No one could see the colour blue until modern times

[Bella]

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http://www.businessinsider.com.au/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2

This totally blew my mind. For those too lazy to follow links, I've reproduced the whole article below.

[Bella]

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2

[Bella]

But the Himba have more words for types of green than we do in English.

When looking at a circle of green squares with only one slightly different shade, they could immediately spot the different one. Can you?

Which square is the outlier?


This is the outlier




http://www.businessinsider.com.au/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2

[Bella]

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2

[MOON Ki]

It certainly is fascinating, but I think those quoted are unnecessarily getting worked on "if you don't have a word for it, can you see it?" It seems to me that people have words for something and use them according to what importance they attach to the something, but the "importance" changes over time.   Consider, for example, the somewhat different matter of feelings.   Some languages have pretty much two words: "happy" and "sad", with no gradations of either.  I'm sure that people who speak such languages experience different "grades" of either---I doubt that anyone's feelings are simply "binary"---but the languages probably evolved when there were more important matters to deal with than whether a person was sad or happy.   On the other hand, the same languages might have a whole bunch or words to describe what to others are pretty much the same thing.  One should not assume, for example, that people do not feel the feelings solely on the basis that they do not have words that correspond to, say "ecstatic" or "depressed".    People in their use of language will develop or borrow (and modify) whatever words they thing are relevant for their times, and the usage will change over time.   

Following from the preceding, one thing  I find curious about the study is how far back in time and what they looked at; the significance of this is that in some places the written word is relatively recent.   This is also related to the previous point of "words according to need".   I am not an expert in the Luo language; so people should feel free to correct the following example.

Luo does have a word that corresponds to "blue" and which seems curiously related to the English word (or perhaps just in my imagination): it is rambulu.   But a Luo, speaking or writing in Luo, would never, say, describe the sky as blue or refer to the waters of Lake Victoria as blue: the sky is simply either clear or cloudy (to varying degrees) with the prospect of bring rain for farming; and the waters of the lake have no colour, on the very reasonable grounds that water has no colour.   (In general, even with the existence of a word for the colour, I can't think of many things that a Luo would describe as "blue".)   So if a person went around trying to determine anything about the Luos and "blue", I'd be cautious about their conclusions: A Luo equally competent in Luo and English could write "blue sky" and the "blue waters of Lake Victoria" but would probably find the color element absurd in the vernacular.    That could easily lead an "outsider" to assume something about the existence of an equivalent word. 

To finish off on the last point, with Luo still my example: Some Luo words and phrases have disappeared from use as recently as the late 20th century, but are unlikely to be found in any written material.     Some wazees might still use such words, but once they pass on, that's it.   Thereafter, a "casual" student of the language might never know that such words ever existed.    The point here is about the records that one uses in a historical study of language and what conclusions can be drawn safely.

[Kim Jong-Un's Pajama Pants]

Like MOON Ki says, it's about the importance once attaches to things that would make them noteworthy.  More importantly survival value. 

Your eyes pick up everything, including blue.  Your brain is wired over time to sort out the important details to create an abstraction you can work with.

I found the Himba example surprising.  It turns out the author left out, what I think is an important detail.  The Himba were in fact able to identify the color blue.  Only they were able to spot a different shade of green milliseconds faster.

That is still interesting.  But not as shocking as if they had trouble seeing blue altogether.  It seems consistent with the importance one attaches to the color or shades of it.  I would imagine shades of green and brown were a big deal in many primitive societies.

Personally.  I have trouble telling the difference between orange and amber.  But I know people who use colors that I need to look up to know what they are talking about, as if it's just normal.

[veritas]

???

The color blue in East asia has been esteemed for thousands of years. Today it symbolises immortality. During traditional mariage ceremonies, men wore blue hanbok. Considered a common color. Color red, gold etc. were hard dyes to make so was reserved for royalty.

http://www.lifeinkorea.com/culture/clothes/clothes.cfm?xURL=official



My dad, grandpas etc. wore this shock of blue when they got married. I expect the same from my mythical honey.

The hanbok can trace its origin to nomadic clothing in the Scytho-Siberian cultural sphere of northern Asia, widespread in ancient times.[28][29] The earliest evidence of this common style of northern Asia can be found in the Xiongnu burial site of Noin Ula in northern Mongolia,[30] and earliest evidence of hanbok's basic design features can be traced to ancient wall murals of Goguryeo before the 3rd century BCE.[31][32]

Reflecting its nomadic origins in northern Asia, hanbok was designed to facilitate ease of movement and also incorporated many shamanistic motifs. From this time, the basic structure of hanbok, namely the jeogori jacket, baji pants, and the chima skirt, was established. Short, tight trousers and tight, waist-length jackets were worn by both men and women during the early years of the Three Kingdoms of Korea period. The basic structure and these basic design features of hanbok remains relatively unchanged to this day.[33]

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanbok

Looks pretty blue to me.

