Historical evidence reveals that humans possess the remarkable ability to render certain physical appearances invisible if they do not focus on them, including something as fundamental as a color. Specifically, the color blue. While our eyes can perceive among approximately one million colors, it remains unclear how differently each person experiences them.
I want to better understand this because the sky is clearly a specific color that has been there since the beginning.
How did proto humans not look up at the sky and considered in their feeble brains, “everything above the ground is this very unique color. It’s different from the ground, and the plants.”
I get that sea and lakes really don’t look blue. But did they look up and not see some shade of blue on a clear day?
My understanding is that they don’t distinguish blue and green as separate colours. Kind of like pink is just light red and not every language has a separate word for pink and red.
I’m here for this, I recently found out that I can’t really distinguish shades very well, so pink just looks mostly red and I have a really hard time telling blue from green, but can usually make it out if I look hard enough and get at least 2 guesses.
Either that or my wife got my doctor in on a really intense year long prank.
I think I have this same issue with red/pink and when a color is one or the other in that in-between area. I also do this with blue and green as well, though I feel less so than pink/red. I also have done colorblindness tests myself and do not test as colorblind (either variety).
Orange being seen as shades of either red or yellow is also why they’re called redheads, it predates the word Orange entering the english language and being a better descriptor of most of the shades in that range of hair colors.
There’s been research that language shapes how we perceive the world around us. Because there was no word for “blue” there was no concept of blue, the color still existed but their brains just lumped it into “green”. Sight works by the visual centers brain taking data from the eyes, throwing most of it out, then building a model which is what the rest of the brain gets to actually “see”. That’s why optical illusions work.
A commonly cited source for language shaping our perception of color is Jules Davidoff’s studies on the Himba tribe. The Himba have no word for blue, and they struggled to pick out the blue square from this color wheel. However, they do have many distinctions for shades of green so when given this color wheel they could easily pick out the square that’s a different shade of green (and yes I opened it in MSpaint to check and one of the green squares is a different shade.)
I think part of this phenomena is that the color of the sky on a clear day just wasn’t considered as a color, it was ‘blank’, the absence of clouds, stars or sunset. Kind of like how water has a flavor but we consider it to be neutral.
Homer referred to the ocean as “wine dark”, if you’ve seen pictures of the Mediterranean around Greece, that shit’s as Blue as Blue can be, so what it probably boiled down to is that they could “see” blue, but they always understood it as a blackish color or Green if they had distinguished that by that point.
Basically, there wasn’t a lot of necessity use in distinguishing blue, so most people didn’t until recently.
I want to better understand this because the sky is clearly a specific color that has been there since the beginning.
How did proto humans not look up at the sky and considered in their feeble brains, “everything above the ground is this very unique color. It’s different from the ground, and the plants.”
I get that sea and lakes really don’t look blue. But did they look up and not see some shade of blue on a clear day?
My understanding is that they don’t distinguish blue and green as separate colours. Kind of like pink is just light red and not every language has a separate word for pink and red.
I’m here for this, I recently found out that I can’t really distinguish shades very well, so pink just looks mostly red and I have a really hard time telling blue from green, but can usually make it out if I look hard enough and get at least 2 guesses.
Either that or my wife got my doctor in on a really intense year long prank.
I think I have this same issue with red/pink and when a color is one or the other in that in-between area. I also do this with blue and green as well, though I feel less so than pink/red. I also have done colorblindness tests myself and do not test as colorblind (either variety).
For the longest time orange was just called yellow-red so it tracks.
Humans didn’t really care much about details until lately.
Iirc either Greek or Latin use the same word for hands as they do arms or something like that.
Orange being seen as shades of either red or yellow is also why they’re called redheads, it predates the word Orange entering the english language and being a better descriptor of most of the shades in that range of hair colors.
In modern Greek there’s still no distinction between arms and hands, or feet and legs.
Depending on where you are, water can definitely look very blue or even vivid green.
There’s been research that language shapes how we perceive the world around us. Because there was no word for “blue” there was no concept of blue, the color still existed but their brains just lumped it into “green”. Sight works by the visual centers brain taking data from the eyes, throwing most of it out, then building a model which is what the rest of the brain gets to actually “see”. That’s why optical illusions work.
A commonly cited source for language shaping our perception of color is Jules Davidoff’s studies on the Himba tribe. The Himba have no word for blue, and they struggled to pick out the blue square from this color wheel. However, they do have many distinctions for shades of green so when given this color wheel they could easily pick out the square that’s a different shade of green (and yes I opened it in MSpaint to check and one of the green squares is a different shade.)
It’s just terminology. People make a much bigger deal out of it than it is.
I think part of this phenomena is that the color of the sky on a clear day just wasn’t considered as a color, it was ‘blank’, the absence of clouds, stars or sunset. Kind of like how water has a flavor but we consider it to be neutral.
Homer referred to the ocean as “wine dark”, if you’ve seen pictures of the Mediterranean around Greece, that shit’s as Blue as Blue can be, so what it probably boiled down to is that they could “see” blue, but they always understood it as a blackish color or Green if they had distinguished that by that point.
Basically, there wasn’t a lot of necessity use in distinguishing blue, so most people didn’t until recently.