8 ms·

There's a fascinating podcast (with transcript) at https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/211213-sky-isnt-blue https://www.wnycstudios.org/podca

There's a fascinating podcast (with transcript) at https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/211213-sky-isnt-blue https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/21121... about linguistic studies that show blue to be the last color named in virtually all languages. There was no blue in the Odyssey or the Iliad because the Greeks didn't have a word for it yet. It appeared a few centuries later. Same in other languages around the world. Centuries of writing with no reference to the color blue, and then one day it appears. The podcast is a good listen.

Enginerrrd 5y ago
It's really interesting, but I've noticed the same pattern in development with my kids. My eldest had a strong tendency to label blue things as "green". I'll have to test him for color blindness of course, but I don't think that's the issue. I think it's just that the two are more similar than it appears to me as an adult.
ReactiveJelly 5y ago
On a couple occasions, two different cis women said that I must be slightly colorblind because I was assigned male at birth and we disagreed on whether a color (on a physical object we were both looking at) was more blue or more green. (As far as I can tell, I am not even slightly colorblind.) I really want this linguistics thing to be known, because I think it's a sufficient explanation that _people just name colors differently and that's fine._
- HideousKojima 5y ago
  Male is your sex, not your gender, so couldn't you just say "I'm male" instead of irrelevant details about "cis" women?
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    It provides context for why the opinions might be biased, even if they were genuine and independent.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    Some people use male to refer to gender these days.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  That is getting out of topic fast, but have you checked for blue/green color blindness? This one is not widely tested, come in several different forms, and the most usual "symptom" is that you disagree with everybody about colors being more blueish, greenish, purpleish and etc. It also doesn't impact much one's life... unless you have to read resistor values every day.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    I googled for relevant tests and found colorlitelens.com. They may not be trustworthy as they are selling something. However, I took some of the tests (I've never been diagnosed with color blindness by a medical professional) and the results were interesting. The first couple of tests show a partial ring in a different background, like a rotated "C" and ask you to click on the gap as the contrast gets fainter. The red-green gap test was easy for me, and I got 100%. The "Tritan (Blue)" test which might be the relevant one to what you are talking about, was difficult, and it said I was "severely" deficient. However, after you take that test, it shows two spectrums and says if you are color blind in this sense they should look the same. They look very different to me, no question. So then I looked further and saw there is another test for the same type of deficiency, which is called the "mosaic" test, I think, where there is a small square made up of a few "tiles" that is a different color and you have to click on it. This one I got mostly right, and it ended up saying I was "slightly" deficient. It occurs to me, that with LED lights everywhere, and the LED screens on phones, the color deficiency in online tests could be coming from a compromised spectrum of light, not from one's eyesight. I don't quite understand how disagreeing about what to call colors on the spectrum from blue to green can be a deficiency. A rose by any other name... If you can differentiate between colors that are more blue and ones that are more green, then what significance is a label? As I say, lighting is important not to overlook. My first car was basically turquoise, and I tended to think of it as blue or blue-green. Other people did call it green, but for me, there was nuance due to seeing it under many different settings. Under sodium lights, it would look quite blue and not green, and unpleasant to my eye. Under indirect sunlight, it would be blue-green and jewel like. For reference, while it was a Honda color from many years ago that isn't easy to find good pictures of now, pictures from a GIS for "bmw atlantis blue" show cars that look like exactly the same color to me. On the other hand "porsche lizard green" does not look blue to me in the least. "Jade green" seems to me predictably a blue-green color that is greener than turquoise, but still perceptibly bluish. Colors called "chartreuse" generally look to me like green with a hint of yellow.
