3 ms·
Perhaps this isn't entirely accurate, but there was a time before "zero" as a concept was invented. You don't need it to count. You don't need it to do arithmet
by jmyeet 2y ago
Perhaps this isn't entirely accurate, but there was a time before "zero" as a concept was invented. You don't need it to count. You don't need it to do arithmetic on an abacus. Saying "there are 0 apples" I guess didn't compute. Instead it was "I have no apples". So zero really incorporated the absence of something into the number system and that wasn't always the case.
I wonder if blue was like that for ancient people. It's not that they couldn't see the blue things but that blue, given that it was the color of the sky and arguably the sea, wasn't really a colour at all. It was the absence of colour.
Essentially blue was a baseline and wasn't thought of as a colour at all. Or at least that's the way I've always thought about it.
- nemomarx 2y agoif you look into Japanese history, they used one word for what we would call blue and green. so they could surely see it, but they might think of it as a special case of green, like how pink and orange can be a special case of red in some historical eras. I believe treating blue as "dark green" is sometimes seen?
- skirmish 2y agoEven today, Russians distinguish light blue from dark blue as completely different colors (голубой vs синий). Culturally different color understanding is not rare at all. For me, personally, English-speakers are being weird when they distinguish pink and red as colors; they are obviously just lightness shades!
- nemomarx 2y agosee I think some shades of pink are more of a weird red purple? like fuchsia and magenta have a different tone. I believe what we call "bright pink" is kinda weird wavelength wise anyway though, I remember old YouTube essays about it.
- knome 2y agobrown is just dark orange, but is treated as separate culturally.
- gehwartzen 2y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language&wprov=rarw1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Blue%E2%80%93gr...
- dumpsterdiver 2y ago> Essentially blue was a baseline If you think about it, the sky (and its colors) are one of the few things that most humans throughout history could readily point at and say, “That is that.” Not many other things explain themselves so readily as the sky above our heads.