8 ms·

The sea was never blue

60 points by prismatic 9y ago

chx 9y ago
If this interests you, Through the Language Glass: How Words Colour Your World by Guy Deutscher is a must read.
- Buttons840 9y ago
  Yes, that was an entertaining book. Some of the interesting things I remember (and I might not remember them exactly correctly): - Most languages developed a word for the color red before any other colors. Probably because blood is red and uniquely present at the most dramatic times of life. - Blue is rarely seen in nature, and so many cultures wouldn't feel the need to distinguish between purple and blue, because neither was seen very often. There is one obvious exception though, the blue sky. Although anecdotal, the author used some precious scientific equipment, his daughter, to perform an experiment. He purposely avoiding telling his daughter the color of the sky, yet taught her the color of many physical objects. Once he was sure she knew all the colors he finally popped the question on a clear day: "What color is the sky?" His daughter seemed confused and eventually decided that the sky was white.
  - MaymayMaster 9y ago
    That second one is so neat.
  - pmoriarty 9y ago
    Was his daughter kept strictly isolated from all other people, or were all the other people she came in contact with also careful not to mention blue around her? If not, it's likely she ran across the word blue in conversations she had with others, in books and stories, on television, movies, songs, etc. I am very skeptical of how much of value could be drawn from such an experiment unless the person in question is completely isolated. Even then, that kind of isolation is likely to have deep psychological consequences that could taint the experiment even then. That's not to mention the severe and possibly insurmountable ethical problems such a study would run in to these days.
  - joeyo 9y ago
    > Most languages developed a word for the color red before > any other colors. Probably because blood is red and > uniquely present at the most dramatic times of life. Red has high contrast against the backgrounds of natural scenes (greens, blues, browns, etc) and is distinguishable in a variety of lighting conditions. For this reason it is one of the standard "warning" colors used by the natural world. Moreover, plants have co-opted red for positive signaling, too: many fruits and berries are red. If that weren't enough, many mammals (including humans) use red hues for signaling emotional and sexual states. Discriminating red hues was apparently important enough that primates "re-evolved" a red-detecting cone in the retina, despite ancestral mammals losing a similar one earlier in evolutionary history.
empath75 9y ago
So basically the greeks didn't cleanly separate hue from the other aspects of the surface appearance of things. So that if something was glimmering, or dark, that was considered to be as important or more important than the hue, for the purposes of description.
scentoni 9y ago
Try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_... instead
baldfat 9y ago
I have studied Ancient Hebrew and Classical Greek in Under Grad and Grad School. I really always struggle with this idea that they didn't see blue. They just described different aspects of things based on their world view. For instance the sky was a solid object that was made of a highly reflexive bronze. That bronze isn't blue wasn't the issue it was the so called shine. The people were much more physical in their writing styles. Take "Apple of my eye." That was an ancient terms. It means that when you look closely at an apple you see your own eyes' reflections. It meant that they keep their eyes close to you.
- DarkTree 9y ago
  This still supports your argument, but the wikipedia entry has a different meaning of the phrase "Apple of my eye". From the wiki entry[0]: "Its meaning does indeed derive from an expression signifying the pupil of the eye, one of the most sensitive parts of the body. For example, one can tolerate an eyelash on the white of his eye, but let it barely touch the pupil, and everything else is of secondary importance." It's kind of funny though, I always assumed it was like saying, "out of all the apples around me, you're the one that I notice, the one apple I see with my eye". And all of these definitions kind of hint at the same point. Definitely a misunderstood quote. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_of_my_eye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_of_my_eye
- pvg 9y ago
  It might also be some quirk of literary culture or a reflection of the paucity of our sources. We know Greeks painted their sculptures, quite brightly, according to some reconstructions. This suggests they must have had some way to communicate about quite a few colours.
- ty_a 9y ago
  The best explanation I've heard is that words for colors come to exist after the invention of artificially produced pigments and dyes.
  - baldfat 9y ago
    I heard that but WE have blue sky, and yellow flowers. We can't say we didn't have yellow till we transferred the dye from a yellow flower to a fabric? We have documentation of dye millennium before Homer and Cave paintings nearly forty thousands years before them. https://zady.com/features/the-history-of-fabric-dye https://zady.com/features/the-history-of-fabric-dye
Cryptid 9y ago
I would also recommend Caroline Alexander's A Winelike Sea http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sea/winelike-sea http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sea/winelike-sea and the ensuing discussion at MetaFilter "Achilles sat on the shore and looked out to the wine-dark sea" https://www.metafilter.com/130875/Achilles-sat-on-the-shore-and-looked-out-to-the-wine-dark-sea https://www.metafilter.com/130875/Achilles-sat-on-the-shore-...
- nsxwolf 9y ago
  Why would it look "wine dark", whatever that means, and not green? If other cultures describe blues as just different shades of green, why would Homer describe it as red - or maybe black? Also, if the literal translation is actually "wine face sea", not "wine dark sea" [1], are we really sure we have any idea what this means? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_dark_sea_(Homer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_dark_sea_(Homer)
  - Avshalom 9y ago
    Alternately many grapes are pretty blueish and almost all are greenish before fully ripe. Ex: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=wine%20grape&tbs=imgo:1 https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=wine%20grape&tbs=im...
  - robotomir 9y ago
    You're all overthinking it. When you are on a boat and you enter deep water in the Aegean, the color does become very dark like thick red wine, different to the blue waters you see from the coast.
    - jdb42 9y ago
      Absolutely. Knowing the phrase "wine dark sea" and its associated discussion, exactly the same struck me when I saw it. Plus reflecting on "verbal" people maybe missing something.
    - dkarl 9y ago
