92
TIL most cultures and peoples all over the world have historically had trouble recognizing the color blue
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this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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The idea that people not being able to describe/name the color blue means that they couldn't see the color blue is the most unhinged takeaway from this.
cultures didn't develop a name for a color until they were using that color as a dye, for the most part. Red usually comes first, and blue usually comes last, because red dye is usually really easy to make and blue is not. if you showed something cyan to somebody from like 500 years ago, and they told you that it was just blue, you wouldn't assume that they couldn't see the color cyan. they just didn't have a word for it cuz they didn't need one (I don't actually know how old cyan is but you know what I mean).
to this day there are still some languages that consider blue to be a shade of green. in Russia, light blue is concerted a separate color from blue just like pink is considered separate from red; in the Iliad, Homer compares the color of the sky to bronze, maybe referring to the blue-green patina that forms on it. he referred to the ocean as "wine-dark".
color naming is weird.
Dyes play a huge role, but it boils down to relevance.
Dark vs. light is probably the first thing that becomes relevant for us, as the difference is [literally] like night and day; then hot colours (red, etc.) because of fruits and blood. Then the rest.
I didn't dig too much into Homer's usage of "bronze sky" (unlike the wine-faced = inebriating sea), but if I had to take a guess, he wasn't referring to the colour but calling it "glorious", or perhaps a "noble" sky.
yeah, in other contexts when he's using the word, like when describing people, he's referring to bronze's intrinsic properties. he might have also been referring to the color of sky at sunset