Why Did Most Ancient Languages ​​Have No Word for Blue?

The topic we are going to talk about is that topic that causes controversy on the internet. she doesn’t mention the famous dress Or at least not completely.

Now, slowly Let’s move on to our topic.

In 1858, a scholar named William Gladstone noticed that the color descriptions in “The Odyssey” were strange.

For example, Homer, He described the sea as “wine black”. So why not deep blue or green?

When he examined other ancient Greek texts, he couldn’t find anything described as “blue.” Even though it seems specific only to the Greeks Philologist Lazarus Geiger discovered that this condition is common across cultures.

The last color to appear in every language was blue.

in the ancient world The only culture that identified the color blue was the Egyptians and they were also the only culture that could produce blue dye.

Blue is not seen very often in nature. There are almost no blue animals, blue eyes are rare and blue flowers are usually man-made.

Except for the sky, is it really blue? As we see from Geiger’s work, Even the sacred texts that constantly think about the sky does not describe it as blue.

Can color be seen without words?

Ancient Greeks and others People in the ancient world had the same biology as us and they had the ability to see the same colors.

But if you don’t have a word for something, can you really see it? named Jules Davidoff The researcher conducted an experiment with the Himba tribe in Namibia. There is no distinction between blue and green in this tribe.

In the experiment, when people were shown 11 green squares and one blue square, they could not distinguish which square was different. But among the green squares When there were subtle tonal differences, they were able to notice them immediately.

Davidoff; When we don’t have a word for a color, Even though our eyes physically see the same things It’s much harder to define it as different, he says.

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