The color blue appeared in human history relatively recently - at least in the form in which we know it now, it was not for a long time. The ancient languages lacked a word to describe the color blue - neither Greek, nor Chinese, nor Hebrew had a corresponding lexeme. And without a word for color, people might not see it at all.
How we realized that blue is not enough
As you know, in the "Odyssey" Homer describes "a sea of the color of dark wine." But why "the colors of dark wine" and not "dark blue" or "green"? In 1858, scientist William Gladstone, who later became Prime Minister of Great Britain, remarked that this was not the only strange description of color in the great Greek. Despite the fact that the poet in each song gives descriptions of complex details of clothing, armor, weapons, facial features, animals and much more, the colors he mentions seem strange: iron and sheep are purple, honey is green.
Gladstone decided to calculate how many times each color is mentioned in the book. Black occurs about 200 times, white - about 100, but other colors are rarely mentioned: red - less than 15 times, yellow and green - less than 10. Having studied other ancient Greek texts, Gladstone discovered the same pattern - they did not contain anything that was described would be like "blue". That word didn't even exist.
The Greeks seemed to live in a muddy, dirty world devoid of bright colors, mostly black, white and metallic colors with occasional flashes of red and yellow.
Gladstone suggested that this may have been unique to the Greeks. But the philologist Lazar Geiger continued his research and found out that this pattern can be traced in other cultures as well.
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He studied Icelandic sagas, the Koran, ancient Chinese stories, and the Hebrew text of the Bible. Analyzing Hindu Vedic chants, he notes: “These texts, which include more than ten thousand verses, are full of descriptions of heaven. Hardly any object is described more often. The sun and the play of color on the reddening edge of the sky during sunrise, clouds and lightning, air and ether - all this unfolds before us again and again. But in these ancient songs, nowhere is it mentioned that the sky is blue."
These peoples did not have blue - because it could not be distinguished from green or darker shades.
Geiger decided to find out when the word "blue" appeared in languages, and found a strange pattern. Each language originally had words for black and white, darkness and light. The next most common color designation in each language studied is the word "red", the color of blood and wine. After red, yellow traditionally appears, and later green (although in some languages yellow and green are interchanged). The last to come to all languages is blue.
The only ancient civilization that created the word for blue was the Egyptians - and it is quite natural that the only culture that produced blue dye was also the ancient Egyptian.
If you think about it, blue is not that common in nature: blue animals are almost non-existent, blue eyes are rare, and blue flowers are mostly the result of selection. Of course, there is a sky, but is it really blue? As we learned from Geiger's work, even in sacred texts in which the sky is constantly mentioned, it is still not necessarily "blue".
Is the sky really blue
Researcher Guy Deutscher, author of Through the Mirror of Language: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, conducted a social experiment. In theory, one of the very first children's questions around the world is "Why is the sky blue?" The scientist raised his daughter, trying never to focus on the color of the sky, and then one day asked her what color she sees when she looks up.
Alma, the researcher's daughter, did not know the answer. For her, the sky was colorless. At first she decided that the sky was white, and then ultimately that it was blue. That is, the blue color was not the first that she saw, and it was not the answer to which she intuitively inclined, although it was on it that she eventually stopped her choice.
It turns out that before this word appeared, people did not see blue?
With this assumption, everything is a little more complicated, because we cannot say for sure what Homer was thinking when he described the sea the color of "dark wine" and the purple sheep - but we know for sure that the ancient Greeks and in general all ancient civilizations had the same structure eyes and brain, and therefore the same ability to distinguish colors as we do.
But can you see something that you don't have the right word to describe?
In search of an answer to this question, researcher Jules Davidoff went to Namibia to visit the Himba tribe. This tribe speaks a language that does not have a special designation for blue, in which blue and green are "merged" at the lexical level.
As part of the experiment, tribe members were shown a circle where 11 squares were green and 1 was blue. Most of the participants could not choose one that was different from the others. Those who did notice the difference spent much more time and made more attempts than even a visually impaired person from a developed country would need.
On the other hand, the Himba tribe had more words to define shades of green than English. By looking at a circle of green squares, one of which is slightly different in shade from the rest, they can instantly determine which square is different. And you?
Which square is different from the others?
For most of us, this is a difficult task.
Give up?
Here's a square that's different from the others:
Davidoff concluded that without a word to describe color, without identifying it as different, it is much more difficult for us to notice the difference between colors - even if our organs of vision have exactly the same physiological characteristics as the eyes of those who easily see this difference.
It turns out that before blue became a common concept, people could see it - but they didn't seem to know what they were seeing. If you see something but don't know about it, does it exist? A big question that should be redirected to representatives of the recently existing science of neurophilosophy.