Lol ancient Japanese,,, That's because ancient Chinese didn't have a word to distinguish blue and green. Both blue and green are described as the same color 青 in Chinese and also in Japanese 青い (Aoi)
"Tchelet" (sky blue) is mentioned repeatedly in the Old Testament in the book of Exodus in the plans for the Tabernacle and priestly garments. Also, lapis lazuli has been prized since antiquity as the colour of the gods. Blue sapphire stones were treasured, and also costly garments were dyed blue with dye made of snails.
@@Est.4_14 the person I replied to said "who asked about Hebrews?" (Something to that effect) And then apparently deleted their comment some time in the last 5 days.
Redheads are called redheads even though they clearly have orange hair because English didn't have a word for orange until quite recently and so orange was once considered a shade of red and yellow.
As others have mentioned, ancient Greek statues and architecture were painted and not white. One of the colors used was blue. Apparently, they could see it well enough to paint with it.
Honestly, pink is essentially just red's baby blue. Among the other named colors in English, pink is probably the most arbitrary one. It's just a range of red tints.
UPDATES: Water is now blue to spot easily from far Sky is now blue to compliment the ocean Blue dyes are now available in the Egypt region Black objects are now blue
@I_dreamed_my_name_was_Brandon Sky colour changes depending on the time of the day, but I recon you have in mind light blue of midday cloudless day :) Maybe "sky" is in some language name of blue color, or some have ethymological connection to it? Actually in my country blue is "niebieski" and the sky is "niebiosa", but did not actually dwelled on that connection ever, they are just two different words you use everyday. Do you know from what word color "blue" derives in your language? Can you
I find the concept of swearing funny. They’re words that people want you to dogmatically avoid, but because they are taboo that very fact makes so many people want to use them. It’s like a self fulfilling prophecy.
Universe: I thought the inside of me was the most complicated in the universe. Multiverse: Nah...The inside part of me is the most complicated thing inside your Universe. Null Space (outside the Multiverse): oooooooooooh, I am getting a headache...
Ancient India had several mentions of blue. Shiva is also called Neelakantha or the “blue throated one”. Similarly, another name for Vishnu is Nilesh, which simply means “the blue God”. Vishnu (and his avatars Ram and Krishna) are often depicted blue in colour.
There's a lot of scholarly debate about this. In the rig Veda, Neela is used to refer to everything from the ocean, to the back of a snake, to a peacock's neck to the night sky. It was initially probably used to describe something as dark, nightlike or ocean blue. Neelakantha could just have mean dark necked, not necessarily blue necked. Krishna and rama were also described as having neela complexion, but obviously they weren't blue.
Yes and in ancient Buddhist texts they describe the heart chakra as a deep blue light. They talked about blue in ancient Indian and Tibetan texts so maybe it was westerners who couldn't see Blue.
In old Japanese, we call green “ao” meaning “blue”. We still call green signal “ao-shingo(signal)”. I always thought it was strange, but I guess we had way more words to describe colors back then.
@@waitaminutewhoarrrrru eh considering the number of times in my brain I'm like "ya know what's the word for *gestures broadly* ya know that highly specific abstract concept that I cannot describe in anyway but have a perfect feeling of in my mind" I'm going to say that having esoteric vocabulary is sometimes useful to prevent you from going you know the thing with the thing and the other thing...
@@mermaidismyname but would the THOUGHT you're having actually be more useful? ...No...Even more so, is it all that useful in communicating to have a large vocabulary with specific words for specific things? Probably only some times. I think people with smaller vocabularies often are far more poetic than people with large vocabularies. "Wine-dark sea" is more poetic than "blue sea," for example. And I often find myself wishing I could talk like people in the rural areas of the USA who are so creative in describing things extremely accurately and poetically using a small vocabulary of common words.
When studying art, one of the first examples for this that is given is Brown and Yellow. They seem so different to us, but brown is just a very dark yellow (sometimes mixed with red)
Magenta is 100% of Red and Blue totally different to Pink as that contains 100% red and then a certain equal % of Green and Blue, so Pink is a colour just not a true colour Brown is actually Dark Orange so another none true colour
When I was a kid I would just refer to them as "Dark blue and light blue. Dark green and light green. Maybe ones darker than the dark one, guess the middle one is just green now." Magenta would have been "light purple" for me.
They actually had word(s) for blue. Kyanos (Cyan - deep or sea blue) and Glaukos (light blue), Kyanoglaukos (something between cyan and light blue), Galanos (the colour of the calm sea), Kal(l)ais (turquoise), Porphyra (purple blue). These are all from Ancient Greek mind you. Modern Greek has those as well as compounds of those. And of course ble (blue thanks to French being the previous lingua franca)... So "Wine dark sea" is used as a poetic license in guess what(!): Homeric Epic poems...Very descriptive as a phrase of the Aegean sea colour just after sunset, or during a storm...
"The original hebrew Bible.. fails to mention blue once" Esther 1:6 "The garden had hangings of white and blue [כָּחוֹל] linen" 8:15 "Mordecai went out from the presence of the king in royal apparel of blue and white"
I’m a native Tagalog speaker. In addition to purple onions being called red, brown sugar is called red sugar, and eggs have a white part and a red part. Most people grow up using English nowadays though, so most people are primed for distinguishing between red, orange and brown. We just use red in those archaic contexts cause those are everyday objects that I guess people didn’t see the point of renaming.
Lol. The sky is still ‘blue’ at night. Stealth jets have lights along their surface to match the blue of the sky at night. Otherwise they would just appear to be giant black objects against the blue background.
Except that isn't exactly true either. Entomologicaly speaking the word κύανος "According to Beekes, probably from Hittite (kuwannan-, “precious stone, copper, blue”), likely from Proto-Indo-European *ḱwey- (“to shine, white, light”) (compare *ḱweytós (“white”)" It was likely used previously to describe the oxidation of copper which anyone who has been to New York can tell you, isn't blue.
@@alexanderhenby1362 In ancient greek it is very clear "κυανος" means blue. Telling you this as someone who has studied ancient greek. This video is painful to watch lol.
Wrongo, Wittenstein Fan. Sapir-Whorf has been disproven many times in many situations. There is just a subtle difference in classification speed. Russians would distinguish between navy blue (which is not sea blue, but designed by Navys to be distinguishable from sea blue) and sky blue slightly faster, because they have different words for them (much like the red/pink distinction pointed out in the video).
You know it’s kind of like meeting new people. Before you meet them they blend in with the crowd, but after meeting them, they start popping up in the hallway all the time
In the Sanskrit language from India, one of the oldest languages in the world predating the Christian era ,the word blue is mentioned as Nila. The Hindu god Shiv is sometimes referred to as Nilkantha. So the utterance of the word blue predates all other languages in the world.
Unless you have a way to travel back in time and interview people from all sorts of prehistoric cultures, this is just nationalistic nonsense. Most languages weren't written thousands of years ago.
@@shawnsgbruh it's true, you don't know our culture more than us.lemme share some fact our Shiva idol which was found during the excavation of (Harappan sites)is much older than almost any other religion. I don't mean to be disrespectful to any religion,but it's a fact that Nila(blue) is mentioned in our scriptures.❤
In the Vietnamese language, green and blue are “Xanh” (pronounced “sun”). They are distinguished as Xanh Troi (troi means sky) as Blue and Xanh La (La means leaf) as Green.
Vietnamese actually have words only for Blue and Green which are "xanh lục" or "lục" for Blue and "xanh lam" or "lam" for Green. We have words for different shades of colors that comes from objects around us such as "xanh lá" for Green from leaf, "xanh lá mạ" for Lime cause "lá mạ" is the seedling leaves (in this case is the seedling leaves of rice plant, "xanh da trời" or "xanh nước biển" for Blue from "da trời" for "sky skin" or "nước biển" for "ocean water"
Not sure if it’s just my family, but for us we usually use xanh as blue and xanh lá cây for green. I’m surprised how many ways to say blue and green there are though! The more you know.
That feedback loop is also responsible for the weird feeling of when you get a new car, then all the sudden you see people driving the same car as you everywhere.
Like how I remember as a kid in the 80's and 90's always reading and hearing the phrase "all of a sudden" yet now I read and hear many people saying "all the sudden." Doesn't sound right to me though.
@@Garry_Combine I mean nothing has been proven or disproved regarding who homer actually was, but there’s a fair chance that homer was more than one person- I‘ve read quite a few articles about it, although I can’t remember the names just now (Maybe I can share you a link to one if you’d like?)
Basically an example of this today would be how cyan and indigo are both "blue" despite being very different. Like I feel like red and orange are more alike than cyan and indigo.
@@banhammer3904 As a qualified printer of over 30 years I dispute that, most of my working life I have dealt with the four colour process, cyan, magenta, yellow and black (keyline) and all the colours when combined that they can make. Indigo is obviously between blue and violet on the rainbow spectrum but nowhere near black as a colour.Indigo used to be called bronze blue as an ink but these days as a spot colour is sort of like a reflex blue. You may need to get checked for colour blindness if you think your statement is factual.