[veritas]

Let me not get started with blue china...



That doesn't look gold to me. I'm sure the Chinese weren't confused with gold.

[veritas]

This "Kevin Loria" chap is obviously uncultured.

Homer described the sea as "wine dark" because he's an artist. If he described it as "blue" I doubt many would be reading Homer's stuff today.

The sea was blue. Duh ? Not stimulated. The sea was "wine dark" : that festers with rich meaning.

Perhaps the Himba tribe are used to describing edible description of items. Blue isn't an edible color in nature. I bet Star Wars tribes (tech freaks) can't distinguish brown colors. They wouldn't even recognize their faeces as unnaturally brown until having a baby.

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2

Also translation issues. There are about 14 ways to translate a piece of latin text, still evolving. Ancient Greek is even more challenging. The translators could have assumed blue wasn't the description when it was. Translating ancient texts are still ongoing. Often times politically misrepresented in the translation. Blue may have been associated with royalty or religion and in that case omitted from texts for political reasons. Aristotle's works are still being interpreted even though it's been thousands of years. Boring colors were probably not worth recording historically than harder to obtain pigments. There are too many ways blue history could be interpreted.

[RV Pundit]

Moonki--rambulu..sounds like borrowed english word. Kalenjin I doubt have word for blue. They just call it buluu/buluu.There is even ageset named after the blue ink when british were forcing people to start signing for IDs with their thumbs.Are there that many naturally occurring blue colours...apart from the sky..and some flowers..it not as prevalent as red or grey or black or white or green colours.

Naturally our languages weren't as colorful

[Kim Jong-Un's Pajama Pants]

Moonki--rambulu..sounds like borrowed english word. Kalenjin I doubt have word for blue. They just call it buluu/buluu.There is even ageset named after the blue ink when british were forcing people to start signing for IDs with their thumbs.Are there that many naturally occurring blue colours...apart from the sky..and some flowers..it not as prevalent as red or grey or black or white or green colours.

Naturally our languages weren't as colorful

Precolonial Kenya must been a riot of brown and green.  There were probably very few things they manipulated that were it brown(soil), green(vegetation), red(blood), or white(milk).

Obviously they also saw blue skies.  The only reason I can think of for not having a word for something is utility.  How frequently one has to describe the phenomenon.

That's why you find that pastoralists will have more words describing things about livestock.  It doesn't always mean others don't know about them.  It could just be that their mention is too infrequent warrant wrapping in a word.  If necessary, they would just describe the phenomenon.

[Bella]

Veritas, they are talking about thousands of years ago when they say "modern times", not necessarily the 1850s. So perhaps 2,000 years ago blue was all the rage in East Asia, but not so, say, 3,500 years ago. In any case, the author is not responsible for the idea, he's just reporting. You can listen to the radio program he's reporting on here: http://www.radiolab.org/story/211119-colors/

An informative discussion if nothing else. Did you know that ALL the colours we humans perceive are based on just THREE we have some place in our eye, and our brain just mixes them up to give us the colourful visual field we perceive? Didn't know that either, until this little article/radio program. Some animals have fewer bases (just two) or even less, so that their world is mostly black and white with splashes of red. When they see a rainbow, they see something far thinner than the 7 or so colours we humans see. But some animals have more than humans, like four, and there's a fish with even more, so that we just can't even imagine all the amazing colous they see that we don't! The rainbow they see is far thicker and more glorious than ours, their world a whole lot more colourful.

@Terminator, apparently this whole idea of how language influences human perception, particularly of colour, is some kind of significant topic in some circles, I've discovered: Apparently, once the "word-processor" bit of the brain that names collours is messed around with, the Russians who can easily tell some shades of colours apart (which in their language are distinguished as separate colours, not just different shades) faster than Americans, slow down to the level of the Americans in telling the shades apart once the "word-processor" that names them is messed around with. Google: Russian  language colour Himba...May you'll find the article, I can't, though read it a few days ago. EDIT: Here it is: https://eagereyes.org/blog/2011/you-only-see-colors-you-can-name

Funny thing, though:  I STILL can't, for the life of me, see the difference in the green square from the rest! To me, they are exactly the same and I've looked at it a gazillion times. Even knowing the answer, I still don't see it.

Perhaps there's an age element there: If you were trained from childhood to see green as basically one colour with lighter (light green) or darker (dark green) variations like me, perhaps this is all you see as an adult except with some serious effort. If you are Himba and hear them mention a gazillion greens and point them out from childhood, your brain is trained to see these colours and what sets them apart from childhood. If there's not much training in the "uniqueness" or differences of blue, it might indeed be harder to tell it apart.

[Omollo]

Could this help bring it in to perspective?

