Why The Ancient Greeks Couldn't See Blue

Why is the sky

blue

? It is one of the most common questions from both children and adults, unless you are from

ancient

Greece. I know, I know you would think that the country that is now widely known for its beautiful

blue

roofs, its crystal clear waters and its The Flag would have a longer history with the color, but if you read Homer, not that famous

ancient

Greek writer from 8th century BC C., you would notice that the word blue is not mentioned even once in thousands of pages of the Iliad and the Odyssey, black is mentioned 170 times white 100 red 13 times yellow and green each about 10 but blue never appears what What's stranger is that Homer describes things we would normally call ocean blue such as dark wine even called honey green and sheep violet.

For a time, some suggested that perhaps the ancient Greeks simply saw different colors than we do or perhaps they were all color blind. , but we now know that color vision developed about 30 million years ago, so it's not like that, it gets even crazier as historians and researchers began to investigate. Other ancient civilizations realized the same thing, almost none of them used the word blue, from Icelandic texts to ancient Indian epics dating back about four millennia, ancient Chinese writings and even the original Hebrew Bible. None of them mentioned blue once, while they all mentioned black, white and red and many of those included in the Bible also mention green and yellow again, not that they don't talk about things we would call blue, they describe the ocean like a wide and stormy silence, but never blue, it was not until mid. -1800 when linguists began to analyze the history of languages ​​and found something peculiar in each culture.

White and black come first, then the first color that enters the language is always red, then yellow follows, then green and then blue is the final color that enters the language. In every culture over the years, researchers have found some minor exceptions with the middle order, so green and yellow, but red is always first and blue is always last in every language, so , why does this order have two main theories? First, the evolutionary explanation is simple, black and white help distinguish between night and day, light and dark, and are the clearest and most useful, so every culture has those.

Then red is often associated with blood or danger, even human faces and communication use red through the skin's galvanic response, like when you blush or are stressed. green and yellow entered the language as the need to distinguish between ripe and unripe foods and blue there are very few blue things that we actually interact with blue fruits are quite rare blue animals are also rare and when they are blue they often It is not a pigment but a kind of illusion of light as in butterflies, even the modern European language words for blue are derived from ancient words for black or green.

The second explanation suggests that these words do not enter the language until humans can turn them into red, being the easiest and most accessible color because you can simply take a piece of dry clay and use it as a crayon if you think about cave drawings, for example. there is a lot of black and red in them but blue is one of the most difficult colors to create for thousands of years, no one had it except the Egyptians and they had a word to describe them, does this mean that ancient people

couldn

't see those colors before you have a word to describe them?

Not exactly, early humans would have considered colors simply as shades of black, white or red, which sounds a bit crazy, but there is in fact modern evidence for this. If you look at these 12 colors, can you spot which one is different? You might clearly think it's this, but when presented with a similar picture, the Himba people of Namibia, who don't have a separate word for blue. They take more time to point out this distinction, on the contrary, when they look at green colors, they can more quickly notice the difference that we would not pick up as quickly in this one and this is because they have more words for the types of green than we do in De In fact, one of their color categories groups together some types of blue and green, while they have other color categories for different greens.

As late as the 1890s, anthropologists discovered that indigenous New Guinea islanders described the sky as black or dirty as water, which if you think about it. Not so surprising, even if you look at a color picker in Photoshop, it's clear that a dark blue or navy blue is not that far from being black and is quite far from other shades that we would still call blue in that sense. black would have been a much broader term for early ancient humans, it's like these are all shades of red, we wouldn't necessarily call them different colors, but in English we call this pink, even though it's technically just another shade of red.

We have decided to categorize it as separate and as a result it is different in our minds, of course even if we didn't call it pink we could still see that it is a different color, a lighter shade, but ultimately we would consider it. a form of red, now you might be thinking that this just seemed semantic so they have different names, there is no functional difference in the actual color we are seeing, but neuroscience has discovered that is not true and it is mind-blowing that the language train. Our brain sees colors differently, what this means is that once we have a new word for a color, there is a feedback loop in the brain and this exaggerates the differences between those colors, especially in the border areas between them. , we get used to calling these colors as different. shades and as a result the brain more appropriately sees them as different shades without the word, you would still see the color but you wouldn't notice it or contextualize it in the same way if that still seems strange to you because I know it did for me.

When learning a new language at first everything looks or sounds like gibberish, you can't tell verbs from nouns let alone one word from the next because you are just learning, but little by little, over time, your brain starts to You pick up on these categories and patterns and can recognize minor differences much faster, not that you

couldn

't tell the words were different before, but it all blends together once you become familiar with them, you start to see and hear those words much more clearly, Honestly, it's kind of like when I learn a new word in English and suddenly I hear it everywhere, I see it everywhere, but the truth is, I probably came across that word before, but I didn't realize it, but now that I actually learned the word, the feedback loop is there and I really notice it, it's an incredible example of how our incredible brains have allowed us to create a language, but then that language changed and it has an impact on brain function, not just our perception of the world is an illusion, our brains are an active part in its creation thank you very much for watching I hope you found it as interesting as I did really if you like our videos make sure you are subscribed make sure you leave a like on this video and You will be able to join our mailing list with the link in the description, otherwise we will see you next time for a new scientific video about peace.