Also why people who are music nerds can differentiate between genres, but my mom says "what is this metal junk?" every time she hears an electric guitar 😂
The last explanation sounds right to me. I lost my memory when I was 17 due to meningitis, much like a concussion might affect the brain, and all memory of colours, smell, taste were disconnected, along with word associations. Then when I finally connected with red things like strawberries or tomatoes, I could taste them, and connect all the items that are available. Otherwise before that, the world really did seem all black and white and my perception of colours was mixed up. It makes sense that ancient civilisations wouldn't associate with a colour until their brains evolved to "find" it. Also, while the cones in the eyes are set to frequency bands, we still have to connect with things that we can use to link words to them. It's likely we could differentiate the frequencies but not separate the higher blue frequency from green.
I mean think of it, we still see cyan as blue even though it looks very different from blue, but somehow it looks the same to us??? But cyan is still often called blue
Amandaishere.jpg Sweet Amanda, in the Lake Wonder how much She can take Cut Her finger, take her ring Bruise her up, black as sin Shoot Her down, blind her eye Bury Her in the night. See the arms, shake in fear Here She is, Amanda is here. A woman named Amanda married a therapist. A patient of this therapist was obsessed with him and jealous of Amanda, so She kidnapped her, took her to Sorren lake, in Cascada Mira Park, and tortured, blinded, shot and buried her, and also She stole her engagement ring after cutting off the finger. The cops found Amanda bc She tried to crawl out of her grave and died with only the arms sticking out of the mud. Since she didn't want to be forgotten, Amanda came back as an image. As a vengace, a photo of Amanda must be shared in order to avoid being killer or haunted by her.
As someone who studied linguistics, I’d like to point out that even if Greeks did not have a word for blue (which is debatable), linguistic determinism (i.e: the theory that if a language lacks a word for a concept, then language users cannot comprehend or articulate the concept) has been disproven. There are plenty of existing languages that do not have words for certain colours, but users are able to differentiate between the colours anyway. So if anyone’s argument for the Ancient Greek not seeing blue is because they didn’t have a word, it’s just not that simple. Language does however affect the way we think (this is called linguistic relativity and it is fascinating, let me tell you) and the latter case described in the video is much more likely- there wasn’t a common word for blue (still debatable!), so people would be less adept at articulating and recognising the colour, because it simply doesn’t have a nice category for the brain to fit the concept into. Like trying to describe teal, or decide if teal looks more like green or blue if you don’t have the word ‘teal’ in your lexicon. So yeah, this comment is just to clarify things for anyone who thinks the Greeks were walking around colourblind to blue. I also love how everyone is suddenly horny for linguistics in the comments, although I feel the need to point out all these theories (linguistic relativity and linguistic determinism) are not new at all, but I’m glad they’re garnering some mainstream interest.
I don't think this video suggests linguistic determinism though. I would rather say that it hints that language and abstract thinking go "hand in hand". I mean, the existence of language alone disproves linguistic determinism, because if people couldn't understand concepts without words, they couldn't assign words to the concepts that were new to them. :D Logic is all you need to figure this one out, there doesn't need to be a research for it. But the point of this video was that the perception of blue has changed over time. While back then, it was considered a shade of another color, nowadays it is standalone and we already distinguish shades of blue because "someone" has realized that blue could be an actual color. For sure this particular case is mostly wordplays and semantics, but it's still interesting to analyze. Perception matters a lot.
Great explanation! I have always been annoyed by the fact that people can imagine that someone becomes colorblind just because they don't have a word for the color. But it annoys me even more that the standard answer is "linguistic determinism had been proven false, you are wrong," when the actual answer is much more interesting. Ancient Greek wouldn't think the sky, the ocean and butterflies were the same color, while they would think the ocean and wine were the same color. Could ancient Greek see blue? Yes, but didn't recognize it like you and me, and the reason is language.
@@MirwenAnareth You’re right, of course. I was just worried about any misconceptions anyone might have, especially considering how the title might be a little misleading depending on someone’s interpretation. Also I’ve seen too many people on the internet unfortunately using similar evidence as presented in the video (Homer’s literature etc.) to justify the people of Ancient Greece being colourblind to blue and it probably mentally scarred me haha
@@mbe67 Lol, okay, point taken. Well, the internet is full of rather illogical conclusions. A bit scary sometimes to see what's inside the heads of all those people you meet out in the streets.
My registration says my car is gray when it's clearly a light golden yellow. Now I notice every car with the same paint colour. The parking lot search has trained us.
the Sanskrit word for "blue" is "nīla" (pronounced "neela"), which is found in ancient Indian texts like the Natyashastra, meaning that the concept of blue is mentioned in old Sanskrit literature; unlike some other ancient civilizations, India did have a word for blue in their language
@@TheRedEncryption what about a word for every sound, smell, feel, touch and taste as well? You can’t truly transcend without doing it for all your senses.
@Victor Mace in what all foreigners call Greece, a proud people called Ellines(eng. Hellene) live...and they call their country Ellada, or Ellas(eng. Hellas. Greece , Grecia, and Grecos are names from the days of Rome, which Romans used. We are the Hellenes and we still have the DNA to prove it despite conquests. Eat your heart out
Modern day Turkey was once Ionia, and Byzantium , even there the population has a large proportion of its DNA from the Hellenes, you must realize that the natives simply coverted to Islam to preserve their property rights and avoid taxation.
As a linguist, I think you did a great job of explaining this! It's so cool to think about the ways language can influence our perception of the world.
ANGEL FELIPE ALVARADO CHAVARIN As well as cardinal direction! Some languages don’t have words for left, right, etc., but use absolute direction based on the cardinal directions (north, east, south, and west); people who speak these languages can have an innate sense of cardinal directions because it’s necessarily in order to communicate. Imagine being able to intrinsically know which way is north at any given time!
As a former color theory professor I really focused on that. I was able to teach, see, and use color well enough to do that job but it was only possible because I spent a long time learning about pigments selling art supplies when I was younger. The biggest “2001 monolith moment” was when I learned about how additive color works and is organized on a different wheel than were taught as kids. In the end the only way I could know something was to have a word for it and then from there I could see it.
Fun fact: blue was so rare, that lapis lazuli - now considered to be semi-precious stone - was once more important then gold. Lapis also often was depicted as magical and thanks to that we can see it having magical abilities in games like Minecraft and other media.
Me too, language tells a lot about the people, their overall mindset and culture. Like Arabic - quite dramatic/emotional, very poetic. Japanese - riddled with double entandres and non-direct ways of expression. I often mix foreign words in when I speak because sometimes there just isn't a word for a thing in my language or it has more power in that other language. In my native language Finnish it's very easy to just make up words on the spot and people still totally understand what you mean 😀 I think that's pretty special? Finnish is quite flexible even though it's quite complicated, you can express yourself super specifically/accurately and pack a lot of information in just a few words. As a people we are known for being very straightforward and really bad at small talk. People of few but poignant words. Honest to a fault. Very practical and efficient.
@@aleleliah No harm 🙂 But actually Finnish isn't a nordic language - or at least not at all related to the other nordic languages. Finnish is part of the finno-ugric language family. Estonian is very similar and Hungarian is a more distant relative. Ofcourse we do have lots of loan words from swedish and Russian especially. Pretty much all the other languages in europe and Russian too are indo-european languages. It's a VERY common misconception that Finnish is either similar to swedish or to russian. When infact russian and swedish are closer to each other than Finnish to either one of them 😆 But culturally we have a lot in common with the other nordic countries and there are many things in the nature of people that are similar. The other nordic languages are very similar, but from the perspective of a finn - if you learn just one language like english or swedish, then it's quite easy to learn German, Dutch, French, Spanish... To us they all are pretty similar. The interesting thing many people are not at all aware is that modern english is in big part Swedish(/Danish/Norwegian). Old/middle(?) English mixed and merged with the language of the "viking" settlers (they weren't just raiders, they settled there and never left, immersed in the population). They were related languages to begin with, but this merge happened later. Yeah 😂 I LOVE languages. Wish I had gone to study that properly.
@@dr.sigmundfreud3030 it makes good pseudo science clickbait Ancient people couldn't see blue? Ancient people couldn't read silently? Ancient Irish people sucked on their kings nipples? Lmao
Well.... No. Cause apparently they refer to one text. There is tons of evidence of the word blue in Greek texts and as I read in the comments, in Indian as well. This is misinformation
@@ThisIsNotAhnJieRen no, due to purple being extremely hard to create, countries didn’t have the money to create them through dyes. Quick lesson here, basically too expensive and too time wasting to create for stuff that needed the flags. Such as army’s and shit
I've heard this before, but your explanation made the most sense. Now, when I think about it, the night sky grades from black to blue, and back to black. Why not believe Blue is just a lighter form of black, or black a darker form of blue.
@hydrolito yeah but imagine being in that time and in that context where you are watching the sky going from black to blue every single day of your life, not having a name for that color, you obviosly describe it as a lighter black
This distinction is not uncommon, off the top of my head I can remember Swahili and Japanese having different words for "blue" and "sky blue," and I'm sure there are a few others (Edit) Russian
Rev. 9:17 εχοντας θωρακας πυρινους και υακινθινους και θειωδεις... okay, it's named for a flower, but it is yet another word for blue. And there are two words for red: ερυθρος, which is just regular red (what red blood cells are named for), and πυρρος (of which πυρινος is a variant), which is fire-red.
@@xaralamposkarapaulos5225 No, the video isn't lying. The fact that the world is ancient doesn't mean that it's *as ancient* as names for other colors - ancient Greek didn't spring fully-formed into existence in one day. For modern people words Cyano and Galano may be old, but - given that this information is based on pretty extensive research - it's simply not as old as the others, thus supporting the premise.
