Why The Ancient Greeks Couldn't See Blue
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- Опубликовано: 16 май 2024
- This BLUE my mind, I just had to share.
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Written by Mitchell Moffit
Editing by Luka Šarlija and Mitchell Moffit
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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
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.
“Blue is one of the hardest colors to create!“
*Purple: Allow me to introduce myself.*
A bit of trivia. In the renaissance blue was made from powering semi-precious gemstones. So artists would negotiate with their customers how much blue he customer wanted to pay for in the painting (most Madonnas were painted in blue head-dresses if memory serves)
this comment sucks
@@man11352 …Ok?
@@man11352 I request that you to provide a list of your reasons on why you think this comment sucks, along with any sources for any non-opinionated/objective information you may have.
@@12bfree4ever4 you got that mixed up, buddy.
Blue appeared in ancient text many times, but I'm afraid not in your research. You mentioned ancient Indian text- the word for Blue in Sanskrit is "Neel". Neel is also the word for sky in Sanskrit (many sanskrit words for color are based on object - like orange) It is mentioned multiple times to describe the color of peacock, sky and even Hindu God Vishnu (he had the blue tint). Lord Shiva drank the poison and hence his throat turned into Blue - hence his name "Neelakanth". Mountains afar are described as blue and blue is everywhere.
This comment is stupid but I can't be bothered
@mokeballs6676 stupid because you couldn't bothered to use your brain cells to understand the comment?
Same as the oldest theravada texts describe 6 coloured rays that was emited by The sacred Lord Buddha at the 4th week after lord attained the enlightenment when the lord buddha meditated on the Abhidamma. There the text originally mentioned one colour as "Neela" in Pali language. It means blue. Which is used as one colour in international buddhist flag.
@@mokeballs6676you were bothered though.
According to Wikipedia, lapis lazuli has been mined in Afghanistan since the 7th Millennium BC: Humans seeing and even seeking out blue is older than civilization itself (Wikipedia further notes that lapis lazuli is also present among artifacts found at Bhirrana, the oldest Indus Valley civilization so far discovered.) It further notes that the Latin word "lazuli" ultimately derives from a Persian word that means (wait for it...) "sky." The worst part is that the video explicitly acknowledges that some people (somehow) thought ancient peoples literally SAW differently than we do solely to immediately dismiss that claim, and yet, the title remains "Why the Ancient Greeks Couldn't See Blue." That's never passed the smell test because it never could. Your regular reminder that "typing words into a search engine isn't actually RESEARCH, it's just a way to (possibly) FIND (some) actual research others conducted. ruclips.net/video/omPGq_cu58Y/видео.html
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
this video blue my mind
Lol, nice one.
Why does this guy had 6 million subscribers but 2 replys
BRUH I'VE BEEN A FAN SINCE 2016
Get ur ticket 🎫 here before this comment “BLUE” up
@@thefuturegamer5159 because the joke was already in the description, he just stole it
The ancient Greeks never used the word 'blue' because they only spoke Greek
smh
This comment failed to blue up
Never used the word orange either, now you mention it.
As people mentioned below, you will find many references to the color blue (κυάνεος or κυάνος) in Homer's works. Since κυάνος is used to describe steel (σίδηρος) and clouds (νεφέλη νέφος Π 66 Δ 282), it is often translated as "dark blue." However, the rare term "κυανῶπις" (μ 60) can be translated as "blue-eyed."
Yep.
Exactly. Besides, Homer was blind.
@@TurrisBabylonius Good point. Besides being blind, Homer believed that a goddess was whispering words of wisdom and information about the world and history into his ears. For instance, the goddess informed him that maggots come from the eggs of flies. More than two thousand years later, Francesco Redi repeated the experiment suggested by the goddess and ascertained that she was right. Francesco Redi was an honest scientist and gave priority to Homer. He should have given it to the goddess who whispered the poems.
@@ed500ac 😁 Ancient Greeks knew more about sciences than medieval Europeans. Fellow classicist here.
@@TurrisBabylonius omg, nope
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??”
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
The details and decoration on early archaic Greek statues were painted with azurite which gives that brilliant blue colour, traces of which survive.
I can vouch for the idea of being trained to see different 'colours'. When I worked in a laboratory which made colouring for the food and cosmetic industry, I had to learn minute, subtle differences in shades of similar colours. Initially, I couldn't 'see' them, and thought I would never be able to match them. But, after a few months I did begin to notice the very small differences, and this ability grew with time and experience. One day, out of curiosity, I went back to the two samples I had been shown on my first day of work. I was astonished with the differences I now perceived, and couldn't believe that I didn't recognise them when starting out.
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.
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 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 would go along with this video, if only the narrator told us he had visited ancient Greece.
Most investigations into past events don't involve time travel.
@@elvancor "most"!
@@stevevernon1978 yeh pertty mush! LOL
"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
@@ramuneisyummy-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...
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.