      I once had a similar discussion about a phrase that was something like "smooth soft stone," describing a surface someone was walking on. It's a straightforward description of a sensation: if you're walking on a stone surface in bare feet, smooth stone feels much softer than rough stone. If you know how it feels, the phrase sounds perfectly smooth and natural, but if you've never experienced it, or don't remember experiencing it as a child, you might think the phrase is meant to sound jarring paradoxical, instead of gently referencing a paradox doesn't even feel paradoxical to us because it agrees with how we perceive the world.
huac 9y ago
In Chinese, the character for green, "绿" (lǜ), also means light blue. Apparently, this is a more linguistic coincidence (https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/6832/what-is-the-difference-between-%E7%BB%BF-and-%E9%9D%92 https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/6832/what-is-the...).
- khedoros1 9y ago
  In Japanese, "青" (ao) traditionally covered certain shades of both blue and green (blue sky, blue traffic lights, blue apples and many other plants). "緑" (midori) is more solidly green, coming from a root word used to describe flourishing trees. I think that it's still considered a shade of ao. They'll sometimes use a phonetic rendering of English "green", and I'm not really clear on the difference in meaning there.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  There is a more or less predictable order in which words for colors will emerge in languages.
Qworg 9y ago
There's a Radiolab on this as well: http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-isnt-blue/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-isnt-blue/
jpfed 9y ago
>The common view today is that white light is colourless and arises from the sum of all the hues of the spectrum, whereas black is its absence. Pet peeve: white is itself a color experience. It's not colorless. The infinite basis that forms the spectrum is different from the basis of three cones (receptive to bands of long, medium, and short wavelengths respectively), which itself is different from the basis formed by color opponencies (white/black, red/green, blue/yellow). Since the projections that go from one of these spaces to the next are not 1:1, to speak precisely we should not identify a spectrum with a color experience. (And, of course, because of other complications that this skips over like lateral inhibition and habituation.) Physics talks about spectra and wavelengths. Retinas talk certain bands of wavelengths. Only brains talk color. The spectra that usually make brains experience white can be separated into spectra that make brains experience other color experiences.
- mhalle 9y ago
  To expand on your point, retinas talk a limited number of overlapping spectral responses. That's why we can have an essentially identical perception of spectral yellow and a mix of red and green light.
  - kmill 9y ago
    To temper your point just a bit, even though yellow light and red+green light look the same when viewed directly, you can still tell the difference. For instance, in the way the light reflects off different materials, or by chromatic aberration with corrective lenses. This is why R+G+B LED lighting is not good enough for illumination and why some better bulbs instead use UV LED + phosphors.
- khedoros1 9y ago
  > Pet peeve: white is itself a color experience. It's not colorless. The way that I thought about color before being educated in the properties of light was to think of white as colorless. It's the thing that's easiest to add color to in a subtractive color model (e.g. using crayons paints as a child). It doesn't represent my science-based understanding, but I wouldn't be surprised to observe someone looking at something white and saying "Huh, it needs some color".
woodandsteel 9y ago
If the Greeks saw colors completely differently than we modern Westerners do, then their artistic representations of color, like in frescos and painted pottery, would look quite bizarre to us. Is that the case?
- gumby 9y ago
  No, since they produced representative art (not abstract art as far as we can tell) they tried to make water watery and the sky sky-y. Yes, since language reflects which paints we pick up, and you can see this from greek sculpture (the victorians didn't manage to get all the color off all the sculpture): their color choices were more garish than we would use today. In fact their color choices are closer to those of hound sculpture. And note that the bronze-age aryan invaders to India and Persia also invaded Greece at the same time... In other words, "yes, but not as much as you might think"
  - woodandsteel 9y ago
    >their color choices were more garish than we would use today. Maybe that was just an artistic choice. The reason I am pushing on this is that there is a widespread idea, especially in academia, that people in different cultures see the world completely differently than we modern Westerners do. But that is simply not true. On most basic things, like the fact that human beings live in space, have to eat, and so on, different cultures agree.
    - gumby 9y ago
      Do you read Classical Greek? Have you read Gladstone's book? In my case the answer to both is yes. And, with a Hindu Indian parent and much time spent there through my life I am quite aware of the ancient cultural ties between those two cultures. There is plenty of work in cultural anthropology, biology, and casting that people are incredibly alike in most ways even in regards to things that appear to be learned, and yet also have elements that are strongly dissimilar despite seemingly being innate. What about people with innate absolute orientation and no concept of right/left. That's not a "historical" phenomenon but a contemporary one. Sometimes things can be scientific and not ideological you know. Why was an oxe the color of wine?
sn9 9y ago
Text really isn't the best medium to discuss color perception. This Vox video summarizing the research of linguistic anthropologists is much more clear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg
edw 9y ago
This submitter mines a lot karma by re-posting articles featured on Arts and Letters Daily (aldaily.com). I find that site far more valuable than HN for informing me in ways that make me a better programmer, businessperson—and person. As a bonus: no comments!
giorgosts 9y ago
The greek language is not dead, it is still spoken by about 15 mil. people worldwide. "Porfyro" is the deep red color that can be frequently experienced in esp. greek orthodox churches (even in apparell dating many hundreds of years), and "Glauco" is the shiny blue of the aegean sea that made the greek islands famous worldwide. The words that the greeks used (and still use) have the purpose of describing the natural world, not of scientificaly defining colors according to a theory of vision. Even the modern theory of color vision acknowledges the principles of color constancy and color adaptation.

