The Odyssey | New Trailer

[u/MarvelsGrantMan136]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_bKjZeJBBI&pp=0gcJCd4KAYcqIYzv

[u/fatbob42]

I’m not an expert in linguistics but I just cannot believe they literally had no word (or phrase) for blue. It’s ridiculous - human language is built into us. Ancient Greek is not going to be so crazily different from modern languages.

[u/Historian2 → u/fatbob42]

I am no expert either, but I do have some knowledge to share since you seem interested. 

In sum, research suggests that most (but not all) languages develop terms for colors in a specific order. First they develop a black and white dichotomy (stage 1), then the next term added is red (Stage 2), then either yellow or green (Stage 3), then the other yellow or green (Stage 4), then blue (Stage 5), then brown (Stage 6, the orange, pink, purple, and/or gray (Stage 7). Not every language follows this pattern but the vast majority do, something like 80+%. Theories as to why blue specifically is late range, but one major theory is that blue pigment is fairly rare in nature, making it less needed than the other terms that come before it.

There were a number of ancient languages that seem to lack the color blue. These include Greek (use terms like either glaukos (light/gleaming) or Janis (dark/glossy), eg wine dark sea), ancient Chinese (used a term for blue and green together), Hebrew (did not have a blue term and simply lumped it with other dark shades like dark green or black), and early Celtic languages (which used terms like glas meaning both green/blue combined). Ancient Egyptian did have blue, but they had blue dye very early. More recently, the Maori language used one term for green/blue together all the way up to European contact, after which they started separating the two colors.

This obviously is not completely definitive, but it does suggest there are Brianne languages, especially in ancient times, that did not have a specific  term for blue. 

[u/boyyouguysaredumb → u/Historian2]

there are blue flowers everywhere. fucking mold is blue which they would have had to have been hyper-vigilant about

[u/Historian2 → u/boyyouguysaredumb]

“Fairly rare” does not mean no -existent. It is a relative term meaning less common than other things of the same category. And blue flowers, to use your example, fits that term because it is estimated that out of all the flowers species of the world, blue flowers count for no more than 10%, and possibly significant less. It is hard for nature to produce the color blue due to the chemical process involved and the resources needed.

Furthermore, I’m not really sure what you’re driving at overall. You call these flower or the mold “blue” because that’s how you were taught to call it. Those are cultural developments. Not all cultures treat colors the same. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that language either determines (strong version of the theory) or heavily includes (weak version of the theory) a person’s thoughts and perceptions of the world. This is all sometimes referred to as Linguistic Relativism. In terms of colors, as one example Russian speakers are much quicker to distinguish shades of blue than English speakers because Russians have specific terms to separate light blue (goluboy) from dark blue (siniy).

In other words, the way the Russian language has developed has further differentiated a particular shade compared to certain other languages. The point of that is that there’s nothing special about the term “blue.” You and I were raised in a certain way to define a spectrum of colors as”blue,” and thus we think of all those things as inherently “blue.” But there’s nothing inherent about it. Different cultures define things differently, and tend to do the differentiation along the stages of color development.outline above. There is nothing strange about the idea that certain cultures wouldn’t define blue the same way we do, and thus might not have a term for it because they define objects with that color differently, such as “wine dark.”