They thought differently back then. Water is clear, the ocean is LITERALLY clear, it can be dark and cloudy, same with the sky, it’s clear, you could say, it doesn’t exist, it’s not a solid mass, if you thought about everything as objects, you’d leave out the sky.
Not huge.. All human experience.. Basically it is like, every human is living in its own illusion.. And your sense of reality could be different from mine..
I found that last part fascinating. Once you give a name for something, it starts seeming a lot more distinct than it actually might be. This is why labels are so dangerous.
they had a word for it: black. blue was a shade of black and it was the number one color, not the last one. The sky was always black, just with different shades of black (hence different shades of blue).
Greeks: Purple is mentioned in the bible (old testament written in Ancient Greek) and a lot dude...it was a royal privilege. Likely, those in 100BC-100AD would have considered blue and purple the same.
Matthew 27.28: scarlet robe Mark 15.17: purple robe Luke 23.11: gorgeous robe John 19.2: purple robe Looks like we found the "yanny/laurel" of the first century.
The Egyptians had a word for blue. It was irtyu. If they had one then other civilizations had them too. These other particular civilizations probably just didn’t utilize them often. Or the word/s that was/were used no longer mean blue when translated by modern standards. Black and brown had their own names as well (in Egyptian). So they didn’t tend to mix them up. Unless maybe describing night vs. day. Dirty water vs. clean water. Black was kem and brown was demy. For added information yellow was khenet, green wahdj, red deshr and white hedj.
This is something I tell people about. It's true language can alter and shape your perception of reality. But ultimately there's never going to be a language that actually breaks down space-time.
The movie/book exaggerated it for storytelling purposes. It's essentially set in a universe where the "Strong" Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is true. Linguists in real life commonly accepted that a "Weak" version of the hypothesis is true. So, thankfully, in real life, Newspeak probably wouldn't hurt your thinking ability that much.
Yes they could see it, they could even manufacture lamps of that color of light, but they called it black light even though everybody was perfectly aware that such a black had nothing to do with the colour of the starry night.
@@MrMirville You cannot actually observe true ultraviolet light. It isn’t possible for humans; although, we can observe the effects UV light can have on certain substances and the violet visible light usually emitted along with the UV light (e.g. torches usually operate by emitting a small range of wavelengths so there can be overlaps between UV and the short wavelength visible light which is violet in colour hence both are present).
@@williamjones4164 yup. On the same token, I read a study some years back (2009 - 2011) about a birth "defect" that comes to women from their fathers side, somehow granting them true 3d vision, or the ability to see the whole color spectrum. It was estimated that the numbers of women with this defect, worldwide, measure in the low thousands. I wonder how things would look from those eyes.
@@williamjones4164 People with a condition called aphakia (a missing lens in the eye, most often caused by cataract surgery) can see ultraviolet to about 300 nm (the range for normal visible light is about 380 to 720 nm). The lens normally blocks it.
@@4n0ngaming Magenta isn't an actual color though. Its literally red and violet light alternating at a speed high enough that your brain interprets it as a new color. One that doesn't exist in the physical world. Magenta is quite literally an illusion
There wasn’t a color chart in ancient times where people could just pick a color to describe what they saw. The reason why translations of ancient books do have colors and includes the color blue is because writers would convey ideas of color by drawing on the subject under consideration, or by comparing unfamiliar objects with well-known things and those “ideas” are easily translated into what we know as color today. For example: A writer could have written Her eyes were as bright as the ocean. Could be translated to She had bright blue eyes. Just an example. They may not have had names for colors but they had ways to describe it.
I think for people that are bilingual this is obvious. Most times you realize that things cant be translated exactly so you would translate to what is similar or easy to understand because a direct translation wont always make sense make sense.
@@kingwaa2989 kinda of but I think such a beautiful color would be known.... Other then the sky or ocean what else in nature is blue? Some birds some marine life but thats all I can think of.
Fun fact: The modern Chinese character meaning blue (蓝) refered to the indigo plant in Ancient Chinese. Blue was refered to as "青", along with green, teal and, in some cases, even black.
Cool thing about blue and Sinitic languages: this character (藍/蓝) had the meaning of "blue" much earlier than some other cultures, one of the most famous appearences being in "青出於藍/青出于蓝", meaning "the student has surpassed his or her teacher", and first appearing in Xunzi, a text from the Warring Dynasties period. As a comparison, the Greeks only decided to loan the French word "bleu" for their word for blue, "μπλε", if my memory has not failed me.
@@novdelta381 I believe the 蓝 in your example refers to the indigo plant. The phrase by itself means "blue is obtained from the indigo plant (but is bluer than the plant itself)". Although I have no idea when Chinese started to refer to the color as 蓝
Well, I was referring to the phrase itself when I was talking about the Warring States peroid, and the phrase literally means "cyan comes out of blue". I am aware of earlier uses of 藍, like in the Shang Dynasty Oracle Bone inscriptions iirc. So they used the character 藍 for at least 1500 ish, possibly fewer, years without the meaning of blue
@@garfieldh.8820 《说文》 “蓝，染青草也” means: blue, the grass that can dye the color blue. The character has the radical “艹”, which stands for grass. The word blue came directly from the grass which leaves can be used to dye the color blue. AT the time of XunZi. (313B. C. -238B. C. ), “青出于蓝而胜于蓝”, 蓝 is still the name of the grass, and the color blue is named after 青. But from Wei Jin and Southern Northern dynasty, (220-420) there are already documents using the word 蓝 directly to refer the color. But it didn’t make into the dictionaries. Means people already use this word to refer the color blue at the daily use but was still not recognized officially. 梁·江淹《杂体诗序》：“譬犹蓝朱成彩，杂错之变无穷。” From Tang Dynasty（618-907）, 蓝 was commonly used to refer as the color, 杜甫《冬到金华山观》诗：“上有蔚蓝天，垂光抱琼台。” 蓝 means exactly as the blue we are talking about today.
my mother always called blue as green when i was a kid i thought it was weird, but now that i think about it my grandma did too. not so far generation behind me still called blue as green, and yes iam indonesia too.
I think the more appropriate translation would be "light red" from your initial description as a lighter shade of red. Oh and btw, people where I live would still describe Pink as "merah jambu" instead, literally "Jambu Pink" , since the color of the fruit is actually pink to light red. (Nope, jambu is different from guava. look it up)
True. I remember myself as a 6 month old, and I had no words for color, every shade of every color was unique. Top of the leaf would be one color and the bottom of the same leaf, a different one. Or the leaf would change color when it was lit differently. In fact, when outdoors, everything that moved was changing color all the time. Stationary objects changed color when the clouds moved. Also, in Russian language, light blue and dark blue are two different colors.
Due to language, their brains interpreted it as a shade of black. He gives other examples of the connection of language to the brain's interpretation of colors: seeing pink as a distinct color rather than a shade of red or the Nimba people taking longer to see the blue dot but seeing the slightly different green dot faster. It's more than just semantics. =)
Ah yes the desperate attempt by young adult novelists (a term I’m using loosely here) to stand out more ...her eyes were a deep shade, a dazzling hue comparable to cloudless sky or the Adriatic Sea...
This is also the case with the color amber in German. This is described in German as either yellow or orange. Only a few Germans can distinguish amber from yellow or orange.
Because, back then, everything was black and white. Trust me. I've seen it in movies.
As a kid,I actually believed this to be a fact for quite a while thanks to Charlie Chaplin..
kkkkkk boa
I learned that in Calvin and Hobbes.
Oh shit you’re right
I trust you, your mexican
Ancient Japanese didn’t have a word for green. 🇯🇵 It was just a shade of blue. They still call the stoplights red and blue, even though it’s green! 🚦
Yeah, it confused me a lot when I lived in Japan. They also call green apples, "blue" apples.
They know what's up
what do you mean "even though its green". its as much their definition as our.
Yellow+blue=green. Well, they are not wrong...
Lol ancient Japanese,,, That's because ancient Chinese didn't have a word to distinguish blue and green. Both blue and green are described as the same color 青 in Chinese and also in Japanese 青い (Aoi)
this video blue my mind
Lol, nice one.
Why does this guy had 6 million subscribers but 2 replys
Get ur ticket 🎫 here before this comment “BLUE” up
@@thefuturegamer5159 because the joke was already in the description, he just stole it
@@georgek4416 he stole it from the description
"Tchelet" (sky blue) is mentioned repeatedly in the Old Testament in the book of Exodus in the plans for the Tabernacle and priestly garments.
Also, lapis lazuli has been prized since antiquity as the colour of the gods. Blue sapphire stones were treasured, and also costly garments were dyed blue with dye made of snails.
The blue thread in the tassles/ tzitzit is definitely blue too.
@@foudroyaume he specifically mentions Hebrews in this video
@@Est.4_14 the person I replied to said "who asked about Hebrews?" (Something to that effect) And then apparently deleted their comment some time in the last 5 days.
oh hey same profile pic!
Colour blind? Did not know the colour exist? Flowers are also under the blue stream.
Of course they couldn't see blue, history was all in black and white.
I'm not falling for lies.
Big brain
Of course they COULD see blue, because they were humans too!
ELENI IOANNA LAZOPOULOU r/wooooosh
@@elylazpro r/wooooosh
@@elylazpro R/Woooosh
Redheads are called redheads even though they clearly have orange hair because English didn't have a word for orange until quite recently and so orange was once considered a shade of red and yellow.