@@nikkiespinosa8854 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 :
This is really fascinating! Thanks
"To venture out upon the wine dark sea." There was some speculation that Homer may have been using the color of deep red wine in a terra cotta cup to describe the color of the sea at a certain time of day. As in early dawn when the Sun is at a low angle and the tide is right for sailing or starting a journey. Translation of ancient languages into the modern is an art, not a science. It must take into account both the literal as well as the "felt" meaning (i.e., the emotional content) which the ancient author's phrase actually carried. And to get that right is no mean feat.
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.
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 😂
What an interesting channel, thank you!!
Fascinating! I really enjoyed this video.
It's unfortunately not really true though. Tired rn but I will provide sources soon
“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.
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.
I speak both Spanish and English, and this is something I totally notice. To me saying the sky is "blue" just sounds weird, because in Spanish we have a different word for that color "celeste" (at least in Argentina). And I notice how English speaking people don't distinguish it so much. Sure everyone can notice the different shades of blue, but to me it's just a different color, just like the red/pink example
Sky Blue is the name of the color in English...
@@FuckRUclipsAndGoogle oh interesting! I didn't know it was used like that to distinguish it
@ar2arr I'm sure it's at least somewhat true of other languages too, but there are a ton of names for colors in English. Most of which just aren't used much in day to day life, and a lot of them are just putting light or dark in front of a color, like Light Blue or Dark Blue. There some more specifics as well, Sky Blue and Baby Blue are both shades of Light Blue, so for either of those you could call them Blue, Light Blue or Sky/Baby Blue and be correct, even though only 1/3 of those names actually distinguish those 2 colors from each other.
@@ar2arr like azzurro in Italian...
@@ar2arrI feel the same many rip off sites and google and RUclips just want to advertise and continue the grift
Fascinating insights! This video really made me rethink how language shapes our perception of colors. Great job!
In fact, language has very little influence on the way a human being perceives the world. See John McWhorter's The Language Hoax, or, Why the World Looks the Same in Every Language.
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!
"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
That's so coooooooolllll thank you for starting my day so interesting!
Awesome video! I loved this! Content was awesome, perfectly articulated, great video editing. Loved every minute and shared it with friends.
but this video is totally inaccurate, and false
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
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)
In Turkish language, we have pretty much the opposite happening. We have two distinct words for lighter shades of blue and darker shades of blue ("mavi" for lighter and "lacivert" for darker) and no word to define the whole shades of blue. I think due to this distinction, two shades of blue are almost considered as different hues.
@@eyb0ssss Gök means sky. And çakır is name of another color, not blue.
Holy crap, is that Mitch Moffit from BBCAN4?! I loved this video and I’ve subscribed faster than any other channel!
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
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 blue my mind. Thank you!
This video just lives in the back of my brain now. Thank you.
On Wednesdays we wear a light form of red.
Outstanding.
I see what you did there 👌🏼
noice mean girls
sneaky reference, comrade
Love this
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
Fascinating stuff. In the 4 Bantu languages, I know there's no word for Blue. Even tho southern Africa has some of Bluest skies in the world & for most days of the year. Indeed, it's one of the first things European visitors & tourists comment about: "Oh, how Blue your sky is!" Something which we take for granted here. In these languages, Blue is seen as a version/type of Green & is called "the Green of the Sky". Now you have taught me this is not that unusual after all. Thanks a lot.
I grew up with black and white TV. A TV with colors we had the first time in the end of the 70th. They existed prior to that but were very expensive.
Having said this we actually had no problem with movies that only showed us white, black and all variations of grey in between. Somehow in a subconcious way we "gueesed" whether this kind of gray was really green, blue, yellow or red. Of course we knew that gras was green. So we "saw" it in movies that offered landscapes although what we really saw was a shade of grey. Etc.
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).
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.
Fascinating. More please! 👍😄
Have you ever experienced a particular type of Deja Vu where you seem to notice something more after hearing about it?
Consider the example of seeing a fleet of cars in a parking lot. Your mind processes them as mere vehicles, without any particular significance. Yet, upon visiting a car dealership and learning about a specific brand, even if you believe it to be a rarity in your area, you begin to perceive it almost everywhere.
In fact, it becomes a commonplace feature of your daily life. This phenomenon is truly fascinating, and it raises questions about how our minds perceive the world around us.
This might in fact, be the reason for *all* of this.
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.
"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).
I think the best example for English speakers to understand the thing with recognising pink vs red is Italy does the same thing with blues, if you describe the sea as blue to an Italian they’ll scold you cos they make a strong distinction between what we’d think of as a navy or royal blue and azure, where we’d probably see that colour range as all just blues they separate azure out like we do with pink😊
Wow I'm so glad I clicked on this video and watched it!
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 ._.
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.
As the video points out, this was true across all ancient civilizations. Many other colors were also combined. For example, in ancient color yellow and brown were the same color. That’s why the Yellow River (in China) is named so despite being entirely brown.
Fun fact - in Chinese pink is called “powdery red,” since pink is truly a hue of red.
This has always been one of my favorite topics. Human perception changes every aspect of our lives and is why we all see the world in wildly different ways, yet we share and shape our perspectives through collective learning. So fascinating.
cool beans .....but apparently this video and many others got debunked a while back ...