60 points by prismatic 9y ago

chx 9y ago

If this interests you, Through the Language Glass: How Words Colour Your World by Guy Deutscher is a must read.

Buttons840 9y ago
Yes, that was an entertaining book. Some of the interesting things I remember (and I might not remember them exactly correctly): - Most languages developed a word for the color red before any other colors. Probably because blood is red and uniquely present at the most dramatic times of life. - Blue is rarely seen in nature, and so many cultures wouldn't feel the need to distinguish between purple and blue, because neither was seen very often. There is one obvious exception though, the blue sky. Although anecdotal, the author used some precious scientific equipment, his daughter, to perform an experiment. He purposely avoiding telling his daughter the color of the sky, yet taught her the color of many physical objects. Once he was sure she knew all the colors he finally popped the question on a clear day: "What color is the sky?" His daughter seemed confused and eventually decided that the sky was white.
- MaymayMaster 9y ago
  That second one is so neat.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  Was his daughter kept strictly isolated from all other people, or were all the other people she came in contact with also careful not to mention blue around her? If not, it's likely she ran across the word blue in conversations she had with others, in books and stories, on television, movies, songs, etc. I am very skeptical of how much of value could be drawn from such an experiment unless the person in question is completely isolated. Even then, that kind of isolation is likely to have deep psychological consequences that could taint the experiment even then. That's not to mention the severe and possibly insurmountable ethical problems such a study would run in to these days.
- joeyo 9y ago
  > Most languages developed a word for the color red before > any other colors. Probably because blood is red and > uniquely present at the most dramatic times of life. Red has high contrast against the backgrounds of natural scenes (greens, blues, browns, etc) and is distinguishable in a variety of lighting conditions. For this reason it is one of the standard "warning" colors used by the natural world. Moreover, plants have co-opted red for positive signaling, too: many fruits and berries are red. If that weren't enough, many mammals (including humans) use red hues for signaling emotional and sexual states. Discriminating red hues was apparently important enough that primates "re-evolved" a red-detecting cone in the retina, despite ancestral mammals losing a similar one earlier in evolutionary history.

