Radiolab has had some very interesting podcast on colors
Why Isn't the Sky Blue?https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/211213-sky-isnt-blueProducer Tim Howard introduces us to linguist Guy Deutscher, and the story of William Gladstone (a British Prime Minister back in the 1800s, and a huge Homer-ophile). Gladstone conducted an exhaustive study of every color reference in The Odyssey and The Iliad. And he found something startling: No blue! Tim pays a visit to the New York Public Library, where a book of German philosophy from the late 19th Century helps reveal a pattern: across all cultures, words for colors appear in stages. And blue always comes last. Jules Davidoff, professor of neuropsychology at the University of London, helps us make sense of the way different people see different colors in the same place.
Tim Howard:
...And then, Gladstone realizes something crazy. The color blue?
Um... Zero times. There's just no word that describes the color blue in any of Homer's poems.
5:30-ish
Even the Bible had no blue? [Not] In the original Hebrew.
7:44 -ish
8:30 ish
Brooke Watkins:
These hymns of more than 10 thousand lines are brimming with descriptions of the heavens. Scarcely is there any subject about more frequently the sun and reddening dawns play of color, day and night, cloud and lightning, the air and the ether are unfolded before us. And over and over in splendor and vivid fullness.
But there's only one thing that no one would ever learn from those ancient songs who do not already know it. And that is that the sky is blue.
It gets weirder.
All right. Because Geiger then wondered, "All right, if there's no blue in any of these old texts, then when did blue come into these languages?"
So, he did this massive analysis to trace when each color term was first introduced to each language. And what he found was - The order at which languages seem to acquire these color terms is not entirely random.
First, black and white. Every language has black and white. Then, when they get their first color term - Red always comes first.
After red, it's always yellow.
And then green, and blue only at the very end.
Well, as people discovered more and more languages, they found some exceptions. But, a couple things held, even from Geiger. Out of these colors, red is always first and blue is always last.
Why?
But, here's where we get to Guy's main point. He says you don't really need a word for a color until you can make that color reliably. And the reason that red might have been first is that red - Is apparently one of the easiest to produce.
You can just take a dried piece of red clay and you can use it as a crayon, which is why paints made out of ochre go back something like 60 thousand years. And blue? Blue is the hardest of all. For thousands of years, no one had it.
And to make a long story short, Jules went to Namibia. He sat down with a bunch of members of the Himba tribe, whipped out a laptop, and showed them 12 colored squares.
All identical except for one.
And there's actually some really cool video footage of his research assistant doing this. And they asked them very simply - Which one is different?
Now, you look at this and you see that 11 of these squares are green. A color we would call green -
Very green. And the other one is blue. This blue one, it's shouting. It's like, "Hey! I'm blue! Over here, I'm blue!"
It's easy enough for us to do. It's a no-brainer. But, the Himba, who don't have a separate word for blue in their language - They find this distinction a little difficult.
When they stare at this screen, they just stare. And stare.
They don't see the difference between the blue and the green?
No.
Well, is there something wrong with their eyes?
No, definitely not. We completely rule that out. They don't see color - the individual colors differently.
But, then wait - It's so easy to say that they're seeing different colors to us, and they're not.
Well, then how does he explain it?
Okay. When we decide to put colors together in a group - And then give those colors a word, like blue -
Something happens.
He says what happens is that now that there's a category for that thing, the thing in that category jumps out. It gets louder and louder to your eyes. The category actually feeds back on your perception so you notice it more.
You're saying that having the word for blue unlocks your ability to see blue?
No, it's not quite that.
He says without the word you're still seeing the blue no matter what. You're just not noticing it. Your eyes are just kind of glossing right over it.
So, you don't see it. It's harder to spot, says Jules.
The blue would not jump out and say, "Hi five," the way it does with us.
But if it doesn't jump out to that extent, then, this is starting to sound very Gladstone-y to me.
I mean, maybe he was a little right. Because if Homer had no word for blue and the word somehow enables the blueness of the blue, then maybe his world was less blue than it would be for us. I mean, maybe the blue went through his eyes in the same way but it, perhaps didn't get into his mind in the same way.
Yeah. Blue didn't matter.
Wait a second. Do you know where this breaks down? The [beep] sky! I mean, you look up and there's the bluest blue in the world and then it's right there above our heads. It's been there since the dawn of time. So, why wouldn't blue matter more? I mean why wouldn't it be the first color instead of the last?
Well, that's what I thought too and I asked Guy about that.
"Why is the sky blue?" is the first question that you always think of.
http://wnyc-origin-iad.streamguys1.com/radiolab/radiolab052112c.mp3?listeningSessionID=0CD_382_39__f545de2bfff926f7a7b3ceceab43dfe55c1e1c21?listeningSessionID=0CD_382_39__f545de2bfff926f7a7b3ceceab43dfe55c1e1c21
