7 ms·

That’s physically impossible. The color receptors in our eyes are unlikely to have spontaneously gained the ability to process blue wavelength light only after

by sidlls 3y ago

That’s physically impossible. The color receptors in our eyes are unlikely to have spontaneously gained the ability to process blue wavelength light only after a word was invented for it. More likely is that people simply didn’t use a separate word to distinguish colors of wavelengths between green and violet.

Tenoke 3y ago
While likely still wrong, Sapir-worf doesn't state that you developed the receptors at the same time but rather that things were processed/compressed/remembered differently when/if there was a single word for e.g. blue and purple. It's closer (if we steelman a bit) to how if I think of different shades of purple as just purple I might not notice a difference between 2 objects while someone else would immediately tell that one is lavender and the other wisteria.
- thechao 3y ago
  Your latter example (but with green) is a testable hypothesis, with some weak support for being true! The rest of S-W is popsci garbage.
adrian_b 3y ago
There are many languages where there is a single word for green and blue, but Greek was not one of those languages. Since the earliest texts, Greek had distinct words for blue and green, even if many modern authors have confused them, because they did not compare enough texts to be able to understand the correspondences between words and colors. Ancient Greek was not uniform, there were many dialects, so there are many authors who use different words for colors. Blue was frequently described as the color of the pigment ultramarine blue or more rarely as the color of the sky. For green there were more words, some of whom have uncertain meaning, like "chloros", which is used in many modern terms for green, but which might have meant something else in Greek. The words whose meaning is certain describe green as the color of grass or as the color of emeralds or as the color of leek.
ralferoo 3y ago
Reminds me of this old image (can't find the original link, but it's the same picture) that jokes about the difference between men and women with names for colours: https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/styles/article-inline-half-caption/public/field_blog_entry_images/color_differences.jpg https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/styles/a... Oh, and of course the xkcd follow-up: https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
- bitwize 3y ago
  Fuchsia was named after a botanist named Leonhard Fuchs. To remember its spelling I think of Fred Fuchs, aka Fred Fucks from the AVGN videos, and then add -ia.

by sidlls 3y ago

Tenoke 3y ago

While likely still wrong, Sapir-worf doesn't state that you developed the receptors at the same time but rather that things were processed/compressed/remembered differently when/if there was a single word for e.g. blue and purple. It's closer (if we steelman a bit) to how if I think of different shades of purple as just purple I might not notice a difference between 2 objects while someone else would immediately tell that one is lavender and the other wisteria.

thechao 3y ago
Your latter example (but with green) is a testable hypothesis, with some weak support for being true! The rest of S-W is popsci garbage.

adrian_b 3y ago

There are many languages where there is a single word for green and blue, but Greek was not one of those languages. Since the earliest texts, Greek had distinct words for blue and green, even if many modern authors have confused them, because they did not compare enough texts to be able to understand the correspondences between words and colors. Ancient Greek was not uniform, there were many dialects, so there are many authors who use different words for colors. Blue was frequently described as the color of the pigment ultramarine blue or more rarely as the color of the sky. For green there were more words, some of whom have uncertain meaning, like "chloros", which is used in many modern terms for green, but which might have meant something else in Greek. The words whose meaning is certain describe green as the color of grass or as the color of emeralds or as the color of leek.

ralferoo 3y ago

Reminds me of this old image (can't find the original link, but it's the same picture) that jokes about the difference between men and women with names for colours: https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/styles/article-inline-half-caption/public/field_blog_entry_images/color_differences.jpg https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/styles/a... Oh, and of course the xkcd follow-up: https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/

bitwize 3y ago
Fuchsia was named after a botanist named Leonhard Fuchs. To remember its spelling I think of Fred Fuchs, aka Fred Fucks from the AVGN videos, and then add -ia.