empath75 9y ago

So basically the greeks didn't cleanly separate hue from the other aspects of the surface appearance of things. So that if something was glimmering, or dark, that was considered to be as important or more important than the hue, for the purposes of description.

scentoni 9y ago

Try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_... instead

baldfat 9y ago

I have studied Ancient Hebrew and Classical Greek in Under Grad and Grad School. I really always struggle with this idea that they didn't see blue. They just described different aspects of things based on their world view. For instance the sky was a solid object that was made of a highly reflexive bronze. That bronze isn't blue wasn't the issue it was the so called shine. The people were much more physical in their writing styles. Take "Apple of my eye." That was an ancient terms. It means that when you look closely at an apple you see your own eyes' reflections. It meant that they keep their eyes close to you.

DarkTree 9y ago
This still supports your argument, but the wikipedia entry has a different meaning of the phrase "Apple of my eye". From the wiki entry[0]: "Its meaning does indeed derive from an expression signifying the pupil of the eye, one of the most sensitive parts of the body. For example, one can tolerate an eyelash on the white of his eye, but let it barely touch the pupil, and everything else is of secondary importance." It's kind of funny though, I always assumed it was like saying, "out of all the apples around me, you're the one that I notice, the one apple I see with my eye". And all of these definitions kind of hint at the same point. Definitely a misunderstood quote. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_of_my_eye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_of_my_eye
pvg 9y ago
It might also be some quirk of literary culture or a reflection of the paucity of our sources. We know Greeks painted their sculptures, quite brightly, according to some reconstructions. This suggests they must have had some way to communicate about quite a few colours.
ty_a 9y ago
The best explanation I've heard is that words for colors come to exist after the invention of artificially produced pigments and dyes.
- baldfat 9y ago
  I heard that but WE have blue sky, and yellow flowers. We can't say we didn't have yellow till we transferred the dye from a yellow flower to a fabric? We have documentation of dye millennium before Homer and Cave paintings nearly forty thousands years before them. https://zady.com/features/the-history-of-fabric-dye https://zady.com/features/the-history-of-fabric-dye

Cryptid 9y ago

I would also recommend Caroline Alexander's A Winelike Sea http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sea/winelike-sea http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sea/winelike-sea and the ensuing discussion at MetaFilter "Achilles sat on the shore and looked out to the wine-dark sea" https://www.metafilter.com/130875/Achilles-sat-on-the-shore-and-looked-out-to-the-wine-dark-sea https://www.metafilter.com/130875/Achilles-sat-on-the-shore-...

nsxwolf 9y ago
Why would it look "wine dark", whatever that means, and not green? If other cultures describe blues as just different shades of green, why would Homer describe it as red - or maybe black? Also, if the literal translation is actually "wine face sea", not "wine dark sea" [1], are we really sure we have any idea what this means? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_dark_sea_(Homer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_dark_sea_(Homer)
- Avshalom 9y ago
  Alternately many grapes are pretty blueish and almost all are greenish before fully ripe. Ex: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=wine%20grape&tbs=imgo:1 https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=wine%20grape&tbs=im...
- robotomir 9y ago
  You're all overthinking it. When you are on a boat and you enter deep water in the Aegean, the color does become very dark like thick red wine, different to the blue waters you see from the coast.
  - jdb42 9y ago
    Absolutely. Knowing the phrase "wine dark sea" and its associated discussion, exactly the same struck me when I saw it. Plus reflecting on "verbal" people maybe missing something.
  - dkarl 9y ago
    I once had a similar discussion about a phrase that was something like "smooth soft stone," describing a surface someone was walking on. It's a straightforward description of a sensation: if you're walking on a stone surface in bare feet, smooth stone feels much softer than rough stone. If you know how it feels, the phrase sounds perfectly smooth and natural, but if you've never experienced it, or don't remember experiencing it as a child, you might think the phrase is meant to sound jarring paradoxical, instead of gently referencing a paradox doesn't even feel paradoxical to us because it agrees with how we perceive the world.

huac 9y ago

In Chinese, the character for green, "绿" (lǜ), also means light blue. Apparently, this is a more linguistic coincidence (https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/6832/what-is-the-difference-between-%E7%BB%BF-and-%E9%9D%92 https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/6832/what-is-the...).

khedoros1 9y ago
In Japanese, "青" (ao) traditionally covered certain shades of both blue and green (blue sky, blue traffic lights, blue apples and many other plants). "緑" (midori) is more solidly green, coming from a root word used to describe flourishing trees. I think that it's still considered a shade of ao. They'll sometimes use a phonetic rendering of English "green", and I'm not really clear on the difference in meaning there.
emodendroket 9y ago
There is a more or less predictable order in which words for colors will emerge in languages.

