https://www.andreeadumez.com/the-fascination-with-blue-colors-and-why-people-love-blue/
I’ve always wondered why so many of our fellow Earth dwelling humans would go for blue as a favorite color, but I have a theory. At least I used to, until I read another article, but I’ll come back to that article shortly.
Here’s my theory:
My hypothesis starts from that big thing above us, called sky. It is, by far, the most prevalent natural occurrence anywhere you would turn your head around. Unless you live underground like a mole and never popped your head above the surface, the sky will always be half of the big panoramic view in which you navigate every day (the other half is the earth beneath your feet, with all its happenings).
So, if the sky is blue (well, most of the time, depending on the weather), and you catch a glimpse of it above your head on a daily basis, that’s a damn good reason to like blue. (Familiarity leads to preference). And I’m not just talking about nowadays. This blue sky has been going on for… as long as Earth has been around, like, um, 4.5 billion years I guess. So I’m assuming humanity has learned to associate the sky with blue and freedom and supernatural and transcendent since ancient times.
Can you see blue if you don’t have a word for it, though?
Yeah, like I said, I’m assuming we associate blue with sky and freedom and I’m assuming that’s what people have been doing for millennia. But here comes a story that will turn my theory and your expectations upside down. This really cool Radiolab episode talks about several studies on how ancient people saw the colors around them.
Long story short, ancient languages did not have a word for “blue”. Not Greek (Homer describes the “wine-dark sea” in Odyssey), not Chinese, not Hindu (Vedic hymns talk incessantly about the skies, but no mention of blue…), not Hebrew, not Japanese, and so on. Everywhere you would look, the ancient texts described purple, red, black… but not blue. Except… the Egyptians, because they actually had developed a method for producing a blue pigment, through some really cool chemical reactions involving the most ubiquitous material they could get: the sand (more on this in my next post about blue). So the Egyptians did have a word for blue.
The verdict is still out there.
Yet…, if there was no word for blue in most languages, how could people know it was blue? There’s a lot of controversy around this story, including some unverified studies of a tribe in Africa that allegedly has a hard time seeing blue because they don’t have a word for it.
Of course, the fact that there was no word for blue in ancient languages doesn’t mean that people couldn’t actually perceive blue. Right? At least according to this post, the linguistic relativism is irrelevant. Ancient people might have seen the blue color, but still did not have a word for it.
In any case, my theory that people like blue so much because they’ve been naming the big thing above them as “blue” sky for millennia… still remains open for debate.
—” (Homer describes the “wine-dark sea” in Odyssey)”
Just recently read the Emily Wilson translation; highly recommended for readers everywhere.
That was in the footnotes.
“Linguists argue that ancient Greeks perceived blue in a similar way. Greeks certainly could see the color blue, but they didn’t consider it separate from other shades, like green, complicating how exactly they perceived the hue.”