So before we had a word for it, did people not naturally see blue? So blue was not the first thing she saw or gravitated toward, though it is where she settled in the end. Eventually she decided it was white, and later on, eventually blue. In theory, one of children's first questions is, "Why is the sky blue?" So he raised his daughter while being careful to never describe the color of the sky to her, and then one day asked her what color she saw when she looked up.Īlma, Deutscher's daughter, had no idea. In fact, one researcher that Radiolab spoke with - Guy Deutscher, author of " Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages," tried a casual experiment with that. Is the sky really blue? What does that mean? but there is one thing no one would ever learn from these ancient songs. The sun and reddening dawn's play of color, day and night, cloud and lightning, the air and ether, all these are unfolded before us, again and again. Scarcely any subject is evoked more frequently. Of Hindu Vedic hymns, he wrote: "These hymns, of more than ten thousand lines, are brimming with descriptions of the heavens. He studied Icelandic sagas, the Koran, ancient Chinese stories, and an ancient Hebrew version of the Bible. Gladstone thought this was perhaps something unique to the Greeks, but a philologist named Lazarus Geiger followed up on his work and noticed this was true across cultures. It seemed the Greeks lived in a murky and muddy world, devoid of color, mostly black and white and metallic, with occasional flashes of red or yellow. Gladstone started looking at other ancient Greek texts and noticed the same thing - there was never anything described as "blue." The word didn't even exist. Red is mentioned fewer than 15 times, and yellow and green fewer than 10. And while black is mentioned almost 200 times and white about 100, other colors are rare. So Gladstone decided to count the color references in the book.
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