Orange colour was named after the fruit
And today there are over 20 different names for color red
And brown is just a dark shade of orange. Which means that brown headed people are just "red heads" with a darker shade of the pigment.
Or how people were called black regardless of the actual skin tone is more brown
Like "that fruit called an orange is the color, yellow-red." In retrospect is ideal.
Can't wait for the sequel in 2020 years when they say "These people couldn't see the color Lepu"
There are colors we can’t actually see tho
Poke'mon Trainer Chri$$$ 303
Yeah, you can’t see gamma rays...
(And if you can, please leave the area you are sitting in immediately).
@@cezarcatalin1406 too late becoming the hulk
I would expect Lepu to be a maybe sapphire color... like a dark version on blue-green
“How did they live without aprillion??”
As others have mentioned, ancient Greek statues and architecture were painted and not white. One of the colors used was blue. Apparently, they could see it well enough to paint with it.
The title is very clickbaity but the contents are still accurate. This isn't a particular contentious topic outside of RUclips comments.
@@shawnsgwrong. 😊
in indonesian, we call pink "young red"
that's adorable
Oh hello. Yeah that or, "guava red" lol
Merah Muda~~~
It's totally accurate if you really think about it.
Honestly, pink is essentially just red's baby blue. Among the other named colors in English, pink is probably the most arbitrary one. It's just a range of red tints.
Imagine being alive when the Blue DLC dropped.
Glitch in the matrix
Lmao
UPDATES:
Water is now blue to spot easily from far
Sky is now blue to compliment the ocean
Blue dyes are now available in the Egypt region
Black objects are now blue
Lmao
Underrated comment
It’s 5020
“Why these people couldn’t see Gyret, Brimple, Prattle, Bete, and Ornhack.”
_yes_
I can see Ornhack, everyday someone is ornhacking my Minecraft server
honestly true, though
@@thischannelisinactiveimsor9500
i really set it up for that one didn’t i
@@_Envous Yes and it was very Gyret
The details and decoration on early archaic Greek statues were painted with azurite which gives that brilliant blue colour, traces of which survive.
Good point. The color azure. Maybe we just don't recognize the color name when it appears in some languages.
@@mrcryptozoic817 It is just that anglogermanic scholars who studied the text were idiots.
And
@@mrcryptozoic817Because azurite would be colour name. Im sure names in Your lang also have ethymology.
@I_dreamed_my_name_was_Brandon Sky colour changes depending on the time of the day, but I recon you have in mind light blue of midday cloudless day :)
Maybe "sky" is in some language name of blue color, or some have ethymological connection to it?
Actually in my country blue is "niebieski" and the sky is "niebiosa", but did not actually dwelled on that connection ever, they are just two different words you use everyday.
Do you know from what word color "blue" derives in your language? Can you
The language part is also seen when a child doesn’t recognise swearing until they know the word
I watched Guardians of the Galaxy a lot as a kid. I did not know the words, sh*t, damn, b*tch, and a*s, were words.
@MIA they couldve been 7 when it came out. i mean imo theyre still kids but they're an older kid
@@fatherdog346 yeah but he said “when I was a kid” implying he was no longer a kid
@@evilhutdug4665 he could had been 10
I find the concept of swearing funny. They’re words that people want you to dogmatically avoid, but because they are taboo that very fact makes so many people want to use them. It’s like a self fulfilling prophecy.
"The human brain is the most complicated thing in the universe."
- The human Brain
@@avetiq3905 I don't get it-
@@Apollo_Dionysus_Hermes he was makeing a joke
@@Gen_-6012 *making
Also, I can tell he's making a joke, I just don't get the reference
This sounds so much like a Futurama joke, lmao 🤣
Universe: I thought the inside of me was the most complicated in the universe.
Multiverse: Nah...The inside part of me is the most complicated thing inside your Universe.
Null Space (outside the Multiverse): oooooooooooh, I am getting a headache...
Imagine 10 thousand years later somebody making a video :
Why ancient millennials and Gen-Z's couldn't see the colour "Terp"
Exactly!!
True
I’m colorblind so I didn’t know what color that was
😂😂😂
Yeah probably , and also probably you will be there to see it.
Ancient India had several mentions of blue. Shiva is also called Neelakantha or the “blue throated one”. Similarly, another name for Vishnu is Nilesh, which simply means “the blue God”. Vishnu (and his avatars Ram and Krishna) are often depicted blue in colour.
There's a lot of scholarly debate about this. In the rig Veda, Neela is used to refer to everything from the ocean, to the back of a snake, to a peacock's neck to the night sky. It was initially probably used to describe something as dark, nightlike or ocean blue. Neelakantha could just have mean dark necked, not necessarily blue necked. Krishna and rama were also described as having neela complexion, but obviously they weren't blue.
He clearly said later that blue is mentioned but is the last to be mentioned compared to other colors
@@MeHungy136like aubergine?
Yes and in ancient Buddhist texts they describe the heart chakra as a deep blue light. They talked about blue in ancient Indian and Tibetan texts so maybe it was westerners who couldn't see Blue.
@@_sayandaswhat does that have to do with what the comment says? The Vedas and Purans are older than what the video mentions
In old Japanese, we call green “ao” meaning “blue”. We still call green signal “ao-shingo(signal)”. I always thought it was strange, but I guess we had way more words to describe colors back then.
I’m also Japanese just cool that ur here
@@wolf12345 heyyy what’s up!👋🏻
aozora ni naru song
Very cool!
But there's a kanji for green, so I guess that the Chinese had a word for green before the Japanese?
This explains why having a large vocabulary makes a person have more precise thoughts.
More precise, maybe.
But more useful? Smarter? Better? That's another story.
@@waitaminutewhoarrrrru eh considering the number of times in my brain I'm like "ya know what's the word for *gestures broadly* ya know that highly specific abstract concept that I cannot describe in anyway but have a perfect feeling of in my mind" I'm going to say that having esoteric vocabulary is sometimes useful to prevent you from going you know the thing with the thing and the other thing...
@@mermaidismyname but would the THOUGHT you're having actually be more useful? ...No...Even more so, is it all that useful in communicating to have a large vocabulary with specific words for specific things? Probably only some times. I think people with smaller vocabularies often are far more poetic than people with large vocabularies. "Wine-dark sea" is more poetic than "blue sea," for example. And I often find myself wishing I could talk like people in the rural areas of the USA who are so creative in describing things extremely accurately and poetically using a small vocabulary of common words.
Also explains why its easier to memorize numbers or dates or events because you associate that number with something for example 23;michael jordan.
Me speaking arabic :
I'm going to start describing my eye color as wine-dark.
LOL! I like it.
Right on
I usually do, after about a bottle's worth, and i have green eyes.
@@CristiNeagu Lol sounds like fun
Yes!
When studying art, one of the first examples for this that is given is Brown and Yellow.
They seem so different to us, but brown is just a very dark yellow (sometimes mixed with red)
If a banana was brown the Greeks would have noticed FFS.
This actually makes so much sense. As a kid cyan was just blue, beige was yellow, lime was green, magenta was pink etc.
wait, magenta isn't pink?
As a colorblind adult, all those still resemble similar things.
Magenta is 100% of Red and Blue totally different to Pink as that contains 100% red and then a certain equal % of Green and Blue, so Pink is a colour just not a true colour
Brown is actually Dark Orange so another none true colour
When I was a kid I would just refer to them as "Dark blue and light blue. Dark green and light green. Maybe ones darker than the dark one, guess the middle one is just green now."
Magenta would have been "light purple" for me.
@@rajanyapurohit5113 I always stuck it in between purple and pink. Idk if it really belongs there but that's what I did
They actually had word(s) for blue. Kyanos (Cyan - deep or sea blue) and Glaukos (light blue), Kyanoglaukos (something between cyan and light blue), Galanos (the colour of the calm sea), Kal(l)ais (turquoise), Porphyra (purple blue). These are all from Ancient Greek mind you. Modern Greek has those as well as compounds of those. And of course ble (blue thanks to French being the previous lingua franca)... So "Wine dark sea" is used as a poetic license in guess what(!): Homeric Epic poems...Very descriptive as a phrase of the Aegean sea colour just after sunset, or during a storm...
How is this comment more well researched than the videofnfk
Yeah, that's what I was thinking!
Odd how scanning comments can save time.
"The original hebrew Bible.. fails to mention blue once" Esther 1:6 "The garden had hangings of white and blue [כָּחוֹל] linen" 8:15 "Mordecai went out from the presence of the king in royal apparel of blue and white"
Thank heavens for this intelligent Reply from Hellecor!! "ECHFARISTO!!!!" ♡♡
This is true. That's why they are called 'red' onion, when they are clearly purple. There didn't used to be a word for purple.
that’s wild
I coloblinding
Jost codding
Colorblind:
I’m a native Tagalog speaker. In addition to purple onions being called red, brown sugar is called red sugar, and eggs have a white part and a red part. Most people grow up using English nowadays though, so most people are primed for distinguishing between red, orange and brown. We just use red in those archaic contexts cause those are everyday objects that I guess people didn’t see the point of renaming.
Im not sure but it could be that “blue” wasn’t mention because they didn’t know English at that time
I mean they weren’t wrong calling the sky “black” because it is technically black at night
You have black photo
Lol. The sky is still ‘blue’ at night. Stealth jets have lights along their surface to match the blue of the sky at night. Otherwise they would just appear to be giant black objects against the blue background.
