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I vaguely remember learning in school that the natives who saw ships arrive across the Atlantic for the first time saw the ships made of clouds because they had
by withinboredom 4y ago
I vaguely remember learning in school that the natives who saw ships arrive across the Atlantic for the first time saw the ships made of clouds because they had never seen anything like it before.
No idea if it was a fact or myth, but it’s always stuck with me that so much of our understanding and what we see is based on what we expect and not on reality.
- lukas099 4y agoI suppose a ship with a lot of large, white, billowy sails against a clear blue sky would look a lot like clouds. Edit: I wonder, though, if native people didn't just use the word "cloud" because they did not have a word for "sail", and that was the closest thing they looked like.
- altruios 4y agothe chicken and the egg, or the thought and the word.
- exikyut 4y agoExpectation and also language. I've read that there are native languages out there with some large number of words for certain shades of color, and no words for other colors. Speakers of the language can very reliably distinguish the colors they have words for with high accuracy, but can't tell the colors they don't have words for apart very well at all.
- tacocataco 4y agoMaybe because the ships came from over the horizon?