- executesorder66 5y ago
  My wife and I disagreed over whether our duvet was blue or green. I was adamant that it's green, and she that it is blue. (we both agreed it was a blue-green, but if we had to pick which colour was more prominent) So I took a photo and looked up the RGB values of the pixels to see if it was more green or blue. Turned out it was basically equal values for both. I found that very interesting.
- jedberg 5y ago
  It's fairly well established that eyes of males (sex not gender) are not as good at distinguishing blue vs green as female eyes. If you were born male, your eyes most likely can't see blue and green as well as your friends who were born female. That's why you hear all those stories about men arguing with their wives about blue vs. green.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > It's fairly well established that eyes of males (sex not gender) are not as good at distinguishing blue vs green as female eyes. No, its not. It is, on the other hand, well-established that, on average, female brains are better at distinguishing shades within and between “blue” and “green" (and, really, fine distinctions in colors in general) than male brains are on average. (Similarly, male brains are better at perceiving distinctions in brightness than female brains.)
    - jedberg 5y ago
      Eyes are part of the brain, are they not?
      - _hilro 5y ago
        No. They feed signal in to the brain. You wouldn't say your nostrils or mouth or skin or ears are part of the brain. Why would eyes be different?
        jedberg 5y ago
        The retina is considered part of the brain: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina
        _hilro 5y ago
        Is this what you're referring to?: > In vertebrate embryonic development, the retina and the optic nerve originate as outgrowths of the developing brain, specifically the embryonic diencephalon; thus, the retina is considered part of the central nervous system (CNS) and is actually brain tissue.[2][3] From https://www.britannica.com/science/retina https://www.britannica.com/science/retina > Retina, layer of nervous tissue that covers the inside of the back two-thirds of the eyeball, Anyway. I'm still not convinced eyes = retina = brain so ill leave it there.
VeninVidiaVicii 5y ago
So then what does it mean for languages who split blue into two colors? In Russian, there are famously two: синий and голубой.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  Google translate seems to think those are blauw and cyaan, respectively. I'm not sure why it decided to translate into Dutch though...
  - john-aj 5y ago
    When translating Russian, both are usually translated as blue. Синий is used about dark blue things, like the sea, and голубой about light blue things, like the sky. But translating it to "dark/light blue" would be incorrect, as the lightness is not an important part of the words. It is just that Russian speakers are forced to specify the lightness, similarly to how German speakers are forced to specify the sex of their neighbor (Nachbar/Nachbarin). In most cases, Nachbarin should simply be translated to "neighbor".
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      I'm not sure how many different interpretations there are of "cyan". What I think of first is RGB(0,255,255) because of mostly encountering the term in relation to computers since the 1980s. Or whatever the cyan in CMYK is, I assume it's similar. But that's likely not the traditional meaning of it, in whatever language. So I don't assume that I know what cyaan is.
- Aengeuad 5y ago