@@iakovos56 his photo is blue
@@xerotolerant in actuality the sky is not blue. It's colourless by itself but due to external factors it changes.
technically 😂
Cyan, is blue. "Its name is derived from the Ancient Greek κύανος, transliterated kyanos, meaning dark blue, dark blue enamel, Lapis lazuli"
But yet in modern times cyan is a light blue.
Kinda puts the kibosh on this whole video. Nice one.
Except that isn't exactly true either. Entomologicaly speaking the word κύανος "According to Beekes, probably from Hittite (kuwannan-, “precious stone, copper, blue”), likely from Proto-Indo-European *ḱwey- (“to shine, white, light”) (compare *ḱweytós (“white”)" It was likely used previously to describe the oxidation of copper which anyone who has been to New York can tell you, isn't blue.
@@alexanderhenby1362 In ancient greek it is very clear "κυανος" means blue. Telling you this as someone who has studied ancient greek. This video is painful to watch lol.
@@alexanderhenby1362 The medical term for someone turning blue due to lack of oxygen is cyanotic.
It’s like when you meet someone new in school and “suddenly u see them everywhere”
Yeah I like that analogy
Otherwise known as "stalking"
when you learn a new word and start hearing it more often
The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon
Great presenting: enthusiasm without sounding patronising. A rare skill…
"the limits of my language mean the limits of my world"
Ludwig Wittgenstein
I use this a lot lmao
Kluftinger ftw
I had this realisation last night. Language is so powerful
Time to learn a lot of languages.
Wrongo, Wittenstein Fan. Sapir-Whorf has been disproven many times in many situations. There is just a subtle difference in classification speed. Russians would distinguish between navy blue (which is not sea blue, but designed by Navys to be distinguishable from sea blue) and sky blue slightly faster, because they have different words for them (much like the red/pink distinction pointed out in the video).
You know it’s kind of like meeting new people. Before you meet them they blend in with the crowd, but after meeting them, they start popping up in the hallway all the time
they still blend in with the crowd for me.
Somali doesn't have a word for "purple." All my friends would say it was either a dark blue or sometime a dark pink.
Warya beenta jooji. purple is "barbal"
Lmfaoooo
@@ishmaelm1932 Macalimiintayda u sheeg!
In Portuguese we have 2 words of purple: Roxo( closer to Blue), and Lilás (closer to Red)
I can't even see purple lol. It's just dark blue to me. I also can't see green, it's just a brown or orange. Art class was fun when I was a kid.
Purple doesn't even exist ._.
In the Sanskrit language from India, one of the oldest languages in the world predating the Christian era ,the word blue is mentioned as Nila. The Hindu god Shiv is sometimes referred to as Nilkantha. So the utterance of the word blue predates all other languages in the world.
Unless you have a way to travel back in time and interview people from all sorts of prehistoric cultures, this is just nationalistic nonsense. Most languages weren't written thousands of years ago.
That's not correct.
@@shawnsgbruh it's true, you don't know our culture more than us.lemme share some fact our Shiva idol which was found during the excavation of (Harappan sites)is much older than almost any other religion. I don't mean to be disrespectful to any religion,but it's a fact that Nila(blue) is mentioned in our scriptures.❤
Name the scripture @@SouravChalotra13
@@Amir-lq1fy rigved
On Wednesdays we wear a light form of red.
Outstanding.
I see what you did there 👌🏼
noice mean girls
sneaky reference, comrade
Love this
In the Vietnamese language, green and blue are “Xanh” (pronounced “sun”). They are distinguished as Xanh Troi (troi means sky) as Blue and Xanh La (La means leaf) as Green.
Woah that’s a really beautiful way to think about it 😯 thanks for sharing
Does Xanh mean anything on it's own or does it always need to be followed by la or troi? Either way, how cool
xanh on its own can mean either blue or green
Vietnamese actually have words only for Blue and Green which are "xanh lục" or "lục" for Blue and "xanh lam" or "lam" for Green. We have words for different shades of colors that comes from objects around us such as "xanh lá" for Green from leaf, "xanh lá mạ" for Lime cause "lá mạ" is the seedling leaves (in this case is the seedling leaves of rice plant, "xanh da trời" or "xanh nước biển" for Blue from "da trời" for "sky skin" or "nước biển" for "ocean water"
Not sure if it’s just my family, but for us we usually use xanh as blue and xanh lá cây for green. I’m surprised how many ways to say blue and green there are though! The more you know.
When you learn a new word and start seing and hearing it everywhere it's a sign that you should clear your cookies in the Matrix.
You're funny
Certificate (Valid)
Cookies (69 in use)
Bro so real
😂
Mad respect for the people who painted the sky blue.
That feedback loop is also responsible for the weird feeling of when you get a new car, then all the sudden you see people driving the same car as you everywhere.
Baader -Meinhof phenomenon aka “frequency illusion.”
And yet! I’m hearing my name a heck of a lot more now than just two years ago. That’s the bizarre thing to me
Like how I remember as a kid in the 80's and 90's always reading and hearing the phrase "all of a sudden" yet now I read and hear many people saying "all the sudden." Doesn't sound right to me though.
Same with buying a shirt or dress. Suddenly everyone around has the same thing dammit!
@@bloblovlalalulu3422 probably because you are caught up with the trends and buy stuff at the right time 😂
Regarding Homer's reference to the "wine-dark" seas, I recommended for people to take a cruise around the Aegean & Ionian Seas, once you sail off the coast, the color you will see the most is PERFECTLY described by using the word "wine-dark" seas, as it has almost a purplish Blueberry Hue.
Hope that helps! 👍
-Sebastianos the Philhellene 🇬🇷©
Edit: Wow, almost 1,000 Likes! Thank You everyone. I guess many of you have seen it or know what I am talking about then!
Nevertheless, Homer’s work is poetic. It’s not meant to be historically or scientifically correct, but to entertain.
@@gbatzanos and also HE WAS BLIND
@@fernit0505 homer was probably not a person let alone blind
@@rodmunduruca2587 citation? You can't just make a claim like that without proof
@@Garry_Combine I mean nothing has been proven or disproved regarding who homer actually was, but there’s a fair chance that homer was more than one person- I‘ve read quite a few articles about it, although I can’t remember the names just now
(Maybe I can share you a link to one if you’d like?)
Basically an example of this today would be how cyan and indigo are both "blue" despite being very different. Like I feel like red and orange are more alike than cyan and indigo.
@@banhammer3904 pretty sure there is no such thing as a fake color, what are you talking about
Brown is not a real color is just dark orange
@@electroflames I think this was a joke about ancient people.
@@banhammer3904 As a qualified printer of over 30 years I dispute that, most of my working life I have dealt with the four colour process, cyan, magenta, yellow and black (keyline) and all the colours when combined that they can make. Indigo is obviously between blue and violet on the rainbow spectrum but nowhere near black as a colour.Indigo used to be called bronze blue as an ink but these days as a spot colour is sort of like a reflex blue. You may need to get checked for colour blindness if you think your statement is factual.
@@iankearns774 Also people always forget that it depends on the color spectrum or theory we are talking about, wether it's substractive or additive
I never even considered that language could affect our visual senses like that, and to _that_ extent. That's so cool!
This could explain why artists can see color very well, and give each one a name.
Trained their brains maybe, from interacting on a daily basis with the need to know this
Depends on the artist, I can't remember the names but I'm like "Ah yes this pinkish darkish reddish yellowish but a little but of violet color"
@@hairglowingkyle4572 definitely this. i can see small differences like which is warmer or cooler but I don't think i can name colors accurately
Also why people who are music nerds can differentiate between genres, but my mom says "what is this metal junk?" every time she hears an electric guitar 😂
@@hairglowingkyle4572 this is me I think the brown that has a tint of sap green
That's like saying there is no brown, only dull orange
Oh wait. there's a video on that as well
Oh hey "I understood that reference" 😄
@@c-bass2777 yeah, me too
We're on a similar youtube algorithm?
@@daas3715 funny how the brown video is below this one on my recommends
ruclips.net/video/wh4aWZRtTwU/видео.html This one??
You almost look like Mark Rober in the thumbnail
Mark Robber is much more smooth and smarter... No offense intended.
Ohhhh, *that’s* who he reminded me of!
I thought he was Mark Rober in the thumbnail lol
@@erikziak1249 ...
Thats why I clicked hahaha
The last explanation sounds right to me. I lost my memory when I was 17 due to meningitis, much like a concussion might affect the brain, and all memory of colours, smell, taste were disconnected, along with word associations. Then when I finally connected with red things like strawberries or tomatoes, I could taste them, and connect all the items that are available. Otherwise before that, the world really did seem all black and white and my perception of colours was mixed up. It makes sense that ancient civilisations wouldn't associate with a colour until their brains evolved to "find" it.
Also, while the cones in the eyes are set to frequency bands, we still have to connect with things that we can use to link words to them. It's likely we could differentiate the frequencies but not separate the higher blue frequency from green.
uow, great experience. thanks for sharing it.
I don’t see how this is comparable though. The sky is clearly blue and not like any other colour, it would have been as common as red and green.
I mean think of it, we still see cyan as blue even though it looks very different from blue, but somehow it looks the same to us??? But cyan is still often called blue
Ancient Greeks: “I’m feeling wine-dark today”.
