No one could see blue until modern times.

[Bubbles]

I saw this and it made some interesting points.

Until relatively recently in human history, "blue" didn't exist, not in the way we think of it.

As the delightful Radiolab episode "Colors" describes, ancient languages didn't have a word for blue — not Greek, not Chinese, not Japanese, not Hebrew. And without a word for the color, there is evidence that they may not have seen it at all.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2?r=US&IR=T

It then goes on to give some examples, one of which shows that people don't always appear to see blue.

So before we had a word for it, did people not naturally see blue?
This part gets a little complicated, because we do not know exactly what was going through Homer's brain when he described the wine-dark sea and the violet sheep — but we do know that ancient Greeks and others in the ancient world had the same biology and therefore same capability to see color that we do.

But do you really see something if you don't have a word for it?

A researcher named Jules Davidoff traveled to Namibia to investigate this, where he conducted an experiment with the Himba tribe, which speaks a language that has no word for blue or distinction between blue and green.


When shown a circle with 11 green squares and one blue, they could not pick out which one was different from the others — or those who could see a difference took much longer and made more mistakes than would make sense to us, who can clearly spot the blue square.

But the Himba have more words for types of green than we do in English.

When looking at a circle of green squares with only one slightly different shade, they could immediately spot the different one. Can you?

So are our perceptions coloured by the words we use?

What do you think is going on here?

[Shaker]

It appears to be a part of what's (wrongly) known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which states (as Wittgenstein put it): "The limits of my language are the limits of my world."

I find it extremely hard to believe since, as the quoted portion makes clear, other people presumably have exactly the same biological equipment as anybody else (who isn't colour-blind, for example) and so there's no inherent bar to seeing what somebody else sees. Given that the Himba have no word for blue but many more words for green than we do, I would guess that what we regard as blue they label as a species of green. There's no reason why this shouldn't be the case: words are only labels and there's nothing intrinsically blue about the word blue. Or any other colour.

[Bubbles]

It appears to be a part of what's (wrongly) known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which states (as Wittgenstein put it): "The limits of my language are the limits of my world."

I find it extremely hard to believe since, as the quoted portion makes clear, other people presumably have exactly the same biological equipment as anybody else (who isn't colour-blind, for example) and so there's no inherent bar to seeing what somebody else sees. Given that the Himba have no word for blue but many more words for green than we do, I would guess that what we regard as blue they label as a species of green. There's no reason why this shouldn't be the case: words are only labels and there's nothing intrinsically blue about the word blue. Or any other colour.

Ok thanks. You've given me something else to look up

https://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/sapir.cfm

  :

[Shaker]

We sometimes have multiple words for different shades of a colour - we think of red as, well, red; but what about crimson, scarlet, burgundy?

[Walt Zingmatilder]

It appears to be a part of what's (wrongly) known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which states (as Wittgenstein put it): "The limits of my language are the limits of my world."

I find it extremely hard to believe since, as the quoted portion makes clear, other people presumably have exactly the same biological equipment as anybody else (who isn't colour-blind, for example) and so there's no inherent bar to seeing what somebody else sees. Given that the Himba have no word for blue but many more words for green than we do, I would guess that what we regard as blue they label as a species of green. There's no reason why this shouldn't be the case: words are only labels and there's nothing intrinsically blue about the word blue. Or any other colour.

good post....You da man.

[Bubbles]

We sometimes have multiple words for different shades of a colour - we think of red as, well, red; but what about crimson, scarlet, burgundy?

That's very true, we do 

[Rhiannon]

I find people often disagree over the point where blue becomes green. It's entirely plausible that some societies see no need to differentiate.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

It appears to be a part of what's (wrongly) known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which states (as Wittgenstein put it): "The limits of my language are the limits of my world."

I find it extremely hard to believe

Can a linguistic pirate, a lexiconical Jack Sparrow like yourself claim that?

[Shaker]

I find people often disagree over the point where blue becomes green. It's entirely plausible that some societies see no need to differentiate.

I've thought for a long time that when you search for a particular colour in Google Images, not only do you get a surprisingly wide variety of different shades all purporting to be the same colour, but given the variation in individual computer equipment, if I send somebody a link to a particular image, there's no guarantee at all that they're going to see what I see.

[Aruntraveller]

I've thought for a long time that when you search for a particular colour in Google Images, not only do you get a surprisingly wide variety of different shades all purporting to be the same colour, but given the variation in individual computer equipment, if I send somebody a link to a particular image, there's no guarantee at all that they're going to see what I see.

Indeed - at work I use 2 screens and when I format a document and move it from one screen to the other it changes the shades of the colours used completely. Very annoying - no amount of tampering with the screen settings appears to rectify this - and I have spent more hours than I should have trying to do exactly that.

[Bubbles]

Indeed - at work I use 2 screens and when I format a document and move it from one screen to the other it changes the shades of the colours used completely. Very annoying - no amount of tampering with the screen settings appears to rectify this - and I have spent more hours than I should have trying to do exactly that.

I know what you mean, I get that with photos sometimes moving from device to device  and trying to print them off.

Sometimes what goes to the printer isn't what you see on the screen.

Just when you think you have captured the glow of a sunset on clouds.......

[Rhiannon]

I take photos of the sunrise and sunset most days. Tbh I find it difficult to go wrong, especially on an iPhone.

My printer's crap though so I tend not to bother with that. Might try Apple's own services and see what happens.