  This post is maybe a little off topic, but the view of linguistic relativism and specifically of Whorf (Sapir–Whorf hypothesis - linguistic relativism), as well as many 19th and 20th century philosophers, was that the Ancient Greeks must have viewed the world differently to us, or to put it bluntly, that all ancient peoples must have been colour blind. This then extends to the modern day, do Russian speakers view the world differently because of the separation of light and dark blue, are English (and most other language speakers) blind to the colour голубой as it's grouped together with 'blue'? When the significance of синий and голубой have been studied an effect is seen, Russians are faster at differentiating between these shades of blue. When it's put this way and framed positively it's absolutely an alluring idea and one used to sell language books, learn Russian to literally see the world differently, but is it significant? Russians are about 125ms faster at differentiating between shades of light and dark blue because having a separate word to group them into does confer some advantage, but importantly English speakers are still just as capable of distinguishing those shades. This is also true even for languages that lack distinction between other colours, a particular language not having a separation between say blue and green doesn't mean that speakers of that language are any less capable of seeing a distinction between blue and green even if they refer to those two colours using just one word. Another example of the issues of applying such findings to a world view would be Mandarin which represents the month before as 'above' and the next month as 'below', and studies do show that Mandarin speakers are faster at determining whether March comes before April after having been shown a picture with some verticality. When looking at these results through a Whorfian lens it'd be easy to make the claim that Mandarin speakers view time as vertically. More studies were done, Mandarin speakers were once again faster at guessing up was previous (compared to down for previous) by 170ms. Seems conclusive and further evidence that Mandarin speakers may view time as being vertical, however, the same study found that mandarin speakers were 230ms faster at guessing left as previous (compared to right for previous) and they were faster at doing this than they were doing it vertically. Also noteworthy was that they found English speakers were 300ms faster at guessing left for previous than compared to right, and in both cases of vertical/horizontal guessing English speakers were faster than Mandarin speakers (although English speakers preferred bottom as previous to top as previous). This is where the issues of linguistic relativism pop up and why today it's generally heavily criticised and no longer considered valid by linguists, when applied to colours or time it appears relatively harmless but it's not always framed positively and that has been the case for as long as the theory existed. An example of a harmful application of it would be to look at the many African languages that use the same word for meat and animal, are they incapable of telling a difference between them? In English it's often pointed out that the term beef comes from the French aristocracy where the term cow comes from the Anglo-Saxon speaking peasant/serf class, which of these two would have been more acquainted with raising and slaughtering the animals and would they have been unable to make the differentiation? We absolutely know today that even despite lacking terms for certain colours people are still able to differentiate between them, to know this after having studied it and then say that the Ancient Greeks must have been colour blind seems absurd. >So then what does it mean for languages who split blue into two colors? Personally? It's really neat and being able to differentiate those shades faster is an interesting consequence of that, I just can't view it through a Whorfian lens. I'm also somewhat envious of the differentiation after having been told numerous times as a child that while teal/turquoise are blue they're not really 'blue'.
Aengeuad 5y ago
It's not that languages develop a word for blue last, but that there's usually a specific order in which terms for colour enter languages. It's roughly as follows: all languages have words for white/black, if they have 3 terms for colour the third will always be red. After that it's green and/or yellow. Only then do you get blue or blue-and-green. This can also be seen in the writings of Homer where honey is described as green, and hair is described as... blue, that is, the same term was used to describe the sea as well as corn flours (i.e., a dark colour). It's with Empidocles that we see the classification of colour the Ancient Greeks would have used: light, dark, red, and yellow. After blue/blue-and-green the order breaks down a bit, but new colour terms obviously come into use after blue. In English for instance the terms for pink, orange, and brown all came long after blue. Coincidentally brown is usually one of the last colours to get its own term, and in English before the term brown was used to refer to a colour it referred to dark or dusk.