Lmfao
drunk?
@@anikaloves No, I’m feeling blue today
Amandaishere.jpg
Sweet Amanda, in the Lake
Wonder how much She can take
Cut Her finger, take her ring
Bruise her up, black as sin
Shoot Her down, blind her eye
Bury Her in the night.
See the arms, shake in fear
Here She is, Amanda is here.
A woman named Amanda married a therapist. A patient of this therapist was obsessed with him and jealous of Amanda, so She kidnapped her, took her to Sorren lake, in Cascada Mira Park, and tortured, blinded, shot and buried her, and also She stole her engagement ring after cutting off the finger. The cops found Amanda bc She tried to crawl out of her grave and died with only the arms sticking out of the mud. Since she didn't want to be forgotten, Amanda came back as an image. As a vengace, a photo of Amanda must be shared in order to avoid being killer or haunted by her.
Με
"Blue is the final color to enter the language in every single culture." That's it guys, we got blue, time to wrap up the whole color naming project.
Way underrated.
Crayola never got the memo.
Not in japanese, even in the 1800-900 they dis not have "green"
Bloo
Blue is definetly my favorite flavour. Blue tastes better than any other colour.
As someone who studied linguistics, I’d like to point out that even if Greeks did not have a word for blue (which is debatable), linguistic determinism (i.e: the theory that if a language lacks a word for a concept, then language users cannot comprehend or articulate the concept) has been disproven. There are plenty of existing languages that do not have words for certain colours, but users are able to differentiate between the colours anyway. So if anyone’s argument for the Ancient Greek not seeing blue is because they didn’t have a word, it’s just not that simple.
Language does however affect the way we think (this is called linguistic relativity and it is fascinating, let me tell you) and the latter case described in the video is much more likely- there wasn’t a common word for blue (still debatable!), so people would be less adept at articulating and recognising the colour, because it simply doesn’t have a nice category for the brain to fit the concept into. Like trying to describe teal, or decide if teal looks more like green or blue if you don’t have the word ‘teal’ in your lexicon. So yeah, this comment is just to clarify things for anyone who thinks the Greeks were walking around colourblind to blue. I also love how everyone is suddenly horny for linguistics in the comments, although I feel the need to point out all these theories (linguistic relativity and linguistic determinism) are not new at all, but I’m glad they’re garnering some mainstream interest.
I don't think this video suggests linguistic determinism though. I would rather say that it hints that language and abstract thinking go "hand in hand". I mean, the existence of language alone disproves linguistic determinism, because if people couldn't understand concepts without words, they couldn't assign words to the concepts that were new to them. :D Logic is all you need to figure this one out, there doesn't need to be a research for it. But the point of this video was that the perception of blue has changed over time. While back then, it was considered a shade of another color, nowadays it is standalone and we already distinguish shades of blue because "someone" has realized that blue could be an actual color. For sure this particular case is mostly wordplays and semantics, but it's still interesting to analyze. Perception matters a lot.
Great explanation! I have always been annoyed by the fact that people can imagine that someone becomes colorblind just because they don't have a word for the color. But it annoys me even more that the standard answer is "linguistic determinism had been proven false, you are wrong," when the actual answer is much more interesting. Ancient Greek wouldn't think the sky, the ocean and butterflies were the same color, while they would think the ocean and wine were the same color. Could ancient Greek see blue? Yes, but didn't recognize it like you and me, and the reason is language.
@@MirwenAnareth You’re right, of course. I was just worried about any misconceptions anyone might have, especially considering how the title might be a little misleading depending on someone’s interpretation. Also I’ve seen too many people on the internet unfortunately using similar evidence as presented in the video (Homer’s literature etc.) to justify the people of Ancient Greece being colourblind to blue and it probably mentally scarred me haha
@@mbe67 Lol, okay, point taken. Well, the internet is full of rather illogical conclusions. A bit scary sometimes to see what's inside the heads of all those people you meet out in the streets.
Don't worry guys, most people on the internet don't think about Ancient Greek at all.
I wonder how many ancient Greeks were interviewed before making this video.
When I got a new car, I suddenly started noticing that everyone had my car model verses before I never even noticed that the model existed
Selection bias
My registration says my car is gray when it's clearly a light golden yellow. Now I notice every car with the same paint colour. The parking lot search has trained us.
@@trudycolborne2371 were they colorblind?
I bought a fanny pack and suddenly everyone in my town started having one out of nowhere 😂😂
dunning krueger effect
"Why Homer couldn't see blue" - he was blind
God, I love this comment! ;-)
Or maybe because you can't see colours if you don't exist.
@@silviusforosiculensis - The Odyssey exists. Therefore, someone wrote it. We refer to that person as Homer.
@@customsongmaker but we also refer to the people who wrote different poems as homer. So wouldnt homer, at this point, be more lile a job title
@@bernard7057 - I try not to refer to different people as the same person. Have you considered the possibility that Homer wrote different poems?
So this explains why after you buy a new car, you realize almost everyone on the road has the same one as you, and you no longer feel special. :-(
I'm a fan since the start cus I was dumb
Nice catch!
It's called Baader- Meinhof Phenomenon
If you buy the base model then yeah you're going to see it everywhere.
Same here, I bought an expensive and rare car called the Toyota Corolla, but then I started noticing that car everywhere.
the Sanskrit word for "blue" is "nīla" (pronounced "neela"), which is found in ancient Indian texts like the Natyashastra, meaning that the concept of blue is mentioned in old Sanskrit literature; unlike some other ancient civilizations, India did have a word for blue in their language
just make a word for every color possible and *_T R A N S C E N D_*
RGB or CMYK
All the ten million?
@@HaroldoPinheiro-OK Yes
@@TheRedEncryption what about a word for every sound, smell, feel, touch and taste as well? You can’t truly transcend without doing it for all your senses.
Literally every makeup brand
“Why the Greeks can’t see blue”:
Greeks: Hey, you guys like the invisible flag?
The joke is Greece’s flag is Blue. 🇬🇷
@@october17leftyjason32 🤡 Take a joke
@@october17leftyjason32 so white flag
@Victor Mace in what all foreigners call Greece, a proud people called Ellines(eng. Hellene) live...and they call their country Ellada, or Ellas(eng. Hellas. Greece , Grecia, and Grecos are names from the days of Rome, which Romans used. We are the Hellenes and we still have the DNA to prove it despite conquests. Eat your heart out
Modern day Turkey was once Ionia, and Byzantium , even there the population has a large proportion of its DNA from the Hellenes, you must realize that the natives simply coverted to Islam to preserve their property rights and avoid taxation.
As a linguist, I think you did a great job of explaining this! It's so cool to think about the ways language can influence our perception of the world.
ANGEL FELIPE ALVARADO CHAVARIN As well as cardinal direction! Some languages don’t have words for left, right, etc., but use absolute direction based on the cardinal directions (north, east, south, and west); people who speak these languages can have an innate sense of cardinal directions because it’s necessarily in order to communicate. Imagine being able to intrinsically know which way is north at any given time!
As a former color theory professor I really focused on that. I was able to teach, see, and use color well enough to do that job but it was only possible because I spent a long time learning about pigments selling art supplies when I was younger. The biggest “2001 monolith moment” was when I learned about how additive color works and is organized on a different wheel than were taught as kids. In the end the only way I could know something was to have a word for it and then from there I could see it.
Agreed
Except that he was wrong about icelandic texts as blue is mentioned as both ravens and water are blue.
So that is why I only realised around the age of 10 that pink is actually a lighter shade of red 😅
Just subscribed because of the video. I’m 80 years old, and love learning new stuff!
Fun fact: blue was so rare, that lapis lazuli - now considered to be semi-precious stone - was once more important then gold. Lapis also often was depicted as magical and thanks to that we can see it having magical abilities in games like Minecraft and other media.
That's a real stone? Never knew
@@prakharmishra3000 Yeah it is! We study about it in history
@@prakharmishra3000 I bought a soap that had a lapis lazuli stone on it!
@@TheKarret I wonder if your skin is fine :P
@@prakharmishra3000 it’s what they use to make blue oil paint actually.
This is why languages fascinate me: there are tangible differences in thought processes that are rooted in the language we speak.
if u wanna read a philosopher who’d agree w u, check out Derrida! (warning: he’s not the most accessible)
That is such a beautiful description
Me too, language tells a lot about the people, their overall mindset and culture. Like Arabic - quite dramatic/emotional, very poetic. Japanese - riddled with double entandres and non-direct ways of expression.
I often mix foreign words in when I speak because sometimes there just isn't a word for a thing in my language or it has more power in that other language.
In my native language Finnish it's very easy to just make up words on the spot and people still totally understand what you mean 😀 I think that's pretty special? Finnish is quite flexible even though it's quite complicated, you can express yourself super specifically/accurately and pack a lot of information in just a few words. As a people we are known for being very straightforward and really bad at small talk. People of few but poignant words. Honest to a fault. Very practical and efficient.
@@Pippis78 i wonder if all nordic languages are similar to how you would describe finnish. I beg your pardon if I seem to stereotype you guys
@@aleleliah No harm 🙂 But actually Finnish isn't a nordic language - or at least not at all related to the other nordic languages. Finnish is part of the finno-ugric language family. Estonian is very similar and Hungarian is a more distant relative. Ofcourse we do have lots of loan words from swedish and Russian especially.
Pretty much all the other languages in europe and Russian too are indo-european languages.
