D:
“My daughter once asked me if we had the color “Blue” when I was a kid.
I said, “Of course; why would you ask that?...snip””
You had it, but maybe the ancients did not! Tell her she’s a clever girl!
https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/color-blue-0010720
That article talks about the biological aspects. What’s also interesting is that Linguistically “Blue” applies to what we call “green” in many languages to start with and then over time the additional “green” is developed to differentiate it.
In Japan even now a lot of the older generations will still call “green” by the Japanese word for blue (ao or aoi). The word for green “midori” is only a fairly recent development in their lexicon that was sort of forced on them by their opening up to other cultures in the 1800s.
The practice of calling forests and fields ao or aoi still persists. For certain things I still catch my wife at it - can be confusing for me at times when she’s asking for something.
It’s been shown to be common across a number of languages... I’m not sure about the other colors though.
This is great stuff, Pete; but, I prefer a different explanation for the wine-dark sea and the rosy fingertips of dawn as reported by Homer.
I think the sky was a different color then. Hence the sea reflected a different color. And BTW the Earth also had rings (like Saturn) within human memory.
Things were different in the past. There was, in fact, a “Golden Age.”