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

10 pointslend00018 comments

They definitely did see the blue color, just like we do. Imagine all the named CSS colors: most people can clearly see the difference between them, even if they don't know the correct color name.

Also, the argument that 'they didn't have the name for this color' is flimsy: maybe they had the name, we just don't know it.

I find it hard to believe they didn't have a name for the color of the sky and of the sea.

They did have words for those colors. Ancient greek glaukós meant a light blue, khlōrós meant bright green, and kuanós meant a dark blue or green. Of course these words covered a range of potential color values - glaukós could be anything from a blue-grey to a turquoise, khlōrós could cover shades of "green" all the way to an acid yellow.

This isn't something special about ancient greek. Even in several modern languages like Japanese, the word for blue also applies to colors that in english would be described as shades of green. The color spectrum is continuous, and where a culture decides to delineate one color from another is arbitrary. For example I would call rgb 60,220,240 a sky blue, while 60,240,220 would be a mint green, but these colors are way closer to one another than either is to rgb 0,255,0 or 0,0,255, which I could just as easily call dark mint or dusk sky.

And it's not like english is even the most extreme example. In english, cyan is a shade of blue, for example russian has 7 primary colors, with what we'd call blue split up into a light azure (goluboy) and an ultramarine (siniy). It would be absurd to say that english speakers can't see these colors simply because we refer to both of them as blue.

"Humans didn't see #4F3368 until it was used on this one web page in the 00s"

Does anyone read the whole article before commenting? They did an experiment with a tribe that does not have a word for blue, and they were significantly better at discerning subtle (to a western observer) shades of green than green versus blue.

Actually I didn't bother to read this particular article, because I've read about this hypothesis maby years ago. It was as silly then as it is now.

Given some of the other comments here, I suspect it is a genetic difference that alters color perception.

I find it unlikely. They probably just don't care.

Not clicking. Complete BS. Blue Appears 50 times in the Bible. I presume that came before the invention of clickbait.

Without considering what word was _actually_ in the Bible and what its translation(s) are, that's not a very convincing debunking.

Yeah, blue doesn’t seem to appear in the New Testament (Greek), but it’s in the Old (Hebrew) as “Tekhelet”[1] which can apply across different blue hues, from turquoise to violet.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekhelet

The headline is rubbish. They saw it, they just didn't call it something different. They lumped it in with green or other colors.

This is such a garbage take that comes from taking a minor difference (different cultures name and group colors differently) and assumes a large impact (they can’t see the color if they don’t have a distinct word for it). This is the same kind of over application of theory while ignoring the real work that gave us the Sapir-Worf theory that because some languages have more words for a concept than others, that this restricts and limits the ability of those speakers to think about those concepts.

I've heard this theory many times and have many questions about it, but I'm not a scholar of antiquity.

How do we know the Egyptians had a word for blue, if the Greeks didn't?

What did everyone call the dyes and carvings made Lapis Lazuli? And what about dyes produced from woad and indigo?

How did people describe the color of sapphires?

>"The only ancient culture to develop a word for blue was the Egyptians — and as it happens, they were also the only culture that had a way to produce a blue dye."

That doesn't seem consistent with the Wikipedia entry on woad dye [0] (blue [1]), which mentions woad-dyed textiles found, e.g. at a German site dated to 530 BCE. (?)

edit: Also Herodotus uses words that were translated as "blue" (accurately?), for example describing a palace in Media (in modern Iran) [2]:

>"On this wall the battlements are white, of the next black, of the third scarlet, of the fourth blue, the fifth orange; all these colors with paint."

(I wonder is this was the same blue chemistry as the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, which survives today and is in fact blue, very blue, extremely, shockingly blue [3]).

edit edit: Herodotus' wording of the above is "τετάρτου δὲ κυάνεοι" [4], which is an inflection of "κυάνεος" [5], which is glossed as "dark", "dark-blue"; and in the references section "azure", "blue", and "cerulean". The etymology links to "κύανος", which going forwards is the etymological root for "cyan"; and going backwards is possibly the same word ancient Hitties used for "precious stone" and "copper". (Note the extremely ancient blue pigment azurite [7] is simply a natural copper ore).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isatis_tinctoria#Ancient_use

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=woad+dye&iax=images&ia=images

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecbatana#Historical_descriptio...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishtar_Gate

[4] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...

[5] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/κυάνεος

[6] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/κύανος

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azurite#Pigments

Tuft's Perseus confirms your second comment, and more interestingly, cites examples of kuanos from all of Hesiod's major works. Why would Hesiod have a word for dark bluish stuff and Homer lack one? They were written around the same time (some 200? years before Herodotus). Maybe the article should be re-titled "Why did Homer avoid kuanos and its derivatives?"

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/searchresults?la=greek&p...

Man HN is getting some low quality articles lately. This one, the CEO that got bored and used his telescope to spy on people. What is going on?

I'm surprised Business Insider isn't blocked - its nothing by a low quality content farm.

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