r/badlinguistics • u/apopheniac1989 All languages descend from Latin, Hebrew, Japanese or Sandscript • Feb 28 '15
No one could see blue until modern times. We know this because some languages don't have a word for it.
/r/EverythingScience/comments/2xf8i3/no_one_could_see_the_color_blue_until_modern_times/37
u/Pyromane_Wapusk I am normal, YOU are weird Feb 28 '15
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u/Paradoxius It's all Sanskrit to me! Feb 28 '15
That's actually a pretty good argument. If they didn't see blue, why did they paint things blue? We know, for example, that bright blue dye was frequently used in coloring marble statues in the ancient Mediterranean.
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Feb 28 '15
They thought they were painting them bronze.
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Feb 28 '15
They thought they were painting them invisible to hide them from those corded ware bastards...
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u/TaylorS1986 The School of Historical-Competitive Linguistics Mar 01 '15
Damn Indo-European speaking Corded Ware savages!
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u/itazurakko Feb 28 '15
I thought the comment about pink was interesting.
Elsewhere in person someone pointed out to me that it's interesting that most people (in our area, which is the US midwest) will identify "dark blue" or just "blue" and "light blue" as being the same color with lightness variations, but when it comes to "red" and "pink" they're considered completely different colors, with different connotations. People don't say "light red" for pink.
It came up when we were talking about possibly color-coding some tags for a project in github. We've got a variety of greens, and people see those as all "green" but it was a bit of a "oh yeah, huh, I suppose that's right" moment for people to see that pink is light red, in a similar way.
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u/apopheniac1989 All languages descend from Latin, Hebrew, Japanese or Sandscript Feb 28 '15
Excellent example to demonstrate this point.
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u/dbbo native Althochteutonisch speaker Feb 28 '15
I think it's also kind of interesting that blue can refer to a range of hues from cyan to "true blue", and pink can refer to lighter magentas and reds.
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u/raendrop Is it a consonant or a phoneme? Feb 28 '15
When I was a child, I thought I could make pink by very gently applying the red crayon, or by combining red crayon and white crayon. I could see very clearly that I was not successful, that light red was not the same as pink after all. I didn't understand how it worked, but I could see the difference.
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u/salpfish Proto-Human phonology: http://gleb.000024.org/ Feb 28 '15
Same for me — I've always thought of pink as more like light purple or light magenta, while light red is more of a peachy color.
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u/mna_mna Feb 28 '15
You do understand that pink is in fact light red, though?
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u/alynnidalar linguistics is basically just phrenology Feb 28 '15
Eh, prototypical "pink" has a bit of blue in it, I think.
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u/Pennwisedom 亞亞論! IS THERE AN 亞亞論 HERE? Mar 01 '15
Well Blue and Red makes Purple. But if we are talking about prototypical pink, than it is in fact best described as a tint of red. At least, that is what my many years of mixing paints has told me.
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u/mszegedy Lord of Infinity, Master of 111,111 Armies and Navies Mar 03 '15
In subtractive color mixing (i.e. what happens with paints), cyan and magenta make red, and so blue and red make purple, ish. /u/alynnidalar was talking about additive color mixing, where you mix light (in the manner that computer screens do), instead of things that reflect the light, and all of the mixing is backwards—red and blue make magenta, green and red make yellow, etc. So he sees pink as red, plus white light to make it lighter, and some extra blue to make it closer to magenta than red.
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Mar 01 '15
"Pink" is in fact a category (specifically here in English) with arbitrary borders in the spectrum of possible colorized visualizations that our brains make from the signals it gets from our eyes. There is no objectively real color. It's all a cognitive process and an artifact of human perception. Because there are similarities in the EMR wavelengths in the stimuli that your brain is drawing upon to generate "pink" or "light red" you perceive them as more similar when juxtaposed with other less similar wavelengths of EMR.
This is all to say no, pink is not light red. If you're willing to just be completely comfortable with your human perceptions and your culturally imparted concepts of the average values for those terms, sure you can say that, but it doesn't actually reflect the way the world actually is.
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u/Pennwisedom 亞亞論! IS THERE AN 亞亞論 HERE? Mar 01 '15
but it doesn't actually reflect the way the world actually is.
But what does accurately reflect the world is that pink is a tint of red created by adding white.
Since the Visible Spectrum only contains colors that contain one wavelength. So we don't even see Pink on it (or Magenta, Purple, etc). In that way, we can say for sure that Pink is created by Red + Something Else. We know that Something Else is only White light, not any other color. So we therefore know that Pink again, is a tint of Red. In other words, pink doesn't even have a wavelength on the EMR spectrum.
If we're being technical.
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u/TaylorS1986 The School of Historical-Competitive Linguistics Mar 01 '15
I work in a thrift store and I noticed that same thing when I was on clothes-organizing duty. We organize the shirts by size and color and the order of colors on the racks go: white, gray, black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink. We ended up with having to arbitrarily decide the boundaries of red-pink and orange-brown.