1. Wherever humans exist, language exists.
2. There are no "primitive" languages -- all languages are equally complex and equally capable of expressing any idea in the universe. The vocabulary of any language can be expanded to include new words for new concepts.
3. All languages change through time.
4. The relationship between the sounds and meanings of spoken languages and between the gestures (signs) and meanings of sign languages are for the most part arbitrary.
5. All human languages utilize a finite set of discrete sounds (or gestures) that are combined to form meaningful elements or words, which themselves form an infinite set of possible sentences.
6. All grammars contain rules for the formation of words and sentences of a similar kind.
7. Every spoken language includes discrete sound segments like p, n, or a, which can be defined by a finite set of sound properties or features. Every spoken language has a class of vowels and a class of consonants.
8. Similar grammatical categories (for example, noun, verb) are found in all languages.
9. There are semantic universals, such as "male" or "female," "animate" or "human," found in every language in the world.
10. Every language has a way of referring to past time, forming questions, issuing commands, and so on.
11. Speakers of all languages are capable of producing and comprehending an infinite set of sentences. Syntactic universals reveal that every language has a way of forming sentences such as:

Linguistics is an interesting subject.
I know that linguistics is an interesting subject.
You know that I know that linguistics is an interesting subject.
Cecilia knows that you know that I know that linguistics is an interesting subject.
Is it a fact that Cecilia knows that you know that I know that linguistics is an interesting subject?
12. Any normal child, born anywhere in the world, of any racial, geographical, social, or economic heritage, is capable of learning any language to which he or she is exposed. The differences we find among languages cannot be due to biological reasons.

An Introduction to Language, Fromkin & Rodman, 1988, p. 18-19

[MOON Ki]

Obviously they also saw blue skies.  The only reason I can think of for not having a word for something is utility.  How frequently one has to describe the phenomenon.

And I think utility actually has to do with more than frequency.  There is also the fact that one might think that it is simply irrelevant.  Let us take Luo as an example again.   Consider "green", over which there seems to be little "doubt".    I can't imagine a Luo ordinarily using a phrase like "green grass" in the vernacular.   In fact, I'd be hard pressed to think of many instances in which colour would be considered important ... interesting for the researcher who runs through texts etc counting frequency of usage and then jumping to conclusions.

[Bella]

Obviously they also saw blue skies.  The only reason I can think of for not having a word for something is utility.  How frequently one has to describe the phenomenon.

And I think utility actually has to do with more than frequency.  There is also the fact that one might think that it is simply irrelevant.  Let us take Luo as an example again.   Consider "green", over which there seems to be little "doubt".    I can't imagine a Luo ordinarily using a phrase like "green grass" in the vernacular.   In fact, I'd be hard pressed to think of many instances in which colour would be considered important ... interesting for the researcher who runs through texts etc counting frequency of usage and then jumping to conclusions.

I understood the running through the texts as, those are the oldest written languages, so they are the only sample taken. It is impossible for us to know how Luos spoke 500 years ago, for example. (Though "green" exists in luo even if they don't say green grass) The issue wasn't just the missing word "blue" from any language, it was the strange colour descriptors of common things and its missing from scriptures that were otherwise filled with adjectives of the heavens. Then the little tests with the Himba and Russians. I don't think we can say that language totally influences colour perception in humans, but I don't think we can dismiss that it seems to have an influence on that perception still.

Remember this dress that the whole world debated on (whether it was blue and black or white and gold?)



I could not understand how people were seeing blue and black, to me it STILL looks white and brown. If people can see such different things now, I personally don't think it too much of a stretch to imagine humans not perceiving certain (then uncommon) colours thousands of years ago. Perhaps they just had nothing to contrast or liken the blue of the sky with, so that what was unique about it didn't really pop for them, especially if they were never forced to identify blue apart from the environment in their day to day lives (the sky is never lost, it doesnt need to be identified/picked apart, like an animal, or plant). This little idea/theory clearly hasnt been proved, but interesting all the same.

[MOON Ki]

Veritas, they are talking about thousands of years ago when they say "modern times", not necessarily the 1850s. So perhaps 2,000 years ago blue was all the rage in East Asia, but not so, say, 3,500 years ago. In any case, the author is not responsible for the idea, he's just reporting. You can listen to the radio program he's reporting on here: http://www.radiolab.org/story/211119-colors/

veritas does have a point and it also relates to the question of just what the researchers were looking for.   The evidence is there of plenty of blue in China---e.g. photos as above--and for a long time.  But as far as I can tell, the Chinese did not really have a word for "blue" until "modern times"---modern as in the 20th century!   Before that the same character was used for "blue-green" and the indicated colour was understood in context: "blue" when used for the sky, "green" when used for grass etc.    And just to the confusion, the same character also means "black" when used for hair.

