If a colour has no name, do we see it?

[Larry of the Lawn]

FB, the article in the OP pretty clearly suggests that there was no concept of blue. And while it references the Namibian study, the study itself doesn't seem to support that conclusion. It seems to just be about how many sections your language divides the visible spectrum into.

[Fragile Bird]

FB, the article in the OP pretty clearly suggests that there was no concept of blue. And while it references the Namibian study, the study itself doesn't seem to support that conclusion. It seems to just be about how many sections your language divides the visible spectrum into.

Aaaarrrgh! I am getting tangled up in blue! :P

What Summah said was "Even that article says biblical Hebrew had a word for a specific shade of blue (which is the same as the one I referred to), while its entirely possible that the same word was used for blue and green, it really doesn't follow that there was no concept of blue."

The article Summah refers to above is the quote from the blog "God Didn't Say That", which is written by a scholar of biblical text. I said the article doesn't say there was no concept of blue, which it doesn't. It says there can be an argument that a certain word may refer to a shade of blueish shade that is not blue.

All of this evidence points toward t’chelet meaning some blueish shade that isn’t blue. But because we don’t have any actual samples (the oldest sample of anything blueish is less than 2,000 year old, so it doesn’t help), we can’t narrow it down any further.

This doesn’t mean people haven’t tried, though, because it’s a matter of some religious importance. But I’m not convinced by any of the theories that claim to have determined the exact shade.

So it looks like there’s no pure blue in the text of the Bible, but there are other shades. I don’t think this means that they didn’t have blue back then, though. I suspect it just means they didn’t write about it.

Then I went on to talk about the original article from the Business Insider, where the suggestion is made that the ancient societies referenced may not have had any concept of blue.

ETA: The Business Insider article says there was no word for blue in Hebrew, so Summah had to be referring to the blog article.

[Summah]

IIRC, ancient Chinese used the same word for blue and green, but that's not really the same as not having a concept of blue as other adjectives can be used to differentiate various shades of grue or qing as it were.

[Fragile Bird]

Does it really matter what they called it? Is that what you're hanging up on and having fun thinking about?

What I find fascinating is that there is blue in the sky and blue in the water, for people around the Mediterranean, anyway, and yet there was no word for blue until relatively late in written language. Just imagine, this big blue sky overhead and nobody has a word to describe that colour. They describe red skies, and yellow sun, but not blue sky. It seems like a pretty huge gap, doesn't it?

[TrueMetis]

What I find fascinating is that there is blue in the sky and blue in the water, for people around the Mediterranean, anyway, and yet there was no word for blue until relatively late in written language. Just imagine, this big blue sky overhead and nobody has a word to describe that colour. They describe red skies, and yellow sun, but not blue sky. It seems like a pretty huge gap, doesn't it?

It doesn't to me actually. The sky's ubiquitous so it would make some sense to me to only think about it really when it does something unusual. So rather than a word "the colour of the sky" seems simple enough.

[Gertrude]

They describe red skies, and yellow sun, but not blue sky. It seems like a pretty huge gap, doesn't it?

It's funny that you pull out instances of red and yellow. Aristotle categorized the colors into four main ones that corresponded to the four elements. Earth/black, Fire/white, Air/red, and Water/yellow. Other colors were a mixture of those four. Much like the four humors that make up the human body in Greek thinking. It's easier to see how thinking colors perception when comparing the two ideas.

[Fragile Bird]

You know, the article refers to a radio program, it doesn't make all the ideas necessarily true. If you got experts from various fields you would probably make good arguments against some of the ideas presented.

But I find the ideas presented an interesting thought experiment. :) Whether or not it follows that because people weren't writing about the colour blue means that they conceived the colour in a different way we do today is a very interesting one to contemplate.

I do see from other articles I've found while searching for some answers that quite a few peoples in Africa consider the sky white, that a number of Asian countries used the same word for blue and green and only developed separate words fairly recently, or need to add a noun to the word like sky or grass to indicate whether the meaning is blue or green, and that the Vikings had only one word for both blue and black and a famous ancient text refers to the three colours of the rainbow.

[Summah]

FB, do you have a link on the sky as white thing, because I googled that and came up with nothing.

[Fragile Bird]

Go to the OP article, go to the radio site, and look at the program's comment section. Several people talk about experiences in Africa where people discovered the prevailing opinion is that the sky was white. I also followed links in other articles that linked to stories about colour perception that mentioned the same thing, but I'm not sure I could find those stories again.

[Proudfeet]

If we can't see a colour, how do we name it?

I think there is definitely a perception difference with regards to language. With regards to blue and green using the same word, perhaps the colour referred to was cyan/teal rather than a sky blue or leaf green. It's not hard to see how if you only had one word, you wouldn't think there was much difference. For example, my desk is a very dark brown and my book shelf is a very light brown. If I didn't know the word brown, I would have described them as black and yellow. Someone better with colours might not even use the word brown and refer to them by their specific shades. (In case I didn't make my point clear, brown=cyan/teal, black=blue, yellow=green)

Doesn't explain the experiment in the article where they couldn't pick out the blue square but had no problems with the green though.

[Kelli Fury]

If you listen to the radiolab episode (and you should because radiolab is a really fun podcast) and go to their site you can watch a video of the Namibian study, wherein all the greens were identical to each other, the blue was of the same value as the greens, only blue. Most of them did not indicate a difference at all. And, they talk to this guy who raised his daughter, taught her colors, including blue, as usual. The only difference was he was careful that she was not told the sky was blue specifically. When asked on days it was clearly blue to him, when they were outside and identifying other items and their colors, she first indicated it had no color. this was a child fully aware of blue, but consistently said it lacked any color or was white for a couple months before ever calling it blue

[Gertrude]

Those are the parts of the conversation that are the most interesting to me and I really don't know what to do with that information.

[Proudfeet]

I couldn't find the video, but I disagree with the sky experiment. I think what the experiment showed was that the child could not conceive of the sky being an object to describe rather than the child not noticing the colour. The child recognises blue in other objects, why not the sky?

Also, not really related, but does anyone know if Homer was thought to be blind before or after people realised his colour descriptions were weird?

[Jo498]

I think the blind singer/poet was a very common trope in Antiquity (apparently similarly for musicians in ancient China), not related to the actual content of the Homeric epics.

[Filippa Eilhart]

My point is that I find it fascinating that in a world where all those people had, at the very least, blue sky above their heads, they apparently had no written word for the colour blue. What did they call it? Sky colour?

I read a book on linguistics once that had a chapter about colours. It mentioned most of the stuff discussed in this thread, but an interesting thing was an experiment the author did on his daughter. He taught her names of all the colours and made sure she knew blue, but he never mentioned to her what colour the sky is. So then one day when the sky was particularly blue, he asked her what colour it was. She couldn't answer. She definitely did not identify it as blue.

eta, oops, didn't read Kay's post :p

[jet199]

There was quite a good series about colours on BBC radio 4.

Blind people apparently see colours. I wonder how those who have been blind from birth name them or maybe they don't bother.

[Larry of the Lawn]

If you listen to the radiolab episode (and you should because radiolab is a really fun podcast) and go to their site you can watch a video of the Namibian study, wherein all the greens were identical to each other, the blue was of the same value as the greens, only blue. Most of them did not indicate a difference at all. And, they talk to this guy who raised his daughter, taught her colors, including blue, as usual. The only difference was he was careful that she was not told the sky was blue specifically. When asked on days it was clearly blue to him, when they were outside and identifying other items and their colors, she first indicated it had no color. this was a child fully aware of blue, but consistently said it lacked any color or was white for a couple months before ever calling it blue

Cool. This is what I've been wondering from the start. Will definitely check out the video.

[The Marquis de Leech]

It doesn't to me actually. The sky's ubiquitous so it would make some sense to me to only think about it really when it does something unusual. So rather than a word "the colour of the sky" seems simple enough.

But where does that leave people with blue eyes? Do you distinguish eyes that are "brown" and eyes that are "the colour of the sky"? That would be an awkward way of doing it.

[Theda Baratheon]

This is a very interesting thing to think about. I don't believe the Greeks lived in a monochromatic world though; blue just doesn't appear too often naturally. I really don't think it's likely there was a mass Grecian colour blindess when looking at the sky and the sea. Also Homer in general is pretty weird, I'm pretty at one point he describes sheep as violet and honey as green so his world was pretty psychadelic anyway. :P

So the concept of blue might not have existed to them so they wouldn't say ''that is blue'' or ''the sky is blue'' but it doesn't mean they were not seeing the same sky as we see, it just wouldn't have the association of 'being blue'' I am sure they did not just see a completely different colour sky.

[Fragile Bird]

I was thinking about colour in everyday life, and the thought that crosses my mind is that outside of nature, the rest their surroundings in a typical person's life would be pretty drab in ancient Greece. The house you lived in would be made of stone or wood, so shades of grey and brown, the clothing you wore would be woven from wool, or perhaps flax or cotton, all shades of off white, beige or brown. Your cooking utensils would be made of clay, or perhaps metal. Your domestic animals would be white, brown, black and some shades of red, perhaps some yellow. Slaughtering your animals for food would introduce red (not to mention your own blood). Crops were shades of beige, brown, yellow and green.

No wonder black and white, and dark and light were words that show up first, followed by red, and then yellow and green.

I would think you would have to be wealthy to buy dyed cloth, and, of course, certain colours were forbidden to the common people. Red was reserved for nobles, and purple and blue for royalty. Jesus's mother Mary is always painted wearing blue, to indicate her status, but as a real person she would never have worn the colour. People would dye their own clothing, using natural dyes, but they weren't very permanent and would fade and wash out.

Clothing that was dyed would be dyed in shades of brown and a yellow that was more ochre than yellow. Reliable dyes for yellow and green weren't developed until the 1500s, and even then they would fade. Only when synthetic dyes were invented in the 1850s could you buy clothing that would hold it's colour. Hilary Mantel, in Wolf Hall, talks about the sensation Anne Boleyn made wearing a yellow dress, after a new yellow dye was developed. Women bought handkerchiefs, or gloves, or cuffs and collars, made from yellow cloth because cloth made from the novel colour was so very expensive.

So, really, while they weren't in a black and white world, their lives were filled with a lot of drab colour.

In reading the Wikipedia pages on various colours, they do say the ancient Greeks would have used the same word for both green and blue, and would have called the sea green, not blue. And the classic colours in Greek art were red, yellow, black and white, and green was almost never used, so the colourized statuary linked up thread were unlikely to have had green or blue on them.