while your pigment technology is primitive, you are still limited in the usable colors you need to describe. Once you get your technology down you discover red-yellow-blue (or cyan-magenta-yellow) and the various combinations - and eventually you advance to TV and discover the three primary additive colors red-green-blue.
Just a personal observation on the arbitrary way cultures organize and name “divisions” of the color continuum: my Chinese wife and I have a three-ring binder that ‘is definitely’ on the blue side of aquamarine; light-aqua-blue, I suppose I would say. She constantly confuses me by referring to it as the green binder, and when I hold it up to various of my light-aqua-bluish shirts (which admittedly have a greenish component, just one that is outweighed by the bluish component) she says, “yeah, see: green.”
I think this is a fascinating column, and concept. There are really old pictographs - and hieroglyphics in Egypt - that contain a variety of colors. Did they say, “Oh darn, I ran out of… whatever that color is I used on that robe.” How can you paint with colors you don’t have names for? I guess it’s hard for us modern folks to conceptualize. But I’m still trying to get over the fact that John Kennedy and his wife hosted the 1996 Munchkin convention.
The Munchkin Convention is the eastern regional convention (Harrisburg, PA) of the Int’l Wizard of Oz club; it’s a three-day annual event, as are the Winkie Convention (Pacific Grove, CA) and the Ozmapolitan Convention (variable, but in the northern midwest). There are also one-day Quadling (Tulsa, OK) and South Winkie (Dana Point, CA) Conventions, and others.
For 2000, the centennial of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, all these are being forgone for a special 4-day national convention in Bloomington, IN. For further utterly off-topic details, see http://www.ozclub.org .
If you were thinking of another sort of Munchkin convention, it’s not, in fact, uncommon for us to have one or two of the surviving members of the 1939 cast turn up.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
My mother’s dad was colorblind, and she grew up with mom absent from the house. She will often confuse labels for colors, and name things unconventionally. Is that a blue or a green shirt?
I myself have some color-blindness. Usually unnoticed, but has shown up in science lab experiments. In one we were using a spectrograph to look at color lines. I kept seeing and identifying a light green and a dark green. When I asked about it, I found out everyone else saw a yellow and a green. Looked green to me.
You too? I could never do red-green titrations in chemistry - I could never get the change point, because it went from green to grey to red - my prof did a couple with me to test it, and he and my lab partner always saw a clear green-red change at the same point, but I didn’t. No big deal - for red-green titrations, we just left it to my lab partner. I’ve never noticed it on anything else.
The funniest was in ninth grade physical science. We had an experiment where we burned substances and identified them by the color of the flame. Both my lab partner and I were color blind. We did okay on most, but there was one substance that I could not see any color on - it was a “clear” flame. I’m serious - there was a thermal distortion, but I could barely tell the flame was there at all. I think we asked our neighbors on that one.
It was my understanding that the terms Homer used a lot, “wine-dark sea”, “rosy-fingered Dawn”, etc., were fixed. You always called the sea wine-dark, it was a formula used by all storytellers at the time, and expected by the listeners.
However, I have no idea where I got this understanding.
I had a friend who, up until recent surgery, was color blind due to a growth problem. He learned to distinguish colors by shades. So for instance where he would have seen dark green and light green lines, while we were seeing yellow and green lines (thank you Irishman for the example), he would have learned that the light green line was actually yellow. Therefore, although he actually saw light green he would have called it yellow. This seems to fit with the assumption that what we see and what we call a color are two different things. Hence the names of colors are a rule we learn as opposed to a natural phenomenon we observe. (I hope that last line made sense, I just can’t tell if what I was thinking came out in words okay.)
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” --Whitman
{:-Df,
No, but thanks for the suggestion. I will have to remember that next time I go to the BBQ Pits to release aggression and laugh at all the little people.
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” --Whitman
SINsApple:
Yes, you are making sense, I was trying to present the same thought back on 12/23 in my post. The color names are arbitrary, it does not mean that we are all seeing (experiencing) the same thing.
It doesn’t matter what we call them, my “blue(s)” may not be the same as your “blue(s)”.
Why would you? It’s perfectly true that “royal purple” was actually a dark red. Remnants of this usage are also found in botany and zoology; e.g., Digitalis purpurea, purple finches, which feature red. In botany, too, the color we think of as purple is more often referred to as blue.
Everyone knows there are only 3 colors - red, green, and blue in various shades.
and yeah, black is just the absence, and white is just the combination.
Hm. Time to start renaming.
Yellow? What’s that? Surely you mean red-green?
Purple? red-blue.
Aqua-marine? blue-green.
Hm. Next step in my plan. Deprecate names and refer to them by hex values. FF0000, 00FF00, 0000FF, FFFF00, FF00FF, 00FFFF
“That’s a lovely shade of FF0000 you’re wearing! I’d say it’s an FF0060, but not overpoweringly FF00FF.”
Were you just kidding or did you know that shopping websites will soon be using Pantone™ color codes to describe their products? One site will send you a color chart; another will allow you to download calibration software for your monitor.
I’m not really convinced that spectral divisions are arbitrary. That’s true in physics, but not necessarily in biology. The photsensitive pigment in a cone is bound in a protein; all the components are genetically determined so they will be the same in all the cones in a given person. The “red” cones respond to light in a certain range of frequencies, but there will be a single maximum more-or-less in the middle of this range. For that person, this precise frequency will be the most natural and intense red. (Granted, the word red is arbitrary, but the frequency that some word must be applied to is not.) Similarly, a given person will have their natural “green” and natural “blue” frequency, depending on the sensitivity profile of those cones. The spectrum does have certain natural divisions in it, based on how we experience the colors.
IIRC, the protein tunes the photopigment to the frequency appropriate to that cone. It is possible that small genetic differences from person to person cause us to experience the most intense “red”, for instance, at different frequencies. I’m not talking about color blindness, here. These differences would not necessarily mean that one person could not distinguish all the different shades that the other person could, it only means that they would actually be seeing them slightly differently.
I suppose these differences could differ among different population groups, which would be interesting.
None of that should be taken to imply in any way, though, that color vision could have evolved into existence in the last 10,000 years.
First of all, let me correct a couple of misconceptions that have been carried through from my earlier post.
I did not mean to imply that color vision evolved in the last 10,000 years. I was merely pointing out that color deficient vision may have been the rule versus the exception for ancient man. Through the wonder of genetics, color deficient vision is now only a remnant population.
In addition, I did not say that the spectral divisions were arbitrary. I said the naming of the colors was arbitrary (particularly for people with color deficient vision).
My thought is that once the human genome is completely mapped, it may be possible to delineate the genes for color vision/perception, and correlate the results back to different populations color terminology.
I urge everyone to follow the links in my earlier post.
Several years ago, there was a report that someone had found that some people have a slightly different blue pigment than the majority. It was a fairly significant minority, about 10-20%, IIRC. This variant pigment responded slightly differently to light, although not enough to make a practical difference to vision.