- EamonnMR 5y ago
  You have to wonder if people working with dyes had (now lost) terms of art to describe colors.
  - Aengeuad 5y ago
    I would imagine the dyes were referred to by the materials used to create them, cochineal for a red dye, woad for a blue/indigo dye, etc. The etymology of purple does come from a shellfish or a fish and purple dye did historically come from a sea snail but the name for that particular dye likely didn't come from the same root as purple.
- jimmygrapes 5y ago
  As Tool put it in Lateralus: Black / Then / White are / All I see / In my infancy / Red and yellow then came to be Fun fact: syllable count follows Fibbonaci sequence
- thevardanian 5y ago
  What might be missed is that black and blue are not necessarily differentiated. I know that, at least among Indian languages specifically Sanskrit, black and blue aren't as differentiated as they are today. A dark color/black was seen as dark blue.
I_complete_me 5y ago
> linguistic studies that show blue to be the last color named in virtually all languages In Irish, the term "fear dubh" refers to the devil literally "black man" which presumably long preceded Irish language interaction with non-whites. To refer to a black (coloured) man in modern Irish the term "fear gorm" is used. The word 'gorm' in other contexts means blue. This would match your comment. As an aside, the term "fear bán" is literally "white man" and I leave it to the curious to guess or research it's meaning.
- dorchadas 5y ago
  In this case, there's multiple issues going on here. First 'gorm' in the case of 'fear gorm' didn't mean blue. It meant 'dusky', 'swarthy'. Also, 'fear dubh' refers to a black-haired person; 'An Fear Dubh' refers to the devil. 'Fear bán' would likely refer to hair color. Irish traditionally classified people on their hair color (thus 'Roisín dubh' was 'Roisín of the dark hair', not that she was dark complected). Another big issue is Irish colors don't match up to English ones, at all. So many seem to think 'gorm' matches up to English 'blue', when it doesn't. It's different. Same with 'glas' and 'green', which is why you can have 'capall glas' or a 'green horse', but really it's a different color split that English. Same with 'spéir glas' to describe a 'grey sky'. It's a huge problem among learners who learn the language incorrectly (most in Ireland, sadly).
  - I_complete_me 5y ago
    Go raibh míle agat! Tá an ceart agat. My 'fear dubh' was intended to be "An Fear Dubh". If you are male you have "An Fear Bán", the colour of men's clothing presumably being dark in contrast!
Hamuko 5y ago
I thought that the word "orange" was way newer than "blue".
robotomir 5y ago
This thing again. I think all the misunderstanding starts from this one person misinterpreting Homer's "wine-dark sea" to mean blue. No. It means on the deep black sea.
- wazoox 5y ago
  In my own interpretation, Homer refers to the colour of red wine as you can see in a black earthenware cup of the sort that was common in ancient Greece, or a bronze crater, both very dark, and actually not so different from the colour of seawater as seen from a boat offshore (not exactly black, but not really coloured either).
Telemakhos 5y ago
> There was no blue in the Odyssey or the Iliad because the Greeks didn't have a word for it yet. That's not true. From the description of Alcinoos' palace in Odyssey 7.87: περὶ δὲ θριγκὸς κυάνοιο ("around was a cornice of blue enamel"). κύανος is dark blue, and it is used later in Greek to describe the color of lapis lazuli. In the Iliad it's used of blue enamel on armor, as at Iliad 11.24: τοῦ δ' ἤτοι δέκα οἶμοι ἔσαν μέλανος κυάνοιο ("there were ten stripes of dark blue enamel") on the breastplate of Agamemnon, and κυάνεοι δράκοντες ("blue enamel snakes") two lines later.
- stephenhuey 5y ago
  In later stages of Greek it meant blue, but I also had read how for Homer it probably did not mean that. Here's a quote from the related Wikipedia entry: The word kyanós (κυανός), which in later stages of Greek meant blue, does make a limited appearance, but for Homer it almost certainly meant "dark", as it was used to describe the eyebrows of Zeus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea_(Homer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea_(Homer) Also see this 2015 paper: Wine-Dark Sheep: Ancient Color in a Modern Greek Odyssey https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1115&context=hcoltheses https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=111...

