[Closed] Blue didnt exist til modern times..

Yes, I was thinking "primitive morons" until I got to the bit about different shades of green. Fascinating.

Even after it was pointed out, I still found the outlier green square very difficult to see.

My colour vision is pretty good, years of colour-retouching scanned photos proved that, but I cannot tell the difference with those green squares; it may have something to do with the way the colour is reproduced on a touch-screen device, or just that example isn't the original, and the subtleties have been lost.
Still, it's an interesting subject, how can we know if the colours we see are the same for everyone?

My left eye perceives colour differently to my right eye so I'm fairly confident colour perception would also vary between people. No problem picking out the green square that was a different shade in that article either.

Very interesting, I didn't have any joy picking out the different green...

Was having a chat about something similar earlier~ it's crazy to think we're surrounded by so many elements of the electromagnetic spectrum that are beyond the senses we're taught~

Would that mean if we could find a way of describing them, we'd begin to be able to discern things that we currently can't?

(And if so, would it end up as an exercise in over-stimulation, with too much info for our brains to process)

Green traffic lights aren't green any more. Because so many men are red/green colourblind they're a greeny shade of blue. We're just conditioned to think of them as green. (Or is this just my massive over-simplification?)

My colour vision is pretty good, years of colour-retouching scanned photos proved that, but I cannot tell the difference with those green squares; it may have something to do with the way the colour is reproduced on a touch-screen device, or just that example isn't the original, and the subtleties have been lost.

May I ask whether you considered the option where your vision/perception is just not keen enough to discern the difference?

Excellent article, very interesting indeed. Thanks muddydwarf.

I personally think it's not just colour that everyone sees differently but shape,too. We learn to see by association so when our parents tell us that the shape in front of us is a cup then that is what we associate this perceived shape as. But what I perceive a cup to look like is probably quite different to you.

And if so, would it end up as an exercise in over-stimulation, with too much info for our brains to process

If it happened to you now then quite possibly. If it had evolved then highly unlikely.

I'm sure I remember reading that the reason life uses the "visible" part of the spectrum is that radiation in those wavelengths is abundant (e.g. microwaves are pretty rare and don't reflect well so less informative of the environment), has enough energy to excite electrons (for detection; longer wavelengths are really energy poor, detector would have to be massive and ultra sensitive) but not so much that it would damage the sensing apparatus.

In terms of evolution what would be the advantage of being able to detect these other forms of EM radiation? What would they allow an organism to do better? I'm struggling to think of examples (and it is a bit of a trick question). Maybe if we had evolved some kind of emitter at the same time for radio communication..........

I guess life has evolved to use the most useful forms of EM radiation in our environment.

Being able to see IR (heat) would be handy (in fact, don't some organisms already have that capability?

The other part of the chat I was having earlier is how the dog seems to sense I'm on my way home a few minutes before I arrive

(and no, I don't have a set routine and smelly though I may be, a few minutes in a car=a few miles in undulating countryside full of stench)

They always say children and animals are more sensitive...

Being able to see IR (heat) would be handy (in fact, don't some organisms already have that capability?

Insects can see in UV. Also, interestingly, birds can see the polarisation angle of light. So the same wavelengths we see, but they're getting additional info we don't get.

Interesting article....although worth reading the comments under it too as they are quite informative (not often that can be said about comments on an article on a news website!)

BigJohn - Member

Green traffic lights aren't green any more. Because so many men are red/green colourblind they're a greeny shade of blue. We're just conditioned to think of them as green. (Or is this just my massive over-simplification?)

I'm red-green color blind. To me, a green traffic light is a very light green, almost white. About as green as some streetlights that have a bit of a yellowish or bluish tint to them...

Apparently, I see the yellow one normally. And the red is very dark.

Edit - can't see the different green square but that may be colorblindness,

I'm colour blind which makes me lousy at differentiating colours but really good at spotting subtle differences in shade. Those greens are all the same on my monitor.

Ha ha! The observer changes the reality!

Of everything! 😀

I suppose colours only exist if you name them. Red is red - but scarlet is also red. But whether its a kind or red or a different colour to red is a language decision.

We call a Robin a 'Robin Redbreast' (it actually [i]is [/i] a 'Redbreast' - Robin is a nickname)

But a Robin's red breast in orange. We've had a name for the bird for longer than we've had a word for 'orange' so the colour we is as orange now used to part of what we called red previously.

Sound is cultural too - tell a Spaniard (for example) that dogs go 'woof' and they'll laugh their heads off. Mind you, its said that dogs have accents too..

That was an interesting read.

I asked my Greek colleague about ancient Greek (he studied it at School) and words for Blue and he came up with a couple, plus if you read the comments it's also mentioned.

Surprised myself, I actually spotted the Green square straight away and I'd say I'm pretty rubbish with shades ect.....

...Maybe I should think more seriously about that move to interior design 😉

There's a good bit about colour in Mouse Or Rat by Umberto Eco, an interesting book about the nature of translation and how concepts aren't necessarily communicable between languages.

Link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mouse-Or-Rat-Translation-Negotiation/dp/0753817985

Excellent article but I must be one of the rare ones as seen the difference pretty much straight away.

"The only ancient culture to develop a word for blue was the Egyptians — and as it happens, they were also the only culture that had a way to produce a blue dye."

Well thats wrong for a start. What about all those woad painted celts the Romans used to encounter?

And there are plenty of words in ancient languages for blue (or at least we transalate them as blue).

I believ the ancient Sumerians (who pre date Egypt) prized Lapzi Lazuli so much there was a large long distance trade in the stuff. The defining characteristic of lapis lazuli, the thing that makes it unusual, is that it is bright blue.

[i]Well thats wrong for a start. What about all those woad painted celts the Romans used to encounter?[/i]

Interesting. The ancient Egyptians were using the same plant, and it's not clear that Picts actually painted themselves with it, it may well have been political move by Ceaser to call them "painted" as it marked you out as barbarian, or the may have been using an Iron based pigment (possibly miss-described because of the difficultly translating colour differences in the ancient world that the article tries to explain!

Mind you, its said that dogs have accents too..

[url= http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-31159898 ]Dutch chimps at Edinburgh Zoo learn to speak in a Scottish accent[/url]

I think that the 'blue didn't exist' angle isn't quite right - a friend pointed out this article which suggested otherwise from way back in the Old Testament referecing 'Techelet' several times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/world/middleeast/28blue.html

And the article itself points out that ancient Egyptians used it too.

The point really is about the not being able to discern a colour if you don't have a categorisation/name for it which is interesting - a kind of unawareness colour-blindness.

FWIW, I can spot the green.

[i]The point really is about the not being able to discern a colour if you don't have a categorisation/name for it which is interesting[/i]

Yep, what we would confidently call blue, for a lot of ancient folk was a shade of green

I'm curious about the people who could spot the different green square - what colour did you perceive the dress to be?

(I couldn't spot the difference - white and gold)

Well durr...
[img] [/img]

I'm curious about the people who could spot the different green square - what colour did you perceive the dress to be?

[img] [/img]

Green of course 😉

<sigh> not trying to rehash the dress, just wondering if there's any correlation

Edukator - Troll

I'm colour blind which makes me lousy at differentiating colours but really good at spotting subtle differences in shade. Those greens are all the same on my monitor.

I'm slightly colour blind and the greens all looked slightly different to me. 😆

not trying to rehash the dress, just wondering if there's any correlation

It was a joke.

To answer your question though. Well the dress as was it designed to do depended on the background colours to what I seen.

This whole topic is fascinating; my students have been obsessed by the dress since last week.

The dress colour doesn't depend upon the background, because different people see it in different colours on the same webpage. I suspect it's based on individual differences in photo-receptor cells on the retina - we only have a relatively small number of blue-detecting cells (because we primarily evolved to spot the difference between red berries and green leaves?) and some people will have fewer than others.

I really struggle with blue/black/brown colours - I've had jackets that I was convinced were black but were actually blue and I'm sure our sofa is blue-grey but it's actually brown - and I always see the dress in that photo as white and gold. I'd guess that those who see it differently at different times have more of the blue receptors, but they don't recover quickly from use and so their perception changes over time.

It works in language too.

I knew a Finnish bloke called Ville. Some people pronounced the first letter as V, some as W. I asked someone else about this and he said that they were the same thing...

This gives an insight into why we sometimes find it so hard to make ourselves understood to French people. We are making sounds that we think are what we've heard or been taught and we're actually doing something completely different, we just don't know. The French however do, and to them we are mangling the language.

It works in language too.

There's something similar with, I think, Japanese where they literally don't hear any difference between two common English sounds (r and w, IIRC). If taught English from birth, they can, but not if left until after 3 or 4 years old. They can be taught to say the sounds, but never learn to hear the difference.

good moaning

Related:

Isn't it?