Qworg 9y ago

There's a Radiolab on this as well: http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-isnt-blue/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-isnt-blue/

jpfed 9y ago

>The common view today is that white light is colourless and arises from the sum of all the hues of the spectrum, whereas black is its absence. Pet peeve: white is itself a color experience. It's not colorless. The infinite basis that forms the spectrum is different from the basis of three cones (receptive to bands of long, medium, and short wavelengths respectively), which itself is different from the basis formed by color opponencies (white/black, red/green, blue/yellow). Since the projections that go from one of these spaces to the next are not 1:1, to speak precisely we should not identify a spectrum with a color experience. (And, of course, because of other complications that this skips over like lateral inhibition and habituation.) Physics talks about spectra and wavelengths. Retinas talk certain bands of wavelengths. Only brains talk color. The spectra that usually make brains experience white can be separated into spectra that make brains experience other color experiences.

mhalle 9y ago
To expand on your point, retinas talk a limited number of overlapping spectral responses. That's why we can have an essentially identical perception of spectral yellow and a mix of red and green light.
- kmill 9y ago
  To temper your point just a bit, even though yellow light and red+green light look the same when viewed directly, you can still tell the difference. For instance, in the way the light reflects off different materials, or by chromatic aberration with corrective lenses. This is why R+G+B LED lighting is not good enough for illumination and why some better bulbs instead use UV LED + phosphors.
khedoros1 9y ago
> Pet peeve: white is itself a color experience. It's not colorless. The way that I thought about color before being educated in the properties of light was to think of white as colorless. It's the thing that's easiest to add color to in a subtractive color model (e.g. using crayons paints as a child). It doesn't represent my science-based understanding, but I wouldn't be surprised to observe someone looking at something white and saying "Huh, it needs some color".

woodandsteel 9y ago

If the Greeks saw colors completely differently than we modern Westerners do, then their artistic representations of color, like in frescos and painted pottery, would look quite bizarre to us. Is that the case?

gumby 9y ago
No, since they produced representative art (not abstract art as far as we can tell) they tried to make water watery and the sky sky-y. Yes, since language reflects which paints we pick up, and you can see this from greek sculpture (the victorians didn't manage to get all the color off all the sculpture): their color choices were more garish than we would use today. In fact their color choices are closer to those of hound sculpture. And note that the bronze-age aryan invaders to India and Persia also invaded Greece at the same time... In other words, "yes, but not as much as you might think"
- woodandsteel 9y ago
  >their color choices were more garish than we would use today. Maybe that was just an artistic choice. The reason I am pushing on this is that there is a widespread idea, especially in academia, that people in different cultures see the world completely differently than we modern Westerners do. But that is simply not true. On most basic things, like the fact that human beings live in space, have to eat, and so on, different cultures agree.
  - gumby 9y ago
    Do you read Classical Greek? Have you read Gladstone's book? In my case the answer to both is yes. And, with a Hindu Indian parent and much time spent there through my life I am quite aware of the ancient cultural ties between those two cultures. There is plenty of work in cultural anthropology, biology, and casting that people are incredibly alike in most ways even in regards to things that appear to be learned, and yet also have elements that are strongly dissimilar despite seemingly being innate. What about people with innate absolute orientation and no concept of right/left. That's not a "historical" phenomenon but a contemporary one. Sometimes things can be scientific and not ideological you know. Why was an oxe the color of wine?

sn9 9y ago

Text really isn't the best medium to discuss color perception. This Vox video summarizing the research of linguistic anthropologists is much more clear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg

edw 9y ago

This submitter mines a lot karma by re-posting articles featured on Arts and Letters Daily (aldaily.com). I find that site far more valuable than HN for informing me in ways that make me a better programmer, businessperson—and person. As a bonus: no comments!

giorgosts 9y ago

The greek language is not dead, it is still spoken by about 15 mil. people worldwide. "Porfyro" is the deep red color that can be frequently experienced in esp. greek orthodox churches (even in apparell dating many hundreds of years), and "Glauco" is the shiny blue of the aegean sea that made the greek islands famous worldwide. The words that the greeks used (and still use) have the purpose of describing the natural world, not of scientificaly defining colors according to a theory of vision. Even the modern theory of color vision acknowledges the principles of color constancy and color adaptation.