Your comment on why we call pig pork was awesome. I swear, it seems like you know everything, Rhov. You mentioned that colors also are a blend of French and English. Have you ever heard about how old languages didn’t have a word for blue? I read about that somewhere, and scientists think maybe humans couldn’t see blue until recently.

wildrhov:

Oh man, you brought up another subject I love. Etymology! I’m gonna look like I “know everything” again. I swear, I don’t. I have random trivia cluttered in my brain like a hoarder’s house.

I’m going to guess you read a Facebook post about this in IFLScience, which was taken from this article in Science Alert. I even saw it mentioned in Business Insider; it was very popular in 2015.

Well, it’s wrong.

I feel like I need to correct you about those “scientists,” so here we go.

It’s true, old languages didn’t have a word for blue. Greek epics say the sea is the color of
wine and honey is green, Hindu Vedic hymns lack any use of the word blue. In the ancient world, “blue” only existed in Egypt, which was the only place at the time capable of producing blue pigment. Modern tribes in Africa can distinguish subtle shades of green, for which they have many words, but they can’t tell blue from green, since they have no word for blue. This led one psychologist in 2006 to assume human eyes evolved differently. Ancient Greeks couldn’t see blue, since they had no word for it. In fact, eyes are still evolving, and modern tribes in Africa are still behind White People, because they apparently can’t see blue.

I’m sorry, Psychology Professor Person. This is a matter of etymology. Leave your racism out of human language development.

Here’s a hypothesis: maybe if something is super important to a society, it recognizes the subtle differences more and develops words for it, but when something isn’t that important, a society doesn’t notice the different.

Let’s use coffee. My dad thinks coffee is coffee. He can’t taste the difference between one black coffee and another. He doesn’t go for cream and sugar, let alone flavoring. Going into Starbucks with him is a trip. Meanwhile, I’m a bit of a coffee snob, so I can taste the difference between dark roast and light roast, cold brew and pour-over, and I love experimenting with flavors. To me, there are dozens of words for coffee. To my dad, it’s just coffee. That doesn’t mean my dad doesn’t taste the exact same thing as me when we both drink a Kona light roast, it just means his brain never bothered to log the differences.

Our ancestors saw blue, those African tribes see blue, they have the same eyes we do, but they never needed a word for it, so they can’t tell the difference between green and blue.

Let’s focus back onto the language ancient Brits spoke.

Old English had only six colors: red (read), yellow (geolo), green (grene), black (sweart), white (hwit), and gray (græg). There are no Old English words for blue until the 13th century, at which point we borrowed the French bleu and called it blǣw, which lost in the spelling war to the upper class French in England and became blue.

So why no blue in Old English, Homer’s epics, Vedic hymns, or old languages in general?

There’s a 1969 book, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, precisely about this issue. Two
linguists discovered that ancient languages followed a specific
evolution when it came to naming colors. The most basic of human
languages have at the very least some term for dark and bright, black
and white, “sweart” and “hwit” in Old English, which come to us as
swarthy and white.

The next to be distinguished is always red, the color of blood and meat, followed
by green and yellow, usually at about the time agriculture develops for
that area. Now there’s a NEED to distinguish at least the colors used as
a fruit ripens.

You see, these two linguists discovered that a language doesn’t fully
open up to distinguishing other colors until it has a need to describe
blue as a color. Blue isn’t necessary in agriculture, it rarely appears
in the plant world, it’s the color of the sky and sea, but that’s about
it. Most languages used other ways to describe something that we would
call blue. Either it was lumped together with green, basically a very
broad blue-green spectrum, or like Ancient Greeks, they lumped blue
together toward the darker end of the spectrum and said the sea was the
color of wine. Not because wine was blue or the sea was purple, but
because it wasn’t light, dark, red, or green.

Here’s a twist: the French got bleu from Proto-Indo-European (the mother of all European, Indian, and Iranian languages) and it stems from the word bʰlēw,
meaning yellow. It also developed into blaze, which might be why it applied to the sky, and that mutated into sky-color, AKA blue. So at its core,
“blue” comes from a root word for “yellow.” Wild, right?

In many languages, their “blue” stems
from the word for sky or water, because that’s where we see blue in
nature. Societies don’t form the word blue until they’ve developed a
need to see it as being different from yellow, green, or black.

But even in ancient times, English was a mishmash of languages, so we didn’t develop the same as other places. Brittonic, one of the first languages spoken on the British Isles back in the Iron Age, had four colors: black, white, red, green/yellow. Old English took gray and brown from the Norse Vikings, so we grew to 6 colors. That’s generally what you’ll learn if you study Old English. Then in the 9th century, we find writings that show the color purple (purpul) somehow came in, likely thanks to the Roman soldiers who occupied the land for a time and spoke Latin.

We had purple, but still no blue, which is an oddity in terms of the etymology of colors in developing languages. We developed that bluish concept somewhere around the 1300s. We took orange from Sanskrit in the 1500s. There was no name for that color besides geoluhread which literally means “yellow-red.” Then as the fruit naranga drifted from India and across Europe, so did the name, mutating into “orange” by the time it reached Jolly Olde England.

Pink is practically a modern invention and wasn’t used until the 1700s.

So
it’s not that humans evolved to see blue, but that linguistics evolved
to recognize colors. Once a language “discovers” blue, it quickly begins
to distinguish other colors that were in the in-between spectrum. As a society, they didn’t need to know the difference between green and blue, like my dad can’t tell the difference between an Ethiopian Yirgacheffe pour-over and his Folgers drip coffee.

Languages have to develop a need to
distinguish a color before it invents a word to categorize it.

This could easily lead me into linguistic relativity and the evolutionary psychology of language, but that’s a whole other subject and this reply has grown TOO LONG.