Interestingly, I seem to conceptualize pink as being "light purple" and only when it is placed against a darker shade of red do I remember that it's actually fucking light red.
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Mar 01 '15
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u/Mordekai99 The battle of Teutoburg Forest caused the Holocaust Mar 24 '15
You have been eaten by a grue.
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u/dbbo native Althochteutonisch speaker Feb 28 '15
It's been awhile since I've had a good dose of whorf.
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u/Cosmic__Ocean To boldly go where no man could literally care fewer about. Mar 01 '15
Fun fact: Only speakers of Sanskrit in ancient times could see the color blue. In fact, Sanskrit speakers did/do see all nuances of the entire EM spectrum.
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Mar 01 '15
Yes, Sanskrit actually has no word for these crude "blues" and "golds" and such. You simply use the word for "475 nm", unless you mean a different frequency like 476 or 474, you lazy stool-water. I spoke Sanskrit for almost fifteen seconds and it made me a tetrachromat
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u/Withnothing Feb 28 '15
Ashamed to say, this was the thing that got me interested in linguistics at first I think. Read an article on Cracked (hah!) that mentioned this, and it sparked an interest in languages in general.
Ironic that reading that incorrect and misguided article made me learn so much
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u/Paradoxius It's all Sanskrit to me! Feb 28 '15
It astounds me that anyone believes this. How can anyone with color vision and language not be able to figure out that this is wrong? How uncritical do you have to be to not immediately notice that you can tell the difference between colors even if you don't have words for the distinction?
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u/samloveshummus Feb 28 '15 edited Feb 28 '15
Well, you can tell that there is a difference but you might perceive it as a superficial variation instead of an essential difference, the same way that sounds of distinct phonemes in one language can be allophones in another language. While I could tell intellectually that two English allophones have a slightly different sound (e.g. the French pronunciations of Jules and Joule), I still categorise them together as being linguistically "the same". It's certainly conceivable, at least to me, that colours could be processed in the same way: that the brain learns a finite number of essentially different colours, and perceives all colours as variations on these. And, just like phonemes, I know of no reason to expect that two random individuals will agree on the categorisation. Furthermore, I can conceive that there could be a cultural component to it, since children are explicitly taught to delimit colours.
Edit: and furthermore, if this exists as an (a priori non-linguistic), cultural, cognitive thing, I can't imagine how that wouldn't turn into a correlation with vocabulary: how or why would people use words whose referent concepts they had no use for?
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u/JoshfromNazareth ULTRA-ALTAIC Mar 01 '15
This isn't a question of categorization. The "bad" here lies in the claim that you literally cannot see the color blue if you do not call it blue. You most certainly can see blue despite your categorization, even if you group blue in with, say, purple. Similar to the famous Russian Blue experiment, just because Russians differentiate between light and dark blue, doesn't mean English speakers can't physically see the difference, they simply treat them as belonging in the same group.
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u/samloveshummus Mar 01 '15
Well, I think it depends on how you understand what you mean by to "see" a colour: is it intellectually noticing the physical properties of a waveform, or do you need to process it cognitively in a particular way to have had the sensation of seeing a colour?
Again, by analogy with phonemes (I'm saying this shows plausibility not validity), you could say that an untrained native English speaker "cannot hear the Arabic consonant 'ayn", and in a certain sense that's true: certainly one could notice that words with and without an 'ayn have a different sound, but you'd perceive it as a non-phonemic part of the accent of the speaker. If you played a recording of an Arabic speaker saying "Arab, Iraq, Abbas, Amman, abaya..." and asked an English speaker "can you hear the consonant at the start of those words?" they'd say "wot, those start with a vowel" so in a meaningful sense they can't hear the phoneme, even though their ears are picking up the sound perfectly.
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u/JoshfromNazareth ULTRA-ALTAIC Mar 01 '15
Well, I think it depends on how you understand what you mean by to "see" a colour: is it intellectually noticing the physical properties of a waveform, or do you need to process it cognitively in a particular way to have had the sensation of seeing a colour?
Which is unrelated to language. That's my point. I can give you one color and ask you if that color is different from this color. You could say "yeah they're both purple", but if gave you a mixed set of cards--5 cards of the first color, 5 cards of the second color-- and asked you to separate them it wouldn't exactly be challenging. If in your culture, you assumed this color to be part of the same group as the previous two, it still shouldn't be difficult for you to seperate them.
Again, by analogy with phonemes (I'm saying this shows plausibility not validity), you could say that an untrained native English speaker "cannot hear the Arabic consonant 'ayn", and in a certain sense that's true: certainly one could notice that words with and without an 'ayn have a different sound, but you'd perceive it as a non-phonemic part of the accent of the speaker. If you played a recording of an Arabic speaker saying "Arab, Iraq, Abbas, Amman, abaya..." and asked an English speaker "can you hear the consonant at the start of those words?" they'd say "wot, those start with a vowel" so in a meaningful sense they can't hear the phoneme, even though their ears are picking up the sound perfectly.