@@life09m Egyptians discovered the color blue around 2400ish BCE around the 4 dynasty of the old kingdom before that there was no reference to the color blue. Sure, humans could see Red Blue Green (RGB) but prior to that there was no color that resonated at that frequency within the color spectrum.
Yeah, I mean some people saw the color before, but we're talking prehistory, before writing. I'm not sure what you mean by "debunked" This is taught at the university level. Infact, there are tribes in Africa to this day that do not have a word for the color blue and cannot see variations of the color blue as we see them. These same tribes have hundreds of words for the color green and can see shades of green that we cannot.
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!!!!" ♡♡
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)
In Chinese (Mandarin), there exists a color called 青色 (Qīng sé). Traditionally this color has been used to refer to both green and blue. For example the sky is qing but so is the green Lake. Jade (a naturally green stone) is also said to be of this colour. While in modern times it refers to mostly a bluish-green/sea-green shade, in ancient times it referred to green, blue, and everything in between. This also happens to be my favorite color in the world
*@yang_er* So then you are using a variant of turquoise, .i.e. the greenish variant of it. If you do more research you might find even more answers, but, as i think, one of the problems with ideograms, is that they have a limited ability to represent things like "abstract meanings" etc.
@@PlanetIscandar Surely the word 'turquoise' conveys zero abstract meaning. My understanding is that Chinese ideograms are loaded with much symbolic meaning that is lacking in English words.
Exactly the same for Japanese. The Kanji are the same, but the perception of this green-blue seems to have predated the introduction of chinese ideograms around the 7th century !
Interning in Northern Ndebele (Zimbabwe) we have the same word for green and blue but you need a qualifier to be specific which version of the word you mean.
In English, the color "turquoise" is the color of a stone that ranges from sky blue to sea green.
Very interesting. Fun explanation. Thanks
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
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
Thank you, i heard an interview with one of the first people to have this theory many years ago and I still think about it frequently. You helped explain it very well.
A more likely possibility is that they could see it, but regarded it as one of the shades of green rather than as a colour in its own right, so they did not bother giving it a separate name. Even among modern English-speakers, the actual boundary between green and blue is debatable. We talk about deep "blue sea", but "Yellow Submarine" says "seas of green".
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
"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.
@@thebad6246 - 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?
Very interesting! Thank you!
And, I've never seen blue water - ocean, lake, stream, etc. But...if I drew a picture that had (what we now call) water as a feature...I'd color it blue. NOT if it was in a glass as if to drink...THAT water would be indicated by wavy lines.
The ancient Romans famously had a famous team of chariot racers called the Blues who wore the color blue. Too bad the ancient Greeks never had any contact with ancient Rome , aside from trade , wars and shared culture or they might have known about the color blue .
lol
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 😂
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
It's like sitting in diner with people talking everywhere around you. If someone says your name, even if it has nothing to do with you, you will hear it immediately.
Thank you for this fascinating analysis. I picked this up in Plato, who srote in the C4thBCE. He describes the colour of our planet's oceans as seen from space with a word conventionally translated as "purple" - a colour dye which had been around since the C6th BCE.
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
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 was fascinating. I've never considered this kind of link between language and neurology.
This is really interesting
*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
"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.
Learning a new language and culture of my wife we are always arguing on the shade of a color. This was the first thing I assumed when watching the video. Great explanation
Fascinating!!! 👏☺️
**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
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.
Ancient Greeks: there is no blue
Current Greeks; Blue is the only color we have
Regarding the Photoshop example, any color on the darker spectrum leads to black, not just blue.
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?
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
Pleeeeeease start posting the sources too!
One translation of the color name "pink" into German language is "Rosa". But since around 1980 "pink" is also used in German as a name for a color that is distinguished from "Rosa". For me (and most Germans, I assume) there is now a very clear difference between the two colors - a difference that native English speakers may not see (but of course they may have a lot more color names than in German language - German language has not that many color names).
In Portuguese pink is a kind of rosa. We call it "rosa pink". There are other types of rosa. Chá (tea), coral, salmão (salmon), magenta, pera (pear), etc.
But rosas, flowers, can be yellow, white, blue and red...
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.
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
So, I was today years old that learned something mind boggling!
And there are probably thousands of colors added since this video 😃
People saw blue in antiquity.
The Egyptians called it irtyu or khesbedj (𓐍𓋴𓃀𓆓𓈒).
The ancient Hebrews called it Tekhelet.
The ancient Romans called it caerŭlus.
The sky appears blue in some Pompeii mosaics.
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.
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 🤙
Strangeley, this makes total sense
I'm interested in the history of some of the other colors, like puce, taupe, mauve, and teal.
Pov: you are greek and don't understand why he is talking about semilight black
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.
He left out the Inuit for example who have 40 to 50 words for snow. The confounding variable is the sky can be many types of blue as can the ocean. So why would they use a single word for a multiplicity in their existence attentional tunnelling of description according to relevance of their life. So quite straightforward answer.
In Spanish we have a word for light blue(Celeste) which is to Blue what Pink is to Red.