Enginerrrd 5y ago

It's really interesting, but I've noticed the same pattern in development with my kids. My eldest had a strong tendency to label blue things as "green". I'll have to test him for color blindness of course, but I don't think that's the issue. I think it's just that the two are more similar than it appears to me as an adult.

ReactiveJelly 5y ago

On a couple occasions, two different cis women said that I must be slightly colorblind because I was assigned male at birth and we disagreed on whether a color (on a physical object we were both looking at) was more blue or more green. (As far as I can tell, I am not even slightly colorblind.) I really want this linguistics thing to be known, because I think it's a sufficient explanation that _people just name colors differently and that's fine._

HideousKojima 5y ago
Male is your sex, not your gender, so couldn't you just say "I'm male" instead of irrelevant details about "cis" women?
- perl4ever 5y ago
  It provides context for why the opinions might be biased, even if they were genuine and independent.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  Some people use male to refer to gender these days.
marcosdumay 5y ago
That is getting out of topic fast, but have you checked for blue/green color blindness? This one is not widely tested, come in several different forms, and the most usual "symptom" is that you disagree with everybody about colors being more blueish, greenish, purpleish and etc. It also doesn't impact much one's life... unless you have to read resistor values every day.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  I googled for relevant tests and found colorlitelens.com. They may not be trustworthy as they are selling something. However, I took some of the tests (I've never been diagnosed with color blindness by a medical professional) and the results were interesting. The first couple of tests show a partial ring in a different background, like a rotated "C" and ask you to click on the gap as the contrast gets fainter. The red-green gap test was easy for me, and I got 100%. The "Tritan (Blue)" test which might be the relevant one to what you are talking about, was difficult, and it said I was "severely" deficient. However, after you take that test, it shows two spectrums and says if you are color blind in this sense they should look the same. They look very different to me, no question. So then I looked further and saw there is another test for the same type of deficiency, which is called the "mosaic" test, I think, where there is a small square made up of a few "tiles" that is a different color and you have to click on it. This one I got mostly right, and it ended up saying I was "slightly" deficient. It occurs to me, that with LED lights everywhere, and the LED screens on phones, the color deficiency in online tests could be coming from a compromised spectrum of light, not from one's eyesight. I don't quite understand how disagreeing about what to call colors on the spectrum from blue to green can be a deficiency. A rose by any other name... If you can differentiate between colors that are more blue and ones that are more green, then what significance is a label? As I say, lighting is important not to overlook. My first car was basically turquoise, and I tended to think of it as blue or blue-green. Other people did call it green, but for me, there was nuance due to seeing it under many different settings. Under sodium lights, it would look quite blue and not green, and unpleasant to my eye. Under indirect sunlight, it would be blue-green and jewel like. For reference, while it was a Honda color from many years ago that isn't easy to find good pictures of now, pictures from a GIS for "bmw atlantis blue" show cars that look like exactly the same color to me. On the other hand "porsche lizard green" does not look blue to me in the least. "Jade green" seems to me predictably a blue-green color that is greener than turquoise, but still perceptibly bluish. Colors called "chartreuse" generally look to me like green with a hint of yellow.
executesorder66 5y ago
My wife and I disagreed over whether our duvet was blue or green. I was adamant that it's green, and she that it is blue. (we both agreed it was a blue-green, but if we had to pick which colour was more prominent) So I took a photo and looked up the RGB values of the pixels to see if it was more green or blue. Turned out it was basically equal values for both. I found that very interesting.
jedberg 5y ago
It's fairly well established that eyes of males (sex not gender) are not as good at distinguishing blue vs green as female eyes. If you were born male, your eyes most likely can't see blue and green as well as your friends who were born female. That's why you hear all those stories about men arguing with their wives about blue vs. green.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > It's fairly well established that eyes of males (sex not gender) are not as good at distinguishing blue vs green as female eyes. No, its not. It is, on the other hand, well-established that, on average, female brains are better at distinguishing shades within and between “blue” and “green" (and, really, fine distinctions in colors in general) than male brains are on average. (Similarly, male brains are better at perceiving distinctions in brightness than female brains.)
  - jedberg 5y ago
    Eyes are part of the brain, are they not?
    - _hilro 5y ago
      No. They feed signal in to the brain. You wouldn't say your nostrils or mouth or skin or ears are part of the brain. Why would eyes be different?
      - jedberg 5y ago
        The retina is considered part of the brain: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina
        _hilro 5y ago
        Is this what you're referring to?: > In vertebrate embryonic development, the retina and the optic nerve originate as outgrowths of the developing brain, specifically the embryonic diencephalon; thus, the retina is considered part of the central nervous system (CNS) and is actually brain tissue.[2][3] From https://www.britannica.com/science/retina https://www.britannica.com/science/retina > Retina, layer of nervous tissue that covers the inside of the back two-thirds of the eyeball, Anyway. I'm still not convinced eyes = retina = brain so ill leave it there.

VeninVidiaVicii 5y ago

So then what does it mean for languages who split blue into two colors? In Russian, there are famously two: синий and голубой.

