No one could see the colour blue until modern times | Hacker News Reader

No one could see the colour blue until modern times

businessinsider.com.au

28 pointsZeljkoS24 comments

The idea that you can't perceive something unless you have a word for it is ridiculous. Every face I see walking down the street looks different, even though my vocabulary for describing faces is not remotely adequate for the various unique shapes. Or how about when you smell something you can't identify? In fact, the way words get invented, very often, is we perceive something we don't have a word for, so we make up a new one. And as far as blue goes, thanks to millions of years of primate evolution, our eyes have perceptors for blue. Were they just useless until the last few hundred years?

The people who push these sorts of ideas are operating out of a theory known as social constructivism, which holds there is nothing universal in human cognition or motivation, is all taught by society. But lots of research, like with infants, shows that is not true. Social constructivists ignore the science because they are pushing a utopianist left-wing ideology that holds that we can re-make human psychology and have a perfect society.

I believe that research shows that people have more difficulty distinguishing faces they didn't grow up seeing, which seems analogous to what the research this article is based on is saying.

I wouldn't be surprised to hear the same about smells, the example of wine experts is one potential example.

I'm wondering how much the reaction to the article is conditioned by the overreaching headline.

> The idea that you can't perceive something unless you have a word for it is ridiculous.

That's not the idea. The idea is that if you don't interact with something you can't perceive it, and if you can't perceive it you won't have a word for it.

> our eyes have perceptors for blue. Were they just useless until the last few hundred years?

They can be used to used to disambiguate other categories besides blue. For example, you would use your blue receptors to differentiate forest green and aquamarine. But aquamarine and cobalt might look exactly the same to you.

Every individual will see a slightly different set of categories based on their experiences. The world has infinite information, and categories don't actually exist in the world. They are just something we form in our minds through interaction with things that do exist. If a category doesn't signify anything useful to a creature, that creature won't perceive the category at all. It doesn't mean their receptors aren't picking up the information. It just means the perceptual system is disregarding it as noise.

The Japanese word for blue (aoi) is very ancient indeed, as are literary references to the blue sky (aozora). However, Japanese did not develop a distinct word for green (midori) until relatively recently (circa 1000 AD); and for centuries green was considered a shade of blue. It might still be: to this day, a green traffic light will be referred to as a "blue light" by Japanese. "Aoi" is also used in Japanese in a similar manner to how we would use "green" to describe youth or inexperience, as the origin of the metaphor is the same: the color of fruit that has not yet ripened.

I don't know anything about Japanese, but if "aoi" is used to describe both the sky and unripe fruit, what makes linguists say that the correct translation for "aoi" is blue? Wouldn't it make more sense to say that "aoi" means "green/blue", i.e. a general term for both green and blue? Doesn't it make the relationship between the words "aoi" and "midori" the same as the relationship between the words "rectangle" and "square" - one is a superset of the other?

"Aoi" is listed as blue/green in dictionaries. It can also mean "pale" in some contexts. "Midori" is specifically green, there's also "mizuiro" (color of water) which is specifically light blue. Basically there are broad shades,but if you need to describe a specific color there is probably also a word for it.

The article seems to get some of it's key foundation points a bit wrong. :(

eg:

> If you think about it, blue doesn’t appear much in nature — there aren’t blue animals, ...

Unless they're being very precise with their definition of "animals", which the article doesn't sound like it is being, they're off base. Blue creatures do exist:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluebird

* http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/exhibits/always-on-display/butterfl...

(etc)

Not to mention peacocks and some frogs, snakes, geckos, jellyfish, tropical fish, parrots.

Also, eyes.

While he made mention of the relative rarity of blue eyes, in animals, blue eyes are common.

> blue doesn't appear much in nature

As long as you don't look up during the daytime.

Or down while near a large body of water.

Or any other reflection of the sky.

I think the core example for sapir-whorf is an american language that had no word for blue.

I love these linguistic studies beyond all reason but also take them with a grain of salt; Julian Jaynes (origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind) based his whole argument on homer's greek. So did the Singer of Tales; neither of these are what you'd call prime scholarship.

John McWhorter's book <i>The Language Hoax</i> explains the linguistic researchers have found that the sapir-whorf hypothesis is just wrong.

"Just wrong" is a bit harsh, the modern argument seems to fall along the lines of "to what extent is the hypothesis true/false?"

This "wine-dark sea" conclusion is bullshit. "Wine dark" is a translation of a phrase( http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sea/winelike-sea) , oínopa pónton, that fits the meter used: http://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/20/science/homer-s-sea-wine-d... .

It's about more than color: http://www.jstor.org/stable/642564?seq=1#page_scan_tab_conte...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tutankhamun&t=ffab&iax=1&ia=images

or how about Hathor

http://static1.squarespace.com/static/53f353f4e4b0dbe1ff73ce...

There's so much more if you just use google.

How about south america: https://fr.pinterest.com/tanukus/yeibechai/

Greece 200 BC: http://www.gettyimages.ca/detail/illustration/vase-with-plas...

It's more a matter of commerce.

Ultramarine, and cobalt blue came along later, in the middle ages; the ancient Greeks and Romans had few and poor options to for creating blue dye, or tiles, or paint. So it just wasn't seen much, and there's no need to invent a word to say the sky is blue when you can say it's "a clear sky."

This probably did affect perceptive abilities to at least some degree - we do lose the ability to hear and distinguish phonemes we don't hear when quite young, but that's a much more extreme case.

Wasn't Homer called "the blind poet"? Of course, that doesn't address the other texts considered.

Moronic. Language does not influence the wavelengths of light that our retinas respond to.

Whether they called it Blue or not is irrespective of whether or not they could see the colour.

It's not. That's the point.

Yes, their eyes responded to blue light. But without having a separate concept of blue, they probably couldn't distinguish blue from green, or at least could do so less well. That's what the experiment with the Himba is about.

There's been tons of research on this:

http://lclab.berkeley.edu/papers/tics2-published.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...

You're trying to learn an eastern language and the teacher tells you four forms of a word, e.g ma, ma, ma, ma (each with different intonation/level). As an adult westerner you'll be lucky to differentiate two sounds out of the four; had you been practicing since a younger age you wouldn't have a problem.

The same goes for your nose, in general your sense of smell is poor, but with training you can become better at it.

Also why do you think everyone can perceive the maximum color/wavelength range that your eye can respond to? There are tetrachromatic women out there who can differentiate a lot more colors than a normal person can.

This whole study/idea is just that we're basing language on that framework, and by having spent language on it we've spent more time to finely define it, which has caused us to become more skilled at it, etc.

Reminds me of one of the first articles I ever saved to Pocket (when it was still called Read It Later) - The crayola-fication of the world

*http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication...

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