Historical evidence reveals that humans possess the remarkable ability to render certain physical appearances invisible if they do not focus on them, including something as fundamental as a color. Specifically, the color blue. While our eyes can perceive among approximately one million colors, it remains unclear how differently each person experiences them.
That’s not what the article is saying though? It doesn’t say the Greeks thought the sea was red, it says they didn’t have (or at least rarely used) a word for what color it is, so they only described it by its other attributes (like how dark it was).
It says that they couldn’t process the entire concept of blue, because they didn’t have a name for it. Actually it goes further than that:
Extending his research, he discovered that references to the color blue were absent from all Greek literature. German Jewish philosopher Lazarus Geiger followed Gladstone’s lead, analyzing ancient Icelandic sagas, the Koran, Hindu, Chinese folklore, Arabic, and an ancient Hebrew version of the Bible. Geiger found that blue was missing in these texts too. His findings underscored a widespread absence of blue in ancient writings, reshaping our understanding of historical color perception.
In the absence of specific terminology to describe the color blue, scholars were compelled to entertain the possibility that ancient societies didn’t perceive this hue, leading to its omission from their lexicon. Were the visual faculties of ancient peoples markedly distinct from our own? What accounts for the apparent oversight of blue in their observations?
I mean she’s sort of doing the Tucker Carlson thing here; she doesn’t exactly come out and say that all of those cultures didn’t have blue because they didn’t have the word blue. But she does say in the headline that they couldn’t see blue.
I did one DDG search for “word for blue in ancient hebrew,” and found this. If what she was saying was what you were saying, I would think it made quite a bit of sense, but as it is I stand by my assessment.
Like reading the wikipedia article about how did this myth develop and what is the actual linguistic shift that was what was going on and some other examples, that was cool to me. And also I learned something from it. I’m not trying to be super critical of this person just writing an article but it just seems like way too much of it is just wrong, but then phrased in this “wouldn’t it be cool if” type of way that shields it from being a problem that it’s wrong.
That’s not what the article is saying though? It doesn’t say the Greeks thought the sea was red, it says they didn’t have (or at least rarely used) a word for what color it is, so they only described it by its other attributes (like how dark it was).
It says that they couldn’t process the entire concept of blue, because they didn’t have a name for it. Actually it goes further than that:
I mean she’s sort of doing the Tucker Carlson thing here; she doesn’t exactly come out and say that all of those cultures didn’t have blue because they didn’t have the word blue. But she does say in the headline that they couldn’t see blue.
I did one DDG search for “word for blue in ancient hebrew,” and found this. If what she was saying was what you were saying, I would think it made quite a bit of sense, but as it is I stand by my assessment.
Like reading the wikipedia article about how did this myth develop and what is the actual linguistic shift that was what was going on and some other examples, that was cool to me. And also I learned something from it. I’m not trying to be super critical of this person just writing an article but it just seems like way too much of it is just wrong, but then phrased in this “wouldn’t it be cool if” type of way that shields it from being a problem that it’s wrong.