The Color Blue
Most people today can describe the color blue (it happens to be my favorite) and have incorporated it into their daily expressions: a blue sky, the deep blue sea, blue jeans, etc. So it came as a surprise to me when I read that many ancient cultures had no separate word for blue (as evidenced in the works of Homer and others), and indeed some tribes today think of blue as just one of the many shades of green.
Now, we know the color blue exists as a scientific fact. It can be expressed mathematically as a distinct wavelength in the visible spectrum of light. So why, even though most other colors such as red, yellow, green, brown, black and white are mentioned in ancient Greek texts hundreds of times, is there not a single mention of blue in them as its own color? The answer, at best, is elusive and debatable. We know that it doesn’t come down to biology…even cats are capable of seeing colors, after all, and so humans have been for their entire existence. Apparently it’s a societal phenomenon rather than a natural one.
From what we can tell today, most cultures did not develop words for all the colors at once…instead the words appear over thousands of years in a sort of sequence. Words for black and for white appear earliest, which makes sense as this is probably the most fundamental way of distinguishing two different objects (the darker one and the lighter one). Red receives its own word very early, which also makes sense since it is the color of blood, and recognizing blood can be the difference between life and death (or between eating and not eating, if you are a hunter tracking wounded game). Yellow and green tend to receive words next, followed by the more compound colors orange, brown and pink. The most recent words for colors tend to be violet, purple, and of course blue.
This leads to the question: What natural phenomena exist today that we don’t yet express in our language, but that future people will? It’s hard to know, but one thing in my reading I found interesting (because I didn’t know it) is that there is a physical difference between the colors violet and purple. I couldn’t tell you what that difference is, but I’m guessing in a few hundred years any average Joe could point it out as easily as I can distinguish blue from green today.
Here endeth the lesson on the color blue.
Bike Newbie 