perl4ever 5y ago
Google translate seems to think those are blauw and cyaan, respectively. I'm not sure why it decided to translate into Dutch though...
- john-aj 5y ago
  When translating Russian, both are usually translated as blue. Синий is used about dark blue things, like the sea, and голубой about light blue things, like the sky. But translating it to "dark/light blue" would be incorrect, as the lightness is not an important part of the words. It is just that Russian speakers are forced to specify the lightness, similarly to how German speakers are forced to specify the sex of their neighbor (Nachbar/Nachbarin). In most cases, Nachbarin should simply be translated to "neighbor".
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    I'm not sure how many different interpretations there are of "cyan". What I think of first is RGB(0,255,255) because of mostly encountering the term in relation to computers since the 1980s. Or whatever the cyan in CMYK is, I assume it's similar. But that's likely not the traditional meaning of it, in whatever language. So I don't assume that I know what cyaan is.
Aengeuad 5y ago
This post is maybe a little off topic, but the view of linguistic relativism and specifically of Whorf (Sapir–Whorf hypothesis - linguistic relativism), as well as many 19th and 20th century philosophers, was that the Ancient Greeks must have viewed the world differently to us, or to put it bluntly, that all ancient peoples must have been colour blind. This then extends to the modern day, do Russian speakers view the world differently because of the separation of light and dark blue, are English (and most other language speakers) blind to the colour голубой as it's grouped together with 'blue'? When the significance of синий and голубой have been studied an effect is seen, Russians are faster at differentiating between these shades of blue. When it's put this way and framed positively it's absolutely an alluring idea and one used to sell language books, learn Russian to literally see the world differently, but is it significant? Russians are about 125ms faster at differentiating between shades of light and dark blue because having a separate word to group them into does confer some advantage, but importantly English speakers are still just as capable of distinguishing those shades. This is also true even for languages that lack distinction between other colours, a particular language not having a separation between say blue and green doesn't mean that speakers of that language are any less capable of seeing a distinction between blue and green even if they refer to those two colours using just one word. Another example of the issues of applying such findings to a world view would be Mandarin which represents the month before as 'above' and the next month as 'below', and studies do show that Mandarin speakers are faster at determining whether March comes before April after having been shown a picture with some verticality. When looking at these results through a Whorfian lens it'd be easy to make the claim that Mandarin speakers view time as vertically. More studies were done, Mandarin speakers were once again faster at guessing up was previous (compared to down for previous) by 170ms. Seems conclusive and further evidence that Mandarin speakers may view time as being vertical, however, the same study found that mandarin speakers were 230ms faster at guessing left as previous (compared to right for previous) and they were faster at doing this than they were doing it vertically. Also noteworthy was that they found English speakers were 300ms faster at guessing left for previous than compared to right, and in both cases of vertical/horizontal guessing English speakers were faster than Mandarin speakers (although English speakers preferred bottom as previous to top as previous). This is where the issues of linguistic relativism pop up and why today it's generally heavily criticised and no longer considered valid by linguists, when applied to colours or time it appears relatively harmless but it's not always framed positively and that has been the case for as long as the theory existed. An example of a harmful application of it would be to look at the many African languages that use the same word for meat and animal, are they incapable of telling a difference between them? In English it's often pointed out that the term beef comes from the French aristocracy where the term cow comes from the Anglo-Saxon speaking peasant/serf class, which of these two would have been more acquainted with raising and slaughtering the animals and would they have been unable to make the differentiation? We absolutely know today that even despite lacking terms for certain colours people are still able to differentiate between them, to know this after having studied it and then say that the Ancient Greeks must have been colour blind seems absurd. >So then what does it mean for languages who split blue into two colors? Personally? It's really neat and being able to differentiate those shades faster is an interesting consequence of that, I just can't view it through a Whorfian lens. I'm also somewhat envious of the differentiation after having been told numerous times as a child that while teal/turquoise are blue they're not really 'blue'.

Aengeuad 5y ago

It's not that languages develop a word for blue last, but that there's usually a specific order in which terms for colour enter languages. It's roughly as follows: all languages have words for white/black, if they have 3 terms for colour the third will always be red. After that it's green and/or yellow. Only then do you get blue or blue-and-green. This can also be seen in the writings of Homer where honey is described as green, and hair is described as... blue, that is, the same term was used to describe the sea as well as corn flours (i.e., a dark colour). It's with Empidocles that we see the classification of colour the Ancient Greeks would have used: light, dark, red, and yellow. After blue/blue-and-green the order breaks down a bit, but new colour terms obviously come into use after blue. In English for instance the terms for pink, orange, and brown all came long after blue. Coincidentally brown is usually one of the last colours to get its own term, and in English before the term brown was used to refer to a colour it referred to dark or dusk.

