After blue/blue-and-green the order breaks down a bit, but new colour terms obviously come into use after blue. In English for instance the terms for pink, orange, and brown all came long after blue. Coincidentally brown is usually one of the last colours to get its own term, and in English before the term brown was used to refer to a colour it referred to dark or dusk.
Black / Then / White are / All I see / In my infancy / Red and yellow then came to be
Fun fact: syllable count follows Fibbonaci sequence
That's not true. From the description of Alcinoos' palace in Odyssey 7.87: περὶ δὲ θριγκὸς κυάνοιο ("around was a cornice of blue enamel"). κύανος is dark blue, and it is used later in Greek to describe the color of lapis lazuli. In the Iliad it's used of blue enamel on armor, as at Iliad 11.24: τοῦ δ' ἤτοι δέκα οἶμοι ἔσαν μέλανος κυάνοιο ("there were ten stripes of dark blue enamel") on the breastplate of Agamemnon, and κυάνεοι δράκοντες ("blue enamel snakes") two lines later.
The word kyanós (κυανός), which in later stages of Greek meant blue, does make a limited appearance, but for Homer it almost certainly meant "dark", as it was used to describe the eyebrows of Zeus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea_(Homer)
Also see this 2015 paper:
Wine-Dark Sheep: Ancient Color in a Modern Greek Odyssey
https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=111...
I'll have to test him for color blindness of course, but I don't think that's the issue. I think it's just that the two are more similar than it appears to me as an adult.
When the significance of синий and голубой have been studied an effect is seen, Russians are faster at differentiating between these shades of blue. When it's put this way and framed positively it's absolutely an alluring idea and one used to sell language books, learn Russian to literally see the world differently, but is it significant? Russians are about 125ms faster at differentiating between shades of light and dark blue because having a separate word to group them into does confer some advantage, but importantly English speakers are still just as capable of distinguishing those shades. This is also true even for languages that lack distinction between other colours, a particular language not having a separation between say blue and green doesn't mean that speakers of that language are any less capable of seeing a distinction between blue and green even if they refer to those two colours using just one word.
Another example of the issues of applying such findings to a world view would be Mandarin which represents the month before as 'above' and the next month as 'below', and studies do show that Mandarin speakers are faster at determining whether March comes before April after having been shown a picture with some verticality. When looking at these results through a Whorfian lens it'd be easy to make the claim that Mandarin speakers view time as vertically. More studies were done, Mandarin speakers were once again faster at guessing up was previous (compared to down for previous) by 170ms. Seems conclusive and further evidence that Mandarin speakers may view time as being vertical, however, the same study found that mandarin speakers were 230ms faster at guessing left as previous (compared to right for previous) and they were faster at doing this than they were doing it vertically. Also noteworthy was that they found English speakers were 300ms faster at guessing left for previous than compared to right, and in both cases of vertical/horizontal guessing English speakers were faster than Mandarin speakers (although English speakers preferred bottom as previous to top as previous).
This is where the issues of linguistic relativism pop up and why today it's generally heavily criticised and no longer considered valid by linguists, when applied to colours or time it appears relatively harmless but it's not always framed positively and that has been the case for as long as the theory existed. An example of a harmful application of it would be to look at the many African languages that use the same word for meat and animal, are they incapable of telling a difference between them? In English it's often pointed out that the term beef comes from the French aristocracy where the term cow comes from the Anglo-Saxon speaking peasant/serf class, which of these two would have been more acquainted with raising and slaughtering the animals and would they have been unable to make the differentiation? We absolutely know today that even despite lacking terms for certain colours people are still able to differentiate between them, to know this after having studied it and then say that the Ancient Greeks must have been colour blind seems absurd.
>So then what does it mean for languages who split blue into two colors?
Personally? It's really neat and being able to differentiate those shades faster is an interesting consequence of that, I just can't view it through a Whorfian lens. I'm also somewhat envious of the differentiation after having been told numerous times as a child that while teal/turquoise are blue they're not really 'blue'.
One example in the book would be the Pirahã who famously don't have words for numbers, they can describe 1 'that', 2 'pair', a few, and many, but not much else. It wouldn't be hard to imagine the harm that would be caused by taking a Whorfian approach would have on such a tribe. In this subchapter he does make the point that it's culture that drives the linguistics, and the subtitle of which is pretty pertinent, 'Tribe without Paper or Pencils Mysteriously Weak at Portraiture'.
Lera Boroditsky is a good mention as well, she authored both of the mentioned studies on Mandarin. The first was 'Does Language Shape Thought?: Mandarin and English Speakers’ Conceptions of Time' (2001) (1). Other researchers have tried to replicate this study (2) and were unable to do so, although they note that all documented examples of linguistic relativity can't be dismissed just from one flawed study, and explicitly note that the effect of the mechanisms is unknown and that the issue is with the claim that language is the mechanism. Boroditsky followed up with 'Do English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently?' (2010) (3). It still seems to be an active area of research and I don't think we'll get a conclusive answer any time soon.
(0) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QglKeIIC5Ds
(1) http://lera.ucsd.edu/papers/mandarin.pdf
(2) 'Re-evaluating evidence for linguistic relativity: Reply to Boroditsky (2001)' https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/personal-karin-stromswold/p...
(3) http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.690...
But they are not considered as separate spectral colors, whereas light blue is. So Russians have 7 colors in the rainbow.
I don't think that learning Russian will help your color perception in adult age and without being exposed to light blue paints, pyramid disks, toys, etc.
In fact, I'm not sure it will persist as much in the next generation of Russian children whose toys are usually made for world wide audience and don't set the light blue color out of myriad of hues.
Pink is another little color which appeared a short time ago and permanently extended our palette.
