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The surprising pattern behind color names around the world
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.What is blond, in a two-thousand-year-old context?
⬐ ummonkIt doesn't matter. Non-white people without steppe ancestry are pretty much uniformly dark-haired and don't have names akin to "subflavum" for traditional hair colors, because light yellow/gold hair just isn't a thing, regardless of what exactly they conceive of as "yellow/gold".⬐ CMCDragonkaiAboriginal Australians have blonde hair arising independently.⬐ makapufPretty sure Augustus wasnt aboriginal Australian, though (I see your point)
The perception of color is a pretty wild area of science. Colors seem to be culturally dependent. In that, people literally cannot see the difference between blue and green if their language does not have words to distinguish them. Even when big rewards are given for the 'correct' answer. Colors also follow certain patterns, with colors like blue being the last to be named in a culture.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg
Fun fact, the color blue does not appear at all in the Iliad, Homer describes the ocean as wine, despite the stunning blue colors of grecian seas.
⬐ peter303Its the other way around. A classic study from the 1960s found that color words and the correlated perception were pretty similar among a large number of languages. That suggest something physiological about color perception.What is curious is how color words evolve. Most languages have between two and eight basic color words (and color concepts). Those with two colors is almost always the same two colors- light and dark. The third color is usually red-brown. And fourth usually blue-green.
⬐ Aengeuad>In that, people literally cannot see the difference between blue and green if their language does not have words to distinguish them.People literally can see the difference between blue and green even if their language doesn't differentiate between the two, I don't know if you're misremembering a claim and a negation sneaked in so please don't take this post too harshly if that's the case, but the idea that say Japanese people can't tell the difference between blue and green is patently false and should be addressed, in fact the video you linked almost does so at 2:34 -
>Some researchers took this and other ancient writings to wrongly speculate that earlier societies were colour blind.
That Homer described the ocean as wine in colour is not an issue of perception but one of language in trying to describe a colour that is not differentiated from other colours, the same is true for other 'perception' issues in the ancient world like green coloured honey. To be clear visual acuity tests have been done on modern populations and tribes which don't differentiate between such colours or overall define less colour categories and it should be no surprise to learn that they can see the difference between those colours just fine.
The whole idea that it's a difference in perception is fraught with issues, like what happens when a language naturally develops words for new categories of colours or new colours? Does a generation undergo the collective experience of literally being able to see/differentiate a new colour? If so why isn't this written about more, is it something that only happens in kids? What would be the reason for this sudden shift in perspective, because it certainly isn't a physiological change that occurs.
What happens when an adult learns a second language which differentiates between more colours? The classic romanticised view here is that learning a new language literally let's you see the world in a different perspective, but then why is it that enhanced perspective rarely more than a curiosity (language x has two words for this colour)? The Russian language has separate words for a dark blue (siniy) and a light blue (goluboy) but English doesn't differentiate between them, do the Russians see an extra colour? What does the science say? Well the science is somewhat interesting here, Russians are able to differentiate between dark blues and lighter blues ever so slightly faster (124ms), but this is worlds apart from the claim that some languages are literally capable of seeing more colours.
In general this line of thinking is known as linguistic relativity, or the view that language shapes perception and cognition, and is something that has generally been discredited among linguists as being discriminatory and harmful as well as being based on faulty reasoning or studies and occasionally fraudulent papers. For example, and I really don't mean to attribute any malice to your post, but if we're considering Homer as being unable to differentiate between an ocean blue and a dark red wine, what do we make of cultures and languages that don't differentiate between smoking, drinking, or eating? Do they not know the difference between those actions? What about the Pirahã people who only have two words (differentiated by tone) for 'small quantity' and 'large quantity' and no other words for numerals? This line of thinking is fairly harmless when applied to the way we perceive colours but can be actively harmful to people who perceive the world the exact same way we do but don't have as expressive language for these particular topics.
For anybody interested in more linguistic oddities and/or the damage linguistic relativism can do I recommend the book 'The Language Hoax' by John McWhorter, there's also an hour long talk on it available on Youtube [0]. The book deals with the more recent studies on how language affects the ways we think in a grounded way and shows how minor some of the best examples given can be like in the case of dark and light blue in Russian. The book is also in response to the general public's view and romanticism of linguistic relativity and in particular in response to a book by another linguist Guy Deutscher titled 'Through the Language Glass', where Guy feeds into the perception that language helps shape the way we think, and it is a good book but it still doesn't get close to saying that other languages see more colours.
⬐ sergeykish⬐ sergeykishThere is no need to travel to jungles. Subtle differences are all around us.* plants - trees, grasses, flowers, native and garden species, once I knew maybe 400 names, now come to disuse and quickly slip away
* food - ingredients and prepared
* fonts - Comic Sans, Times New Roman, Helvetica and many more
* car models - a lot of people know them by heart
It would be a strange claim we do not perceive difference without a name. We do but we do not care. And when we care we want to communicate and names become handy.
Color is still there, just like there are frequencies between A4 440 Hz and A#4 466.16 Hz. Most of the people can't name "color" of pure sound. Yet they feel difference.Purple is a chord.
Yes, the ancient Greeks knew about the color blue, as do most old world primates. Here is an linguistic explanation of color language around the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjgThe sculpture reconstructions you've linked are rather imaginative -- German grad students with UV lights, not chemical reconstructions -- and are probably only vaguely like the original colors. Where original colors have actually survived, in frescoes, etc., the ancients display a reasonable eye for beauty in color.
⬐ olah_1>the ancients display a reasonable eye for beauty in color.And yet, the reconstructions there are reminiscent of Indian religious art today. Do Indians not have a reasonable eye for beauty in color?
⬐ mrmonkeyman⬐ radamadahExactly. It is objectively ugly.Yea, I agree the coloring they present in what I linked is quite... ugly. But what I was trying to get at is that it does seem that, at that point, the Greeks could distinguish between the color of wine and the color blue. And that therefore Homer's "wine-dark" is in reference to something other than color.(I had seen that video before, it's very enlightening.)
I'm not saying that emotions don't exist, just that the meaning is completely separate from the way that we define it.For example many languages define colors differently (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg), but this doesn't mean that the different wavelengths don't exist. Cultures categorized them for the purpose of communication and it's only within the context of that categorization that you can understand the meaning.
Earlier I referenced "finger pointing at the moon" and this is exactly it. The word is the finger and the meaning is the moon, and we shouldn't mistake the finger for the moon.
> i am sure there are animals willing to discuss it with you, it’s just that you (us) can’t understand them.
I was half-joking, there are already animals that we can understand and communicate with. It's just a matter of finding them :P
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GorgFtCqPEs
> it is very possible that animals feel deeper emotional connections than we do. orcas showcase some very deep emotional states.
No doubt. Even visiting an animal shelter exposes some of the deep emotional state that dogs and cats can be in, and I'm sure that barely scratches the surface when considering all of the different species and circumstances.
May not be exactly what you want but you could look into the World Color Survey:
Yes, it is.
⬐ googlryasI thought you might be going there with that. That is how our learning teaches us to classify colors into finite groups(/names). That does not mean that color itself is a social construct.⬐ Turing_MachineRight. Not having specific names for two colors is an entirely different thing from being unable to recognize that one color is different to the other.
Just watched this Vox video on a (potential) pattern behind color names last week, which also covers a bit about the research by Berlin and Kay:
⬐ steanne"blue, on the other hand, was fairly scarce before manufacturing."..unless you look up?
Text really isn't the best medium to discuss color perception. This Vox video summarizing the research of linguistic anthropologists is much more clear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg