This video was posted earlier in HN [0].
Although it was about a tannery, they show how the violet / purple color was extracted from shells. Quite an elaborate procedure.
Why it took us thousands of years to see the colour violet
21–30 of 64 posts
Re: Why it took us thousands of years to see the colour violet
#22I do appreciate the feet-on-the ground research sentiment "Over the past 20 years, I visited 193 museums in 42 different countries. Equipped with 1,500 Munsell colour chips .. I examined 139,892 works of art, searching for violet. ... there were only .. few artworks before the 1860s" And the art historical conclusion feels convincing "in 1864 the influential French art critic Charles Blanc ... described how violet, p…
Relativity of colour is interesting. E.g. The only difference between orange and brown is context.
Re: Why it took us thousands of years to see the colour violet
#23Not read the article yet but commenting while I remember... Prime Minister Gladstone who translated Homer in his spare time, thought that the ancient Greeks, or at least Homer where colour blind. Gladstone said "We have a great deal of difficulty in translating Homer’s colour terms into modern western languages" Homer, apparently had the colour literacy of a modern child, he described oxen as the colour of the sky an…
To my understanding the strange wording was caused by the requirements of the poetic construct the narration used. So they are filler to make other stuff fit. They are like punctuation. They are not trying to describe colors as such and should not be used as evidence how the people who spun the poem saw colors in psychological sense, I think.
It’s entirely possible the Greek language didn’t have the requisite color words yet. There seems to be a more or less stable order in which languages acquire color terms.
> Berlin and Kay also found that, in languages with fewer than the maximum eleven color categories, the colors followed a specific evolutionary pattern. This pattern is as follows:
> All languages contain terms for black and white. If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red. If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both). If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow. If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue. If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown. If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains terms for purple, pink, orange or gray.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...
Re: Why it took us thousands of years to see the colour violet
#24Not read the article yet but commenting while I remember... Prime Minister Gladstone who translated Homer in his spare time, thought that the ancient Greeks, or at least Homer where colour blind. Gladstone said "We have a great deal of difficulty in translating Homer’s colour terms into modern western languages" Homer, apparently had the colour literacy of a modern child, he described oxen as the colour of the sky an…
I'm pretty sure the Med can actually be a bit reddish dark like wine sometimes.
Re: Why it took us thousands of years to see the colour violet
#25Not read the article yet but commenting while I remember... Prime Minister Gladstone who translated Homer in his spare time, thought that the ancient Greeks, or at least Homer where colour blind. Gladstone said "We have a great deal of difficulty in translating Homer’s colour terms into modern western languages" Homer, apparently had the colour literacy of a modern child, he described oxen as the colour of the sky an…
I'm pretty sure the Med can actually be a bit reddish dark like wine sometimes.
I believe Greek wine was also much more dilute (they chugged the stuff) — presumably wine-dark isn’t as dark as it sounds today
Re: Why it took us thousands of years to see the colour violet
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
To my understanding the strange wording was caused by the requirements of the poetic construct the narration used. So they are filler to make other stuff fit. They are like punctuation. They are not trying to describe colors as such and should not be used as evidence how the people who spun the poem saw colors in psychological sense, I think.
It’s entirely possible the Greek language didn’t have the requisite color words yet. There seems to be a more or less stable order in which languages acquire color terms. > Berlin and Kay also found that, in languages with fewer than the maximum eleven color categories, the colors followed a specific evolutionary pattern. This pattern is as follows: > All languages contain terms for black and white. If a language con…
If this hypothesis is correct then Dulux [0] must be the most evolved being ever.
Re: Why it took us thousands of years to see the colour violet
#27Title: Speculation on why it took humans so long to engineer long-lasting violet paint.
Re: Why it took us thousands of years to see the colour violet
#28> Egypt, Mesopotamia and the medieval Islamic cultures survived especially well in their extremely dry climates. And they had no violet in them at all. In ancient times purple was a luxury for dying clothes, even in medieval times, and harvesting sea snails for the dye was lucrative business between egyptians, phoeniceans etc. so how come they claim we can't see it? I dont think their claim is true. What's next? "Why…
Consider the color orange. There wasn't a name for the color in antiquity. When the fruit become available, its color was referred to as "the color of a norange" (this happened independently in various European languages. Unrelated factoid, many languages with an indefinite article that ends with n, assimilated the leading n of the fruit name in the article).
Clearly our ancestors could see the orange colored before they met the fruit. There are other fruit that have that color too; leaves in autumn can be pretty orange too. Orange and brown are basically different shades of the same color.
Naming things is pretty powerful thing.
Re: Why it took us thousands of years to see the colour violet
#29Not sure if mauve, purple and violet are different.
Re: Why it took us thousands of years to see the colour violet
#30The speculation in this article is pretty bad; a shower of cosmic rays isn't going to affect everyone in the planet the same way to all of a sudden enhance their perception of violet. The much likelier explanation is that it's "just" a cultural development.
Exactly. It is not that unusual to find cultures and languages that do not distinguish between "green" and "blue", for example.
And brown and orange