Cerise is a good one - it was a particulary virulent shade of pink 'till the 80's.
🙂
Teal & taupe only seem to have entered mass public consciousness recently.
Taupe was originally used to describe the colour of a mole (the legged type). 🙂

Colours which don't exist in nature (pink, for example) are still real to us - our brain can still define them as separate colours.
How we name them is a bit odd;
Names derived from a nature, a new name entirely or lumped in with the nearest match.

Lots of other things didn't exist before someone decided they should - mountaineering is a great example.

Colours which don't exist in nature (pink, for example) are still real to us

Flamingos 😉

Woad-n't ancient Celts know something about blue?

Someone needs to tell pigs they're not natural. Except for maybe certain ones like Tamworths.

[url= http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/11/color-pink-doesnt-exist-can-see/ ]Oh no it doesn't.... [/url]

They're not pink, honest!
We just see them as pink.

I just picked the link at random, btw.
If it turns out to be a miltant pinkist/anti pinkist front, don't blame me.

EDIT - a counterblast:
[url= http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/03/05/stop-this-absurd-war-on-the-color-pink/ ]Oh yes it does......[/url]

Pink doesn't exist, it's just the absence of green.

The Gaelic word [i]gorm[/i] is nowadays translated as [i]blue [/i] but was previously used to denote a shade of green.

From Wiki:

The Welsh word glas is usually translated as "blue"; however, it can also refer, variously, to the color of the sea, of grass, or of silver. The word gwyrdd (a borrowing from Latin viridis) is the standard translation for "green". In traditional Welsh (and related languages), glas could refer to certain shades of green and grey as well as blue, and llwyd could refer to various shades of grey and brown; however, modern Welsh is tending toward the 11-color Western scheme, restricting glas to blue and using gwyrdd for green, llwyd for grey and brown for brown.

In Old and Middle Irish, like in Welsh, glas was a blanket term for colors ranging from green to blue to various shades of grey (e.g. the glas of a sword, the glas of stone, etc.). In Modern Irish, it has come to mean various shades of green, with specific reference to plant hues, and grey (like the sea); other shades of green[vague] would be referred to in Modern Irish as uaine or uaithne, while liath is grey proper (like a stone).

Scottish Gaelic uses the term uaine for "green". However, the dividing line between it and gorm is somewhat different than between the English "green" and "blue", with uaine signifying a light green or yellow-green, and gorm extending from dark blue (what in English might be Navy blue) to include the dark green or blue-green of vegetation. Grass, for instance, is gorm, rather than uaine. In addition, liath covers a range from light blue to light grey.

I thought this was the case - hence Lôn Las Cymru (green lane of Wales) being glas rather than gwyrdd.

So what colour were blueberries in ancient times?

And bluebells?

And are we saying that cornflowers have only been around for the last thousand years?

I call BS on this.

Blueberries are often referred to as Bilberries, and bluebells have been called fairy bells, harebells, wood bell, and fairy flowers

They existed, just called different things.

So what colour were blueberries in ancient times?

And bluebells?

And are we saying that cornflowers have only been around for the last thousand years?

I call BS on this.

They reflected the same wavelengths of light that they do now, but we didn't call it blue.

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/british-natural-history/survey-bluebells/bluebell-identification/native/

Lots of names there. Still called Harebell in Scotland.

I call BS on this.

Hence my quote - of course the colours were the same, we had different words for different groups of colours.

When I was a kid I thought turquoise and jade were both turquoise, I just called one greeny turquoise and one bluey tursoise. Then later in life I learned that one was called jade.

@maccruiskeen

Pretty sure Orange was referred to as "Dark Yellow"
Until the arrival of the actual fruit (L'Oranja) from european traders.

It kinda amuses me imagining the look on the face of the first "brit" offered one
"It's a what ?"
Classic Chicken & Egg situation...

Hmm, I was having difficulty with differentiating the green square, I did select the correct one but as the OPs link sent you to the comments and I had quickly scrolled back up the page not sure if my brain "remembered" seeing the answer picture.

Interesting stuff tho.

The other part of the chat I was having earlier is how the dog seems to sense I'm on my way home a few minutes before I arrive

Its ears are minutely tuned to your car engine, and it can hear it, and certain frequencies within it a lot further away than you can.

My wife told me one of our dogs used to go and sit in the front window looking out for me two to three minutes before I arrived. In those days I rode a Guzzi Lemans. A neighbour a few doors up loved my bike so much he went and treated himself to one, and carried out the same air filter conversion I'd done on mine. One day I was in the house and the dog sat up, looked towards the front door, then went and sat in the front window. My wife said "That's what she does before you get home." and sure enough a few minutes later Dennis turned up on his Lemon.