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comment by davidbriggs
davidbriggs  ·  3308 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: If We Have No Word for a Colour, Can We See It? Researchers Say No.  ·  

Thanks for thinking of me! I've just finished writing out a few thoughts which I'll repost here: "Most people would probably read Kevin Loria's provocative title as claiming that human colour vision changed in modern times to enable the perception of blue for the first time, which would be quite mad (our blue - yellow opponent signal is as old as colour vision itself!). But up until he starts talking about the Himba claims (see previous post), Loria is only saying that most ancient languages didn't have a term for "blue", which is partly right. Ancient Greek does have a term for dark blue - "kuanos" or "kyanos", and classical Latin adopted "cyaneus" from Greek and added other blues including "caeruleus" (sky blue) and "lividus" (bruise-coloured or "black and blue"). But like many ancient and medieval colour terms, these words refer to a combination of hue, lightness and/or colour-strength properties rather than hue alone. So it's true that Greek and Latin don't have a general term covering all blues, just as we don't have a general English name covering all colours of an orange hue. Looking at my polished pine desk I see it as orange in hue because I am used to thinking in terms of the Munsell dimensions of hue, value and chroma, but most people would call it brown and would have to think for a while to decide what Munsell hue it is. I expect that, not being clear on the concept of hue, a Roman might similarly have had to think for a while to see that cyaneus, caeruleus and lividus had something in common, but that doesn't mean that he saw these colours differently in the usual sense of the word. "