For some primitive peoples, the entire color palette is limited to "light" and "dark", and Europeans have dozens of different words to describe the finest shades of the sky or greenery. Language affects the perception of the surrounding world, scientists say. Constrained by the framework of conceptual categories, the human brain simply “does not see” a lot.
Green honey and purple sheep
In 1858, the British statesman, writer and researcher of ancient literature William Gladstone drew attention to the strange color scheme in the ancient Greek poems Iliad and Odyssey: the sea is purple, the sky is copper, iron and sheep are purple, and honey is green. At the same time, Homer most often mentioned black (170 times) and white (100 times) colors. It turned out that the Greeks saw the world in black and white with small splashes of red, purple, yellow and green, and they could not distinguish blue at all.
German scientist Lazar Geiger has shown that the same color perception is characteristic of ancient Icelandic, Arabic, Chinese and Jewish literary works. Only in the ancient Egyptian texts there is a lot of blue, but the Egyptians are an exception, they knew how to make blue paint.
In ancient Russian chronicles, the epithet "blue" is mentioned, but it means black or crimson-red. For example, the phrase about “blue eyes” is interpreted by the Soviet literary critic Yuri Lotman as the bloodshot eyes of a drunkard.
Eye or Brain?
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Violation of color perception of red and green, sometimes yellow and blue is called color blindness. Its main reason is the absence of a special pigment in the retina. This mutation is quite rare. In Europe, two to eight percent of men and only half a percent of women suffer from color blindness. It is unlikely that it was otherwise in antiquity.
In addition, as a group of scientists from the University of Rochester in the United States has demonstrated, color perception depends not so much on cones - cells in the human eye that respond to waves of the electromagnetic spectrum of a certain length and transmit information to the brain, but on brain neurons that process signals received by the photoreceptor cones. …
Although people perceive colors in much the same way, the number of color-sensitive cones in their retinas can vary. The right photo is dominated by cones that are responsible for the perception of red. / Photo: University of Rochester.
The algorithm for this processing is not yet fully understood. According to some studies, signals from the cones are converted in the visual cortex, located in the back of the brain. There is evidence that color discrimination occurs in the lower temporal lobe, an area responsible for high-level visual activity, such as face recognition. For example, neuroscientist Bevil Conway from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) discovered in the temporal lobe of macaques, whose retina is similar to ours, small clusters of cells that can tune in to recognize shades and create a kind of color map.
No word - no concept. No concept - no color
Only people know how to combine colors in categories, and they do it in very different ways. For example, in the language of the Brazilian Karazha Indians, yellow, green and blue fall into the same category and are denoted by a common word. And in Russian, dark blue and light blue are different colors. No wonder there is the word "blue".
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University have established a connection between the name of a color in a language and the speed of its recognition. During the course of the study, Russian-speaking participants in the experiment were quicker to highlight shades of blue than native English speakers. But if, when performing a color test, the Russians were asked to remember an eight-digit number, the indicators fell to the level of the British. It turns out that colors are recognized in the parts of the brain responsible for language and speech decoding - they were turned off when asked to remember long numbers.
In the language of the Karazha Indians, yellow, green and blue are denoted by one word. / Wilfred Paulse.
Biological bases of language development
According to the hypothesis of anthropologist Brent Berlin and linguist Paul Kay, in any human language there are initially two categories of color - black and white. Gradually, the vocabulary of colors expands.
This is confirmed by the linguistic practice of small peoples living in primitive conditions. Thus, hunter-gatherers from the Indonesian Dani tribe use only two words: "light" and "dark". The inhabitants of the island of Nias (which is near Sumatra) have four color concepts: "black", "white", "red" and "yellow". Green, blue and purple are just shades of black for them. And the representatives of the Papuan Berinmo tribe and the African people Himba hardly distinguish between blue and green, since in their languages these colors are combined into one category.
However, after training, representatives of all these nationalities were able to distinguish colors that they had not previously known.
Alfiya Enikeeva