In other words, the definition of “blue” did not appear in human history until the modern and modern world.
Human vision is incredible – most of us are capable of seeing around 1 million colors. To date, science has not been able to explain why all humans perceive color in the same way. But there is evidence that: in ancient times, mankind could not see the color blue.
In 2015, researcher Kevin Loria wrote in Business Insider that it wasn’t until the late 1800s that blue really “appeared” in the human world. Scholar William Gladstone – who later became Prime Minister of England – also noticed that: in his famous Odyssey, Homer describes the ocean as “dark wine” and other exotic shades, but he never used the word “blue”.
A few years later, Lazarus Geiger – a philologist (who specializes in the study of language and words) decided to delve deeper into this research. He analyzed ancient Icelandic, Hindu, Chinese, Arabic and Hebrew text to see if they used color in their lives. And he saw no language mentioning the color blue.
It was not until modern times that humans were able to see the color blue. (Photo: iStock).
Reading this far may seem odd, but this is actually understandable, because other than the sky, there isn’t much of a brilliant blue. In fact, the first society to have the word for blue was Egypt – it was the only culture that could produce blue dye. From there, it seems that the perception of color spread throughout the modern world. But doesn’t the word blue mean our ancestors couldn’t see it?
Many studies have been done to try to explain this, and one of the most convincing reports was made by Jules Davidoff, a psychologist at Goldsmiths College in London. This study was published in 2006. Davidoff and his team worked with the Himba tribe in Namibia. In their language, there is no word for blue and no real difference between green and blue.
To test whether people here really couldn’t see blue, Davidoff showed members of the tribe a circle made up of 11 green squares and 1 blue square. blue. As shown below, it’s too easy for us to spot the blue square.
Experiment to distinguish blue from green. (Photo: Business Insider).
But the Himba tribe had a lot of trouble finding squares with a different color than the rest of the squares. They guessed randomly and got it wrong many times, and it took a long time before they got the correct answer.
But it is interesting that the Himba people have more words for green than us. So Davidoff reversed the experiment. He showed English speakers a circle with 11 squares of the same shade of green and one square of a different shade of green than the rest.
Experiment to distinguish shades of green. (Photo: Business Insider).
As you can see above, it is very difficult to distinguish which square has a different color. In fact, almost all the participants in the experiment did not notice any difference. But on the contrary, people in the Himba tribe were able to point out that “out-of-species” square immediately (below).
The square has a different color. (Photo: Business Insider).
Another study conducted by scientists at MIT in 2007 showed that native Russians have no words for blue, but words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue. (siniy). They can distinguish between light and dark shades of blue faster than English speakers.
All of the above research shows that before the word blue, it seems that our ancestors didn’t really see it . Or more precisely, they could see it as we see it now, but fail to notice the difference.