It's a VERY common misconception that Finnish is either similar to swedish or to russian. When infact russian and swedish are closer to each other than Finnish to either one of them 😆
But culturally we have a lot in common with the other nordic countries and there are many things in the nature of people that are similar.
The other nordic languages are very similar, but from the perspective of a finn - if you learn just one language like english or swedish, then it's quite easy to learn German, Dutch, French, Spanish... To us they all are pretty similar.
The interesting thing many people are not at all aware is that modern english is in big part Swedish(/Danish/Norwegian).
Old/middle(?) English mixed and merged with the language of the "viking" settlers (they weren't just raiders, they settled there and never left, immersed in the population). They were related languages to begin with, but this merge happened later.
Yeah 😂 I LOVE languages. Wish I had gone to study that properly.
Video answer: they did, languages just develop over time based on need
Which is obvious so I don't really get the point of this video
@@dr.sigmundfreud3030 it makes good pseudo science clickbait
Ancient people couldn't see blue?
Ancient people couldn't read silently?
Ancient Irish people sucked on their kings nipples? Lmao
thank you for saving my 7 minutes bye now
Need more people like you. Save so much data
Thank you
'Ancient Greeks Couldn't See Blue DEBUNKED Once and For All' metatron
I love how you are evolving your content so much! I know YT isn't built for this but please know that a lot of us appreciate it :)
Awh thanks, this means a lot!
@@AsapSCIENCE hi
*The year is 3100*
OurTube: Why Ancient Europeans Couldn't See Blurple
😂😂😂 i don't understand man clearly they were colourblind. They didn't even knew Rorange and Pellow🤷
"Ourtube" 😂😂
How about Blite?
The funniest part is the Discord logo color is literally called Blurple
Are you trying to say that communism took over
That makes sense why, in the Odyssey, they kept describing Athena’s eyes as “foamy, ocean.. *grey* “
ocean gets its color from the sky... so if the weather is meh.... the water will look accordingly
It's ok. Not like we mention to you, young pups, that we used to have to spend hours to boil eggs just right to get balls for our computer mice.
That’s why they describe her eyes as grey!!! She actually had blue eyes! Oh my hackers!
@@aserta that's fast. i used to wait for quail to lay eggs to get one for mine, and then i boil it.
If your eyes are foamy, see a doctor.
The part when you basically said reality is what are brains make it... Was trippy AF
Can we just appreciate the person who had to read through all the text to find out there wasn’t the word blue in it
Well.... No. Cause apparently they refer to one text. There is tons of evidence of the word blue in Greek texts and as I read in the comments, in Indian as well. This is misinformation
dude, i had to read it in school. it’s not that hard.
bruh, these books are around 300 pages long. its genuinly not that hard to read through them😂
@@pixelatedcherry what’s the name of the book you had to read for school?
Ever heard of data processing?
Imagine in the future where other people are surprised we can not see Humulkus
What is it.
@@Roseviell a colour between red and green
And octarine
This explains a great deal about my son's Among Us videos complaining about cyan.
Wait y'all can't see humulkus?
"But blue? it was one of the hardest colors to create"
Purple: hold my beer
Purple? Blue? Arent that black?
RIP snails.
@@GoldenGrenadier Hahaha. Is there a country flag that has Purple?
@@GoldenGrenadier don't forget the mollusks. Also the urine.
@@ThisIsNotAhnJieRen no, due to purple being extremely hard to create, countries didn’t have the money to create them through dyes. Quick lesson here, basically too expensive and too time wasting to create for stuff that needed the flags. Such as army’s and shit
Ancient Egyptians loved their blues. Especially that 18th Dynasty.
I've heard this before, but your explanation made the most sense. Now, when I think about it, the night sky grades from black to blue, and back to black. Why not believe Blue is just a lighter form of black, or black a darker form of blue.
There are darker reds but as some point is no longer dark red or dark blue but is black which is neither blue or red.
@hydrolito yeah but imagine being in that time and in that context where you are watching the sky going from black to blue every single day of your life, not having a name for that color, you obviosly describe it as a lighter black
Midnight blue
that weirdly does make sense 🤔
Black and white are no colors. Inbetween is grey, which is a color without a color.
Ancient Greeks actually had at least TWO words for Blue: "Cyanó" which is the Navy and "Galanó" which is the Light Blue.
So this video is lying. I know it because I know Greek and Ancient Greek as well! You are right my brother
Ps: Brother comes from Greek φράτηρ ;)
This distinction is not uncommon, off the top of my head I can remember Swahili and Japanese having different words for "blue" and "sky blue," and I'm sure there are a few others (Edit) Russian
Yeah true im Greek myself and i know ancient greek and ive studied Odysee and Iliada too
Rev. 9:17 εχοντας θωρακας πυρινους και υακινθινους και θειωδεις... okay, it's named for a flower, but it is yet another word for blue. And there are two words for red: ερυθρος, which is just regular red (what red blood cells are named for), and πυρρος (of which πυρινος is a variant), which is fire-red.
@@xaralamposkarapaulos5225 No, the video isn't lying. The fact that the world is ancient doesn't mean that it's *as ancient* as names for other colors - ancient Greek didn't spring fully-formed into existence in one day. For modern people words Cyano and Galano may be old, but - given that this information is based on pretty extensive research - it's simply not as old as the others, thus supporting the premise.
It's like the Eskimo/Inuit having no word for 'snow', but lots of words for different kinds of snow.
No... there was "cyan" meaning blue in ancient Greek. And many others covering basic colours and shades
Not only in Ancient Greek in Koine but in Modern Greek too. Some say κυανόλευκη (cyan-white) Greece's flag instead of blé (blue)
Детерминизм это Свобода 🤙
They thought differently back then. Water is clear, the ocean is LITERALLY clear, it can be dark and cloudy, same with the sky, it’s clear, you could say, it doesn’t exist, it’s not a solid mass, if you thought about everything as objects, you’d leave out the sky.
A huge portion of the human experience resides only in our minds. It's crazy, bro
It truly is wild.
Not huge.. All human experience.. Basically it is like, every human is living in its own illusion.. And your sense of reality could be different from mine..
Tell that to God when you meet him.
@@kidgenius8170 lol no maybe demons
@@RedPlaystationController if God could be mistaken for a demon that easily I think you'd need to question your own faith
“Blue is the hardest color to make.” Then how did that bully turn my face black and blue so easily?
Well I bet it didn't feel very easy to you.
Because black was present.
Now if he made your face straight up blue then that would be impressive. Lol
You mean he gave you blue eye? Or did he give you black eye 🤔?
Alec benjamin fan will understand
There there
I found that last part fascinating. Once you give a name for something, it starts seeming a lot more distinct than it actually might be. This is why labels are so dangerous.
You know I like to know what’s Anti Freeze and what’s not dude
@@Andyatl2002 I love a bit of Anti-freeze on my cereal...
Labels are dangerous....you're joking right?
@@Plumberboi91 No, I wasn't joking. I thought the tone was quite clear.
Why do you say that?
@@Smd3580 you're scared of lables
I love you guys. My grand babies have learned so much from your Channel THANK YOU
Title: Why the Ancient Greeks Couldn’t See Blue
First minute: OK so they could see blue but they didn’t have a word for it
yeah, click bait on a science channel...
Thank you for voicing my annoyance with the title. I am distraught ;_;
Thanks for saving me 7 minutes
@Angry Hippo you must be fun at parties
they had a word for it: black. blue was a shade of black and it was the number one color, not the last one. The sky was always black, just with different shades of black (hence different shades of blue).
Everyone: Why did the ancient greeks not say the word "blue"?
Me: Well probably because they didn't speak english idk
some of them were pretty smart tho you never know
@@defectivepikachu4582 hahaha. Well, there was no english at that time, isnt it.
To be fair: "Its all Greek to me" - Shakespeare
@@defectivepikachu4582 the English language didn't even exist yet you donut
@@bunja9101 hey, don't be so hard on him/her. He/she is a defective Pikachu, afterall.
Greeks: Purple is mentioned in the bible (old testament written in Ancient Greek) and a lot dude...it was a royal privilege. Likely, those in 100BC-100AD would have considered blue and purple the same.
Matthew 27.28: scarlet robe
Mark 15.17: purple robe
Luke 23.11: gorgeous robe
John 19.2: purple robe
Looks like we found the "yanny/laurel" of the first century.
Sure, and he should've mentioned that. It still doesn't disprove his point about "blue" and it wasn't like it was mentioned that much.
He is referring to the HEBREW Bible which refers specifically to portions of the modern Old Testament--the really old ones.
He’s talking about Greece and not Roman occupied Greece
P
The Egyptians had a word for blue. It was irtyu. If they had one then other civilizations had them too. These other particular civilizations probably just didn’t utilize them often. Or the word/s that was/were used no longer mean blue when translated by modern standards.
Black and brown had their own names as well (in Egyptian). So they didn’t tend to mix them up. Unless maybe describing night vs. day. Dirty water vs. clean water. Black was kem and brown was demy. For added information yellow was khenet, green wahdj, red deshr and white hedj.
Erm... The Ancient greeks calling the sky bronze was cause tarnished bronze is a brilliant blue-green.
Exactly this dude in the video has no idea what he is saying not to mention the Athens military wore blue
If you guys actually watched the video you’d notice that he isn’t saying that the ancient Greeks didn’t see blue.