Last night I asked a Japanese friend about this colour thing, and I got quite an interesting answer.  Japanese usage has been similar, in using the same Chinese character for "blue-green", which nowadays (since the 20th century) would be taken to mean "blue".  What both languages suggest is that the theory of "according to profusion in nature" could be shaky, because neither seemed to think green was necessarily more important than blue.  The Japanese word "midori", which is normally translated as "green" is both fairly recent and also "traditionally" a shade of "blue-green".   When they eventually decided that green was sufficiently important to deserve a word of its own, they found an easy one: gurin, this is obviously a borrowing from English, something that is indicated by the fact that it would be written in katakana and not kanji.

[MOON Ki]

I understood the running through the texts as, those are the oldest written languages, so they are the only sample taken. It is impossible for us to know how Luos spoke 500 years ago, for example.

That was exactly my point about researchers running through some texts and reaching conclusions about the existence of certain words in certain languages.    For all we know, the Luo could well have had a word for blue but it then disappeared.   

I don't think we can say that language totally influences colour perception in humans, but I don't think we can dismiss that it seems to have an influence on that perception still.

That I would partially agree with.   I certainly find it difficult to think of the sky having a colour when I am thinking "in Luo".  But I think it is going a bit far to say that

 

This seems to confuse something and a description of the something.  Colours did not come into existence over time; words to describe them did.

[Kim Jong-Un's Pajama Pants]

@Terminator, apparently this whole idea of how language influences human perception, particularly of colour, is some kind of significant topic in some circles, I've discovered: Apparently, once the "word-processor" bit of the brain that names collours is messed around with, the Russians who can easily tell some shades of colours apart (which in their language are distinguished as separate colours, not just different shades) faster than Americans, slow down to the level of the Americans in telling the shades apart once the "word-processor" that names them is messed around with. Google: Russian  language colour Himba...May you'll find the article, I can't, though read it a few days ago. EDIT: Here it is: https://eagereyes.org/blog/2011/you-only-see-colors-you-can-name

Funny thing, though:  I STILL can't, for the life of me, see the difference in the green square from the rest! To me, they are exactly the same and I've looked at it a gazillion times. Even knowing the answer, I still don't see it.

Perhaps there's an age element there: If you were trained from childhood to see green as basically one colour with lighter (light green) or darker (dark green) variations like me, perhaps this is all you see as an adult except with some serious effort. If you are Himba and hear them mention a gazillion greens and point them out from childhood, your brain is trained to see these colours and what sets them apart from childhood. If there's not much training in the "uniqueness" or differences of blue, it might indeed be harder to tell it apart.

I can relate to the language and perception angle.  To a certain degree.  You can be trained to zero in on certain differences or ignore them.  That is why I still have trouble understanding the difference between amber and orange.  But where the wavelengh differences are relatively large, like between blue and green for example, I believe they will be registered.  Whether they matter is another issue altogether.

The Himba color experiment is intriguing as you mention; even though this particular author misrepresented it.  That said, I think they all look the same on most computer screens.  I can digitally see 3 colors on that image; top left is also slightly different.  But the computer monitor shows the same color. 

This is more a precision limit in the display rather than your inability to spot the difference.  Printing on a good color printer might do a more faithful display of the colors.

[MOON Ki]

Moonki--rambulu..sounds like borrowed english word. Kalenjin I doubt have word for blue. They just call it buluu/buluu.

That is probably true.   More interesting is this: reflecting on the "need" some peoples have to use colour in descriptions, I find it curious that even the (current) Luo word for colour---i.e. rangi---seems to have been borrowed from the Swahili.   Does Kalenjin have an "original" word for "colour"?

[veritas]

But the Himba have more words for types of green than we do in English.

When looking at a circle of green squares with only one slightly different shade, they could immediately spot the different one. Can you?

Which square is the outlier?


This is the outlier




http://www.businessinsider.com.au/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2

Bella, that green is off by a mile. It's more diarrhoea yellow looking. That dress is blue and black but I can also see the gold, white hue but it's more blue and black in my opinion.

I love colors. No two color look the same to me. When I shut my eyes I see dark hues or shiny white rainbows. I can also see the movement of water or wind rippling or skirting past my face in different shades of color when I close my eyes. It's weird how I see movement with my eyes closed. I do that when bored.

When I go to a clothing store, the exact same top in the same color look different. I spend a good 15 mins rummaging through the exact same top looking for the best hue. Sometimes I hate color so intensely I opt for black and white. My childhood drawings were intensely colorful. I may post them up. Recall textas were my friends.

Thanks for the visual science facts though. I wasn't very good at that stuff. I do remember that funny effect ati what was it... stroop effect. Also hmmm.... rotating green and red sh1t that made me very nauseous.. forget what the effect was called.