EamonnMR 5y ago
You have to wonder if people working with dyes had (now lost) terms of art to describe colors.
- Aengeuad 5y ago
  I would imagine the dyes were referred to by the materials used to create them, cochineal for a red dye, woad for a blue/indigo dye, etc. The etymology of purple does come from a shellfish or a fish and purple dye did historically come from a sea snail but the name for that particular dye likely didn't come from the same root as purple.
jimmygrapes 5y ago
As Tool put it in Lateralus: Black / Then / White are / All I see / In my infancy / Red and yellow then came to be Fun fact: syllable count follows Fibbonaci sequence
thevardanian 5y ago
What might be missed is that black and blue are not necessarily differentiated. I know that, at least among Indian languages specifically Sanskrit, black and blue aren't as differentiated as they are today. A dark color/black was seen as dark blue.

I_complete_me 5y ago

> linguistic studies that show blue to be the last color named in virtually all languages In Irish, the term "fear dubh" refers to the devil literally "black man" which presumably long preceded Irish language interaction with non-whites. To refer to a black (coloured) man in modern Irish the term "fear gorm" is used. The word 'gorm' in other contexts means blue. This would match your comment. As an aside, the term "fear bán" is literally "white man" and I leave it to the curious to guess or research it's meaning.

dorchadas 5y ago
In this case, there's multiple issues going on here. First 'gorm' in the case of 'fear gorm' didn't mean blue. It meant 'dusky', 'swarthy'. Also, 'fear dubh' refers to a black-haired person; 'An Fear Dubh' refers to the devil. 'Fear bán' would likely refer to hair color. Irish traditionally classified people on their hair color (thus 'Roisín dubh' was 'Roisín of the dark hair', not that she was dark complected). Another big issue is Irish colors don't match up to English ones, at all. So many seem to think 'gorm' matches up to English 'blue', when it doesn't. It's different. Same with 'glas' and 'green', which is why you can have 'capall glas' or a 'green horse', but really it's a different color split that English. Same with 'spéir glas' to describe a 'grey sky'. It's a huge problem among learners who learn the language incorrectly (most in Ireland, sadly).
- I_complete_me 5y ago
  Go raibh míle agat! Tá an ceart agat. My 'fear dubh' was intended to be "An Fear Dubh". If you are male you have "An Fear Bán", the colour of men's clothing presumably being dark in contrast!

Hamuko 5y ago

I thought that the word "orange" was way newer than "blue".

robotomir 5y ago

This thing again. I think all the misunderstanding starts from this one person misinterpreting Homer's "wine-dark sea" to mean blue. No. It means on the deep black sea.

wazoox 5y ago
In my own interpretation, Homer refers to the colour of red wine as you can see in a black earthenware cup of the sort that was common in ancient Greece, or a bronze crater, both very dark, and actually not so different from the colour of seawater as seen from a boat offshore (not exactly black, but not really coloured either).

Telemakhos 5y ago

> There was no blue in the Odyssey or the Iliad because the Greeks didn't have a word for it yet. That's not true. From the description of Alcinoos' palace in Odyssey 7.87: περὶ δὲ θριγκὸς κυάνοιο ("around was a cornice of blue enamel"). κύανος is dark blue, and it is used later in Greek to describe the color of lapis lazuli. In the Iliad it's used of blue enamel on armor, as at Iliad 11.24: τοῦ δ' ἤτοι δέκα οἶμοι ἔσαν μέλανος κυάνοιο ("there were ten stripes of dark blue enamel") on the breastplate of Agamemnon, and κυάνεοι δράκοντες ("blue enamel snakes") two lines later.

stephenhuey 5y ago
In later stages of Greek it meant blue, but I also had read how for Homer it probably did not mean that. Here's a quote from the related Wikipedia entry: The word kyanós (κυανός), which in later stages of Greek meant blue, does make a limited appearance, but for Homer it almost certainly meant "dark", as it was used to describe the eyebrows of Zeus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea_(Homer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea_(Homer) Also see this 2015 paper: Wine-Dark Sheep: Ancient Color in a Modern Greek Odyssey https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1115&context=hcoltheses https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=111...