The colour blue

[caiusbeerquitius]

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology...wP#image=5
might be interesting for all those color discussions...

[Frank Anthony]

This is so stupid my brain hurts. Enough internet for today.

[Robert Vermaat]

I read this but I somehow don't accept the argument. Why would very (very!) expensive blue dies have been used when nobody could see the colour? Should we not explain the 'absence' of certain colours in the old sources explain with a failure to translate the proper words for them?

[Vindex]

Interesting.

I was shot down in flames for saying blue was an expensive dye on this board.

Why would anyone bother if it could not be seen at all, or is someone merely jumping on the back of the gold/white and whatever it was supposed to be dress which went viral on the internet?

[Giannis K. Hoplite]

Not only there was an ancient greek word for blue:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text...kua%2Fneos

But there were words for different shades of it, and how to produce them:
λαμπρῷ δὲ λευκὸν συνελθὸν καὶ εἰς μέλαν κατακορὲς ἐμπεσὸν κυανοῦν χρῶμα ἀποτελεῖται, κυανοῦ δὲ λευκῷ κεραννυμένου γλαυκόν, πυρροῦ δὲ μέλανι πράσιον. (Plato, Timaeus 68)

Khairete
Giannis

[Michael Kerr]

Ancient Chinese mythology and astrology had different colours representing constellations, mythical creatures, directions and seasons. They had the "Azure Dragon" representing the east and Spring. In China the colour yellow represented the centre or the emperor with black representing North, Red for South, White for west and Azure or blue for East. Azure is a shade of blue so maybe the author cant find the word blue but the colour is represented. How did the ancients describe the colour of the ocean on a bright sunny day? Off topic but isn't the national colour of Italian sporting teams Azura. Looks pretty blue to me.

Regards
Michael Kerr

[Crispianus]

Theres a simple answer "colour blindness" many people are though blue seems to be rarer, but I think this article is just trying to create sensationalism for the hits.....

[Walhaz]

Great. Now I'm just waiting for one of my acquaintances who knows of my interest in history to "blow my mind" with his amazing knowledge that ancient people had no word for blue and probably couldn't even see it. Question for other forum members: do you correct people who feed you incorrect factoids, or do you just sigh and move along?

[Ariovistus]

Babylonians apparently saw blue...

Although this is a very interesting concept, I have to join the argument on the side of the skeptics. This seems to be one of the "is your red the same as my red?" argument, which leads to hours upon hours of mindless contemplation until you realize that this is just a result of the innumerable flaws with human language.

Thank you so much for posting! It sent my mind through a loop for a bit!!

[Nathan Ross]

This is Homer and his wine-dark sheep again...

Arguing that Homeric Greeks and other ancients had a slightly different (or just poetic?) way of expressing colour in language is fine, I'd say. That probably doesn't mean they couldn't 'see' the colours as we do though.

Of course the Romans could see blue - they had a chariot racing team called the 'blues'...

However, it's not quite that simple, maybe - the 'blue' team was actually venetus, usually translated as a sea-green or blue-green shade (it's the same colour as Vegetius gives to the British ships and sailors).

And the 'green' team was actually prasinus, a 'leek green', or perhaps even a blueish-green. So were the teams just different shades of greenish/blueish in fact?...

But that's just the words - the famous mosaic of the charioteers in the Museo Nazionale in Rome shows men wearing a very distinct bright blue and bright green!

[M. Val. Naso]

If the writer of the article would have listened to the podcast fully, he would've known, that it is not about not seeing it, but not having a word for it. We can trace it back, that simply in different civilizations they may have seen certain colors as shades of others.

Also the interviewee did a test on his daughter, until she went to school, the family didn't make her learn the word blue. The daycare teachers were told not to teach her the color. After years, before going to school, her father asked what color the sky is? She was struggling with it, and she said greenish in the end. She didn't have a word for it, though she knew that it differed from green by a few shades.

[aeschild]

Its like saying that Romans only said no, because there was no Latin word for "yes" they just found other ways to say it.

[Renatus]

Arguing that Homeric Greeks and other ancients had a slightly different (or just poetic?) way of expressing colour in language is fine, I'd say. That probably doesn't mean they couldn't 'see' the colours as we do though.

The Homeric phrase that I like best is his description of daybreak, 'dawn, the rosy-fingered'.

[Luca]

This is one of the "little" research we did in Cisalpina in the past years.
I found somenthing curious about the blue color while researching about the use of the "black" in roman culture, so we wrote an article (our internal bulletin april 2013 issue) about the blue and the black in roman times.

It seems that in roman times the word "blue" was indicating the "Caeruleum" or light blue or royal blue as stated for the italian official sport colour that belongs to the Savoia royal family tradition), while the dark blue as we intend today was well known in roman times as "indacus", but somehow considered more barbaric or not fashion because of it's darkness. Many authors (i.e. Michel Pastoureau) report about around 1100 AD the period since when dark blue seems to grow as an "important" colour mostly of its religious symbolism.

This is why we consider dark blue an error in roman reenacting and we don't use it.

[Frank Anthony]

I just wanted to apologize fir my rude reply earlier. It was out of character and not constructive to the topic.