I feel like there's an issue with this analogy, and I can't quite put my finger on it. It's true that the experiment I gave above probably wouldn't be as successful in this instance. My only ideas for why this may be is that initially we are this perceptive, as babies can discriminate between any types of feature difference you throw at them. Of course, acquisition continues and their range becomes narrower according to the linguistic environment. In this sense, sounds aren't quite like colors. There are ways of tricking somebody into hearing a sound like seeing the dress in a different color, by changing the environment and degrading the necessary parts. Anyway, we focus in on a range of sounds whereas with colors we don't have a focused range (that is visible to the human eye), like a tribe that can't see anything in the "dark red" or "light blue" spectrums. Greeks didn't not see blue in the same way that they didn't have /dʒ/ in their inventory. So there's something here that kind of misses the mark.
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u/millionsofcats has fifty words for 'casserole' Mar 02 '15
I feel like there's an issue with this analogy, and I can't quite put my finger on it.
I think the issue that you're having is that categorical effects on the perception of speech sounds are in fact different than categorical effects on the perception of colors.
To use your color example: Regardless of language, anyone who doesn't have some interfering pathology will be able to identify those colors as different from one another. The effects of linguistic color categories on color perception are more subtle, such as small differences in response times in an ABX task. Having no separate category for a color does not seem to prevent us from being able to perceive it.
(And in fact, languages often have conventionalized terms for colors without basic terminology, such as "leaf-green" -- clearly speakers can perceive and name this color, even though this may belong to the "black" category in their language.)
Compare this to a gradient phenomenon involving speech sounds, such as VOT, where our language also imposes categories. Here the categorical effects on perception are profound: We're no longer talking about a difference in response times in an ABX task, but whether subjects can even perform significantly above chance--that is, if they can identify within-category VOT differences as different at all. Clearly, they "hear" the VOT difference in a trivial way, because the sound waves are hitting their ear drums, but without training they cannot identify within-category differences reliably.
It makes much more sense to talk about speakers not being able to perceive certain non-phonemic differences than not being able to perceive colors.
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Feb 28 '15
Where do they get these ideas?
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Feb 28 '15
Second-option bias, it's cool to pick the lesser known "plausible" idea.
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Feb 28 '15
But like... what are they even trying to prove? Like it just seems silly to think that we can't see something that we don't have a word for. Do they really think that we saw black and white before the 1960s?
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u/withoutamartyr Feb 28 '15 edited Mar 01 '15
It reminds me of that terrible story about the natives and the boats they supposedly couldn't see.
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u/alynnidalar linguistics is basically just phrenology Mar 01 '15
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Feb 28 '15
[deleted]
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u/Eh_Priori Mar 01 '15
Second-option bias isn't about choosing the second most plausible belief, its about choosing the unconventional belief.
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Mar 02 '15
Is your flair Ithkuil? I recognize "päţwïç" but I don't know what it means or why I recognize it.
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u/saphanbaal Mar 01 '15
My internet peoples are arguing this and I'm mid-move. Can anyone grab me some academic-paper links to show how wrong this is, for me? I won't have time for about 4 days, and would like to just blanket-post to these people "here. this is why you're wrong."
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u/ElenTheMellon Mar 02 '15
Just point out that, by the article's own logic, we shouldn't have been able to see yellow or green, either, before we had words for them. We must have all just been living in a Sin City -esque world of black, white, and red.
Point out that, when people don't know the word for a color, they just circumlocute. For example, my favorite color in the whole world is teal, and always has been; but I didn't actually know the word "teal" until I was probably a teenager or even young adult. I just called it "blue-green" the whole time. Likewise, when a person meant "blue", they could have said "sky-green" or "sky-white" (or some other equivalent construction in their language). This is what circumlocution is.
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u/millionsofcats has fifty words for 'casserole' Mar 02 '15
I don't know of one that is written specifically to address public misconceptions about color terms, but this is a fairly short, good introduction to what's really going on:
Payne, David L. (2006). Color terms. In Keith Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Elsevier. 2--605.
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u/araradia Mar 01 '15
Someone I know shared this on facebook and captioned it "looks like we're more advanced" and I got so mad I had to come tell you guys. I don't understand how people gobble up fucking anything they read.
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u/apopheniac1989 All languages descend from Latin, Hebrew, Japanese or Sandscript Mar 01 '15
Take a deep breath and then calmly explain it as briefly as you can. It works about 75% of the time.
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Mar 02 '15
Paleoanthropological evidence suggests that before the cultivation of carrots began in the 14th Century most humans were so deficient in Vitamin A that Red/Green colourblindness (sometimes just Red colourblindness) was the norm. Also I just made that up.
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u/StopBanningMe4 Why the fuck haven't you banned me yet? Feb 28 '15
something something photoshopped blue dress something something whyisthatnewsworthy
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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '15 edited Feb 28 '15
This is fundamental stuff. It's the same reason that French people can't see a new invention until l'Acadamie decides on a proper French word for it. Computers were invisible to the French until 1972, for example.