@@chonkyboi8020 yea but her gave the wrong reasons why
Just like the Statue of Liberty
@@Sinceyouvbeengone huh? What are you talking about?
"Language impacts your perception of everything."
The movie Arrival makes much more sense now.
Love that movie
THISSSS! This was the first thing I thought about after watching this, amazing film.
This is something I tell people about. It's true language can alter and shape your perception of reality. But ultimately there's never going to be a language that actually breaks down space-time.
promontorium you sure about that?
The movie/book exaggerated it for storytelling purposes. It's essentially set in a universe where the "Strong" Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is true. Linguists in real life commonly accepted that a "Weak" version of the hypothesis is true. So, thankfully, in real life, Newspeak probably wouldn't hurt your thinking ability that much.
1:53 “Blue is the final color“ Purple and Orange: 😔
Magenta entered the chat
Purple doesnt exist though Violet does
Grey and Brown: *hello*
@@zn316 Yet there's a word for it
i’m sure it’s bc they’re not primary colors
This is my first Asap video. Amazing!
greek: "looks up the sky"
the sky: [REDACTED]
Scp foundation?
Inquisitorial red tape?
Im greek, can confirm
or [data expunged] and █████████
Error: 404 not found
People in 2000 years: Why The Ancient Earthlings Couldn't See Ultraviolet
Yes they could see it, they could even manufacture lamps of that color of light, but they called it black light even though everybody was perfectly aware that such a black had nothing to do with the colour of the starry night.
People in 20000 years, Why Ancient Earthlings couldn't see colours in 5 dimensions.
@@MrMirville You cannot actually observe true ultraviolet light. It isn’t possible for humans; although, we can observe the effects UV light can have on certain substances and the violet visible light usually emitted along with the UV light (e.g. torches usually operate by emitting a small range of wavelengths so there can be overlaps between UV and the short wavelength visible light which is violet in colour hence both are present).
@@williamjones4164 yup. On the same token, I read a study some years back (2009 - 2011) about a birth "defect" that comes to women from their fathers side, somehow granting them true 3d vision, or the ability to see the whole color spectrum. It was estimated that the numbers of women with this defect, worldwide, measure in the low thousands. I wonder how things would look from those eyes.
@@williamjones4164 People with a condition called aphakia (a missing lens in the eye, most often caused by cataract surgery) can see ultraviolet to about 300 nm (the range for normal visible light is about 380 to 720 nm). The lens normally blocks it.
**learns to identify every hex RGB code**
*Mortals, I can see through your camouflage*
Until you learn you can no longer see magenta because it isn't real 😓
Unless you come across animals like mantis shrimp
@@lexecomplexe4083 magenta has a hex code
@@4n0ngaming Magenta isn't an actual color though. Its literally red and violet light alternating at a speed high enough that your brain interprets it as a new color. One that doesn't exist in the physical world. Magenta is quite literally an illusion
Better title: Why Greek had no mention of blue as a color
I'm Native American and in my Lakota Language we have always had blue, it is "Thó" and yellow is "Zi" so green is "Thózi"
Oh, that's so interesting!
So it's literally like when Reese from Malcolm "discovered" green? Interesting!
I paint my horse with duck manure
Hau hau tahansi
Thank you for sharing this! TIL!
There wasn’t a color chart in ancient times where people could just pick a color to describe what they saw. The reason why translations of ancient books do have colors and includes the color blue is because writers would convey ideas of color by drawing on the subject under consideration, or by comparing unfamiliar objects with well-known things and those “ideas” are easily translated into what we know as color today. For example: A writer could have written Her eyes were as bright as the ocean. Could be translated to She had bright blue eyes. Just an example. They may not have had names for colors but they had ways to describe it.
I think for people that are bilingual this is obvious. Most times you realize that things cant be translated exactly so you would translate to what is similar or easy to understand because a direct translation wont always make sense make sense.
@@kingwaa2989 That makes sense makes sense.
Ily
@@kingwaa2989 kinda of but I think such a beautiful color would be known.... Other then the sky or ocean what else in nature is blue? Some birds some marine life but thats all I can think of.
@@Lar_ry To add to the list - flowers. minerals, eyes, butterflies, snakes...
Fun fact: The modern Chinese character meaning blue (蓝) refered to the indigo plant in Ancient Chinese. Blue was refered to as "青", along with green, teal and, in some cases, even black.
yea, when i was reading old poem from chinese, they will describe "blue sky'' as "green sky" and “blue ocean" as "green ocean"
Cool thing about blue and Sinitic languages: this character (藍/蓝) had the meaning of "blue" much earlier than some other cultures, one of the most famous appearences being in "青出於藍/青出于蓝", meaning "the student has surpassed his or her teacher", and first appearing in Xunzi, a text from the Warring Dynasties period. As a comparison, the Greeks only decided to loan the French word "bleu" for their word for blue, "μπλε", if my memory has not failed me.
@@novdelta381 I believe the 蓝 in your example refers to the indigo plant. The phrase by itself means "blue is obtained from the indigo plant (but is bluer than the plant itself)". Although I have no idea when Chinese started to refer to the color as 蓝
Well, I was referring to the phrase itself when I was talking about the Warring States peroid, and the phrase literally means "cyan comes out of blue". I am aware of earlier uses of 藍, like in the Shang Dynasty Oracle Bone inscriptions iirc. So they used the character 藍 for at least 1500 ish, possibly fewer, years without the meaning of blue
@@garfieldh.8820 《说文》 “蓝，染青草也” means: blue, the grass that can dye the color blue. The character has the radical “艹”, which stands for grass. The word blue came directly from the grass which leaves can be used to dye the color blue.
AT the time of XunZi. (313B. C. -238B. C. ), “青出于蓝而胜于蓝”, 蓝 is still the name of the grass, and the color blue is named after 青.
But from Wei Jin and Southern Northern dynasty, (220-420) there are already documents using the word 蓝 directly to refer the color. But it didn’t make into the dictionaries. Means people already use this word to refer the color blue at the daily use but was still not recognized officially. 梁·江淹《杂体诗序》：“譬犹蓝朱成彩，杂错之变无穷。”
From Tang Dynasty（618-907）, 蓝 was commonly used to refer as the color, 杜甫《冬到金华山观》诗：“上有蔚蓝天，垂光抱琼台。” 蓝 means exactly as the blue we are talking about today.
This is interesting. As a Tanzanian, Swahili is my native language and we still don’t have a swahili word for the color Blue.
One Minute In: "We figured maybe all Greeks were colorblind, but that's silly.
Me: Have we considered the theory that *Homer* was colorblind?
Homer was actually blind 😑
Homer is believed to be blind because if there's a bard, its always blind when he writes about it
Homer was a bard
Well in those times if you were blind being a bard was one of the very few jobs you could have. So it's not too uncommon to see blind bards
In one episode Homer makes a reference to Marge's blue hair, so no.
@@jackb4691 Best comment here today!
"Red is always first and Blue is always last."
Sarge: "You have my attention, soldier."
Based
Damn those dirty Wine-Darks.
Doughnut was right, there is a lightish red! xD
117 likes I can't mess that up
@@secularsekai8910 it's at 122 so a few people did 😂
In Indonesian, Pink is just a shade of Red, we called it "Merah Muda" or "Young Red"
my mother always called blue as green when i was a kid i thought it was weird, but now that i think about it my grandma did too. not so far generation behind me still called blue as green, and yes iam indonesia too.
I think the more appropriate translation would be "light red" from your initial description as a lighter shade of red.
Oh and btw, people where I live would still describe Pink as "merah jambu" instead, literally "Jambu Pink" , since the color of the fruit is actually pink to light red. (Nope, jambu is different from guava. look it up)
“Muda” giorno giovana theme intensifies
@Josh Ochoa
Wtf
True. I remember myself as a 6 month old, and I had no words for color, every shade of every color was unique. Top of the leaf would be one color and the bottom of the same leaf, a different one. Or the leaf would change color when it was lit differently. In fact, when outdoors, everything that moved was changing color all the time. Stationary objects changed color when the clouds moved.
Also, in Russian language, light blue and dark blue are two different colors.
They can see blue. They just didn't label/call what they see as "blue".
Due to language, their brains interpreted it as a shade of black.
He gives other examples of the connection of language to the brain's interpretation of colors: seeing pink as a distinct color rather than a shade of red or the Nimba people taking longer to see the blue dot but seeing the slightly different green dot faster.
It's more than just semantics. =)
@@thebasketballhistorian3291 They saw blue faster just took so much longer to find a way to describe it as green. lol
@@thebasketballhistorian3291 they still saw blue, it just had a different label/categorization/association
@@thebasketballhistorian3291 One tribe with a language barrier doesn't prove that hypothesis.
/video
we can all go home now.
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This is every beginner fanfic writer trying to describe blue eyes without using the word blue
(Blackadder): "So what you're saying is, is that something you've never seen is slightly bluer than something else you've never seen."
Ah yes the desperate attempt by young adult novelists (a term I’m using loosely here) to stand out more
...her eyes were a deep shade, a dazzling hue comparable to cloudless sky or the Adriatic Sea...
Ancient Greek People: *look at the sky*
The Sky: *PNG Checkerboard*
That was funny
That was funny
That was funny
That was funny
That was funny
This is also the case with the color amber in German.
This is described in German as either yellow or orange.
Only a few Germans can distinguish amber from yellow or orange.