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Is it possible the author means they lumped blue in with another color, like green or purple, and didn’t differentiate it as its own color? Like how this list o

Is it possible the author means they lumped blue in with another color, like green or purple, and didn’t differentiate it as its own color? Like how this list of Medieval colors also didn’t list orange. I assume orange was lumped in with red or yellow.

PittleyDunkin 2y ago
Yes, this is how I interpreted it. Arguably before the 20th century we had few commonplace references for most of the hues we've now named at all. Plus, most of the references we do have are often localized regionally and linguistically to people who recognize the term. The constant colors—things like "blood" and "dark" and "bright-white"—are actually pretty rare. Even the sun, the sky, the ocean, earth etc are capable of producing far too many hues to reliably use as a reference point, and often different hues in different place. Which is not so say that it's not very poetic when it works!
- throwup238 2y ago
  The funny thing is we've now drifted to the other extreme. A bunch of RGB colors were named after pigments like vermillion or international klein blue that fall outside of the RGB/CMYK color spaces rendered by monitors and print (humans can see significantly more shades than either can reproduce), so now common parlance has compressed the world of color into the narrow band supported by modern technology.
cafeinux 2y ago
Funnily, when I was a child my favourite colour was "dark yellow". It was orange, but I would have died on the hill that said it was dark yellow.
- Filligree 2y ago
  Bright brown.
dimensional_dan 2y ago
Sometimes we find it hard to see the things that are closer to home, and presume that these phenomena are do do with other peoples and cultures. But consider in English we currently do this blue and light blue. Where say Spanish calls them different colours - blue and celeste, and they are linguistically seen as different named colours. Interestingly we don't do this with red, there's no red and light red, but red and pink.
- irrational 2y ago
  Isn’t teal a named blue color?
adrian_b 2y ago
No the explanation is much simpler. The myth about the Ancient Greeks and Romans not distinguishing various colors has arisen in the 19th century, because those who knew well enough Ancient Greek or Latin to be able to read the ancient literature were ignorant in chemistry, mineralogy and biology, so they were not able to recognize the chemical substances, minerals, plants or animals described in the ancient literature, so they were unable to recognize which were their colors. Ancient Greek and Latin and also most old languages had very few words that were just color names. Most colors were referred to as "the color of X", where "X" was some well known colored thing. Even for the very few words that were just color names, like "red", a phrase like "the color of X" was preferred for naming precise hues. For instance, "red" could mean either pure red or purple, so when precision was needed the former was referred as "the color of coccos", while the latter was referred as "the color of purple", where "coccos" was a red dye extracted from certain beetles and "purple" was the purple dye extracted from marine snails. When those reading the ancient literature could not identify "X", they could not identify the color that was named there. At the end, after ignoring most colors mentioned in a text, their (wrong ) conclusion was that the text did not contain color references, except perhaps to red, white, black or gray. So it is not a fact that the Ancients did not discuss about many colors, but the modern scholars with a not wide enough knowledge were those who could not understand the ancient phrases used to name colors like blue, blue-green, green, brown and others.

PittleyDunkin 2y ago

Yes, this is how I interpreted it. Arguably before the 20th century we had few commonplace references for most of the hues we've now named at all. Plus, most of the references we do have are often localized regionally and linguistically to people who recognize the term. The constant colors—things like "blood" and "dark" and "bright-white"—are actually pretty rare. Even the sun, the sky, the ocean, earth etc are capable of producing far too many hues to reliably use as a reference point, and often different hues in different place. Which is not so say that it's not very poetic when it works!

throwup238 2y ago
The funny thing is we've now drifted to the other extreme. A bunch of RGB colors were named after pigments like vermillion or international klein blue that fall outside of the RGB/CMYK color spaces rendered by monitors and print (humans can see significantly more shades than either can reproduce), so now common parlance has compressed the world of color into the narrow band supported by modern technology.

cafeinux 2y ago

Funnily, when I was a child my favourite colour was "dark yellow". It was orange, but I would have died on the hill that said it was dark yellow.

Filligree 2y ago
Bright brown.

dimensional_dan 2y ago

Sometimes we find it hard to see the things that are closer to home, and presume that these phenomena are do do with other peoples and cultures. But consider in English we currently do this blue and light blue. Where say Spanish calls them different colours - blue and celeste, and they are linguistically seen as different named colours. Interestingly we don't do this with red, there's no red and light red, but red and pink.

irrational 2y ago
Isn’t teal a named blue color?

adrian_b 2y ago

No the explanation is much simpler. The myth about the Ancient Greeks and Romans not distinguishing various colors has arisen in the 19th century, because those who knew well enough Ancient Greek or Latin to be able to read the ancient literature were ignorant in chemistry, mineralogy and biology, so they were not able to recognize the chemical substances, minerals, plants or animals described in the ancient literature, so they were unable to recognize which were their colors. Ancient Greek and Latin and also most old languages had very few words that were just color names. Most colors were referred to as "the color of X", where "X" was some well known colored thing. Even for the very few words that were just color names, like "red", a phrase like "the color of X" was preferred for naming precise hues. For instance, "red" could mean either pure red or purple, so when precision was needed the former was referred as "the color of coccos", while the latter was referred as "the color of purple", where "coccos" was a red dye extracted from certain beetles and "purple" was the purple dye extracted from marine snails. When those reading the ancient literature could not identify "X", they could not identify the color that was named there. At the end, after ignoring most colors mentioned in a text, their (wrong ) conclusion was that the text did not contain color references, except perhaps to red, white, black or gray. So it is not a fact that the Ancients did not discuss about many colors, but the modern scholars with a not wide enough knowledge were those who could not understand the ancient phrases used to name colors like blue, blue-green, green, brown and others.