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Do other languages have the same concept of colors
Posted on 8/17/17 at 10:56 am
Posted on 8/17/17 at 10:56 am
I've been thinking about this all morning.
Sure, most people see color and recognize it. But in English, we see everything from turquoise to navy as blue
If you suddenly showed up in Japan or China, would they see that colors have variations of one color or would they see each variation as a desperate color
Sure, most people see color and recognize it. But in English, we see everything from turquoise to navy as blue
If you suddenly showed up in Japan or China, would they see that colors have variations of one color or would they see each variation as a desperate color
10
Posted on 8/17/17 at 10:57 am to athenslife101
I mean they aren't dogs so...
Posted on 8/17/17 at 10:57 am to athenslife101
quote:
I've been thinking about this all morning
Dude. You have too much time on your hands.
Posted on 8/17/17 at 10:58 am to athenslife101
I remember the first time I got high too.
Posted on 8/17/17 at 10:59 am to Rebel
Absolutely not. I am very inquisitive
Posted on 8/17/17 at 10:59 am to athenslife101
quote:what difference does this make?
If you suddenly showed up
Posted on 8/17/17 at 11:00 am to athenslife101
What if their word "blue" was used to describe what we call "red"?
This post was edited on 8/17/17 at 11:52 am
Posted on 8/17/17 at 11:01 am to athenslife101
Yes, they do, but oddly enough, they have different words for most of them.
Posted on 8/17/17 at 11:05 am to airfernando
I'm thinking of like 500 years ago when the first westerners showed up and were trying to learn eastern languages, about all the crazy little intricies and concepts that don't transfer over between the languages
Posted on 8/17/17 at 11:15 am to athenslife101
Colors in many languages
Is this what you're talking about?
quote:
The eleven colour words on this page have been indentified in various studies as the most common across most languages, although the actual colours represented by each of the colour words are not nescessarily exactly the same. For example, in Greek and Russian there are two words for blue corresponding to light blue and dark blue, and these colours are considered and perceived as separate. In other languages there are overlaps between blue, green and grey, or red, orange and brown.
Is this what you're talking about?
Posted on 8/17/17 at 11:18 am to tss22h8
Perfect. Thank you
Posted on 8/17/17 at 11:19 am to athenslife101
Posted on 8/17/17 at 11:20 am to athenslife101
There are studies that suggest most humans did not perceive the color blue until modern times. This is because it is not a color that is common in nature. The only ancient civilization that recognized it as a color or even had a word for blue appear to be the Egyptians, because they could produce it with their unique dyes.
Posted on 8/17/17 at 11:22 am to AnonymousTiger
What did ancient peoples call "blue balls"? 
Posted on 8/17/17 at 11:24 am to AnonymousTiger
quote:
There are studies that suggest most humans did not perceive the color blue until modern times. This is because it is not a color that is common in nature. The only ancient civilization that recognized it as a color or even had a word for blue appear to be the Egyptians, because they could produce it with their unique dyes.
Seems like they would have had a word for the color of the sky
Posted on 8/17/17 at 11:27 am to jchamil
Posted on 8/17/17 at 11:30 am to AnonymousTiger
quote:
There are studies that suggest most humans did not perceive the color blue until modern times. This is because it is not a color that is common in nature
Unless you are a person that looks up from time to time.
Posted on 8/17/17 at 11:31 am to OceanMan
Try reading the study...
Posted on 8/17/17 at 11:33 am to AnonymousTiger
What did they call the ocean?
Posted on 8/17/17 at 11:33 am to athenslife101
quote:
in the Odyssey, Homer describes the ocean as "wine-dark" and other strange hues, but he never uses the word 'blue'.
quote:
A few years later, a philologist called Lazarus Geiger decided to follow up on this discovery, and analysed ancient Icelandic, Hindu, Chinese, Arabic and Hebrew texts, to find no mention of the word blue.
quote:
But just because there was no word for blue, does that mean our ancestors couldn't see it?
There have been various studies conducted to try to work this out, which you can read more about in Loria's feature, but one of the most compelling was conducted by Jules Davidoff, a psychologist from Goldsmiths University of London, who worked with the Himba tribe from Namibia. In their language, there is no word for blue and no real distinction between green and blue. To test whether that meant they couldn't actually see blue, he showed them a circle with 11 green squares and one painfully obvious blue square.
Well, obvious to us, at least, as you can see below.
But the Himba tribe struggled to tell Davidoff which of the squares was a different colour to the others. Those who did hazard a guess at which square was different took a long time to get the right answer, and there were a lot of mistakes.
quote:
But, interestingly, the Himba have lots more words for green than we do. So to reverse the experiment, Davidoff showed English speakers this same circle experiment with 11 squares of one shade of green, and then one odd square of a different shade. As you can see below, it's pretty tough for us to distinguish which square is different. In fact, I really just can't see any differences at all.
quote:
The Himba tribe, on the other hand, could spot the odd square out straight away. FYI, it's this one:
quote:
Another study by MIT scientists in 2007 showed that native Russian speakers, who don't have one single word for blue, but instead have a word for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy), can discriminate between light and dark shades of blue much faster than English speakers.
This all suggests that, until they had a word from it, it's likely that our ancestors didn't see blue at all.
Or, more accurately, they probably saw it as we do now, but they never really noticed it. And that's pretty cool.
This post was edited on 8/17/17 at 11:39 am
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