The first Blue is like a cyan colour, the second indigo-blue is the colour of blue ink (a night-sky blue).
But translating it to "dark/light blue" would be incorrect, as the lightness is not an important part of the words. It is just that Russian speakers are forced to specify the lightness, similarly to how German speakers are forced to specify the sex of their neighbor (Nachbar/Nachbarin). In most cases, Nachbarin should simply be translated to "neighbor".
But that's likely not the traditional meaning of it, in whatever language. So I don't assume that I know what cyaan is.
In Irish, the term "fear dubh" refers to the devil literally "black man" which presumably long preceded Irish language interaction with non-whites. To refer to a black (coloured) man in modern Irish the term "fear gorm" is used. The word 'gorm' in other contexts means blue. This would match your comment.
As an aside, the term "fear bán" is literally "white man" and I leave it to the curious to guess or research it's meaning.
Another big issue is Irish colors don't match up to English ones, at all. So many seem to think 'gorm' matches up to English 'blue', when it doesn't. It's different. Same with 'glas' and 'green', which is why you can have 'capall glas' or a 'green horse', but really it's a different color split that English. Same with 'spéir glas' to describe a 'grey sky'. It's a huge problem among learners who learn the language incorrectly (most in Ireland, sadly).
Tá an ceart agat. My 'fear dubh' was intended to be "An Fear Dubh". If you are male you have "An Fear Bán", the colour of men's clothing presumably being dark in contrast!
(As far as I can tell, I am not even slightly colorblind.)
I really want this linguistics thing to be known, because I think it's a sufficient explanation that _people just name colors differently and that's fine._
It also doesn't impact much one's life... unless you have to read resistor values every day.
They may not be trustworthy as they are selling something.
However, I took some of the tests (I've never been diagnosed with color blindness by a medical professional) and the results were interesting.
The first couple of tests show a partial ring in a different background, like a rotated "C" and ask you to click on the gap as the contrast gets fainter.
The red-green gap test was easy for me, and I got 100%.
The "Tritan (Blue)" test which might be the relevant one to what you are talking about, was difficult, and it said I was "severely" deficient.
However, after you take that test, it shows two spectrums and says if you are color blind in this sense they should look the same. They look very different to me, no question.
So then I looked further and saw there is another test for the same type of deficiency, which is called the "mosaic" test, I think, where there is a small square made up of a few "tiles" that is a different color and you have to click on it. This one I got mostly right, and it ended up saying I was "slightly" deficient.
It occurs to me, that with LED lights everywhere, and the LED screens on phones, the color deficiency in online tests could be coming from a compromised spectrum of light, not from one's eyesight.
I don't quite understand how disagreeing about what to call colors on the spectrum from blue to green can be a deficiency. A rose by any other name... If you can differentiate between colors that are more blue and ones that are more green, then what significance is a label?
As I say, lighting is important not to overlook.
My first car was basically turquoise, and I tended to think of it as blue or blue-green. Other people did call it green, but for me, there was nuance due to seeing it under many different settings. Under sodium lights, it would look quite blue and not green, and unpleasant to my eye. Under indirect sunlight, it would be blue-green and jewel like.
For reference, while it was a Honda color from many years ago that isn't easy to find good pictures of now, pictures from a GIS for "bmw atlantis blue" show cars that look like exactly the same color to me.
On the other hand "porsche lizard green" does not look blue to me in the least.
"Jade green" seems to me predictably a blue-green color that is greener than turquoise, but still perceptibly bluish.
Colors called "chartreuse" generally look to me like green with a hint of yellow.
I can attest that those kinds of tests work well even on a screen, maybe not this one (I failed it in approximately the same way I fail every one, so it probably does). If you are in doubt, just show the test (or that color spectrum at the last page) to another person and ask if they can solve it. It is really disconcerting discovering that you don't see colors that everybody else does, and doubting the test is the reaction that nearly everybody has.
Anyway, it may be the case that you just see different colors. I know I can see some UV light that most people can't.
(Oh, and if the spectra looked different, that probably means you made mistakes in the test, getting an error on some image that you could see.)
For comparison here's what an "almost passing" image looks like: https://www.colorlitelens.com/images/test/T1.jpg -- the blue section should look a bit darker on the bottom spectrum, and it's a bit more "pastel" in general (but yeah, monitors can confound this a lot).
If they don't look the same to you, it's because something got wrong on the test, and you should discard the result.
So I took a photo and looked up the RGB values of the pixels to see if it was more green or blue. Turned out it was basically equal values for both. I found that very interesting.
That's why you hear all those stories about men arguing with their wives about blue vs. green.
No, its not.
It is, on the other hand, well-established that, on average, female brains are better at distinguishing shades within and between “blue” and “green" (and, really, fine distinctions in colors in general) than male brains are on average. (Similarly, male brains are better at perceiving distinctions in brightness than female brains.)
That said, I expect you weren't meaning to restrict consideration to the physical eyes (the distinction does not seem relevant to the previous discussion) and using "eyes" as synecdoche for the entire visual perceptual system seems entirely reasonable (making dragonwriter's a potentially interesting clarification but not a disagreement).
I think your previous comment didn't quite do its job, and including this would've been a big improvement, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They feed signal in to the brain.
You wouldn't say your nostrils or mouth or skin or ears are part of the brain. Why would eyes be different?
> In vertebrate embryonic development, the retina and the optic nerve originate as outgrowths of the developing brain, specifically the embryonic diencephalon; thus, the retina is considered part of the central nervous system (CNS) and is actually brain tissue.[2][3]
From https://www.britannica.com/science/retina
> Retina, layer of nervous tissue that covers the inside of the back two-thirds of the eyeball,
Anyway. I'm still not convinced eyes = retina = brain so ill leave it there.