Big Think: If you met someone from a few hundred years ago and started rattling off the names of colors you saw around you, odds are he or she would be baffled. Some of these would be colors the other person had never heard of. It’s not that the hues have appeared only recently — it’s just that they hadn’t been named, and thus lacked an identity.
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The psychology of color is something that has interested me for several years. Often, we spend time talking about the impact of color: ie. Red is angry, blue is sad, etcetera. However, we often fail to recognize that not every culture perceives color in the same way. On a fundamental level, language shapes our perception. The ability of a person to perceive a color depends, partially, on whether that person has a word for it or not. For example, as I've grown as a designer, my ever-expanding color vocabulary has aided me in being able to perceive a more nuanced range of color. The idea of 'color-usefulness' in the article is particularly interesting to me. The notion that increasingly-complex technology drives the use of color as a descriptor brings large implications in the field of psychology, which absolutely fascinates me.
My favorite color is a teal similar to Marrs Green, and I had no idea that is has been declared the world's favorite color too. Based on the results of study analyzing color identification and language, I was surprised Marrs Green is actually the world's favorite color, if a large amount of cultures lacked words for blue and green, and cool colors are higher up on the "surprisal" chart. Then again, you do not need to be able to name a color to find it appealing.
I find it interesting that the colors higher up on the "surprisal" chart are more green and blue, colors seen in plant life, and pinks and purples. Like the article said, blues and greens were just the "color names that help a population describe something it actively uses are themselves more useful. Hues of naturally occurring things, such as the sky, are less likely to require a color descriptor since these things are just there". I view pink and purple as more man made and manufactured colors. Yes, they do exist in flowers in small quantities but I see these colors much more in processed materials. It makes sense that these colors would be less identifiable in more rural cultures.
The comparison that this article makes about colors and their usefulness in a culture is very interesting. While I’ve studied color theory in the sense that green is related to life and yellow can be interpreted as a “sickly” color, this is a whole new way to interpret color. Western culture holds color as a very important part of our day to day life and to consider that other cultures don’t have a word for blue in their own language is very strange. To also see that this study concluded that western influence is why cultures with little color association have begun to use color as an identifier because of outside influences shows the power of western culture. However, that is also frustrating because I think color should not be a main descriptor for many things because I think that line and form is just as important as color - it’s just more ingrained.
I have seen a Facebook Video on this topic before. It's amazing how the concepts of languages can differ so much from language to language. People easily for get that some words just don't have a translation. It would be interesting as a designer to try and design in a different language and try to cope with this barrier of trying to describe something and having to explain something with so much detail, something that back home would take you seconds. This is a prime example of why we should give non English speakers some leeway when trying to say something that has no meaning in one of the languages. I wish this article would have given more examples of colors that don't have a name on other languages. It would have been cool to talk about a new color.
I read another article similar to this over the summer that noted how blue has only recently become a color with a name. One of the primary pieces of evidence was the lack of the word blue in ancient Greek texts and ones from a similar time period. The Greeks described the ocean quite often, but it was commonly said to be “the wine-dark sea”. No mention of blue. I did like how the article stated what is classified as our current favorite color, which funnily enough is a shade of blue! I’d be very interested to see something like a “Humans’ Favorite Color Across the Years” book or timeline. I’m also curious what makes that particular shade of teal so popular. I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for what the “favorite” color becomes next.
The article talks about how ancient languages don't have the vocabulary to describe colors like blue and green because they are just around people. I would wholeheartedly agree with the statement. After 8 years of Latin class, I've seen how the text will not call colors how we in English classify them as their own descriptors but will call them by a comparison. Latin authors take well-known objects at the time and compare them to the object. Latin texts take adjectives to describe colors more than today where colors are more adjectives. I also found it interesting how there are more names for warm colors. This makes sense as they are more comforting and human seek out places of comfort but I wonder if there are more specific reasons for this. Is this because people use warm colors more for painting things likes houses or because we see more variation in warm colors due to favoritism or a biological factor?
I am absolutely OBSESSED with color, and this article illustrated another reason why - color and society can evolve together over time, changing how we describe and relate to colors from culture to culture and period to period. The fact that one culture, the Amazonian Tsimane, didn't use color until they came into contact with artificial objects is especially interesting because it prooves that color isn't necessary to describe something. We happen to come from a culture where the colors of things not only help to identify it - that blue dress, this green car - but to give meaning to things and sometimes distinguish things like position or speed - we use color, for example, to differentiate driving speeds from stop to go on traffic lights. Another culture designing the standard may have opted to go another way, considering what their culture found the most useful for visual differentiation.
Color is so heavily influenced by culture and even one's own eyes that it's almost incomprehensible to me. The fact that people indigenous to the Amazon Rain Forest literally don't see or even have the cultural references to the same colors as me is so strange. It makes sense though that you only need words to describe the colors that you see everyday and that other colors do not need to be named.
It's also interesting to think about those colors that are in between, such as teal. In a language where there is not teal, is teal called blue, green, or do people just have to describe a mixture of those two colors? I'm a person who regularly sees and categorizes colors differently from those around me. I wonder how describing these colors would go for me if there were no words for it.
Overall I'd like to see the entire unsynthesized data for this study as I didn't feel like I got the whole picture.
A Kindergartener could tell you that the colors would fall into either warm or cool hues. This is basic color theory, regardless of cultural differences, factually there are warm and cool colors, just as factually we all breathe oxygen. There is no cultural market on science. As an artist in a former life and having taken in depth color theory courses throughout my education, it is a known fact that due to the spectrum of light and the wavelengths of each color, warm colors advance and cool colors recede. This is caused by the way in which the eyes adjust to view each color. Warm hues such as red have longer wavelengths and cool hues such as blue have shorter wavelengths. This leaves me to conclude that there are some holes in this study as there might just be more elements involved in the reasons why certain colors are communicated more such as their ability to be more readily perceived by the human eye. In which case this becomes more about a correlation that the “logic behind colors”.
I have always found color theory fascinating. Colors can make us feel a variety of feelings as well as have psychological effects on us that we are not even aware of. Colors can make us calm, angry, hungry, or even happy. This article opened my eyes even more about colors. To think that some cultures never had names for colors is astounding. The article writes: “Ancient Greeks, Chinese, Japanese, and Hebrews had no word for blue — and a therefore limited awareness of a primary color that just doesn’t occur much in nature: the sky, a few flowers, water at some angles, and that’s about it.” To think that a name of a color gives it inherent value, as well as understanding is something I never considered. I’m sure the history of colors is much deeper than what I’ve read or learned about, and I’m interested in learning more about colors.
This is fascinating. I was aware that we have names more colors in recent history, but I hadn’t yet connected that with the rise of technology, artificially created colors, and a increased usefulness of those colors (thus an increased need to identify distinction.)
Another example of the way color naming has evolved is in the phrase “robin redbreast.” Any contemporary person who looks at a robin knows their chest isn’t red, but orange. But English speakers did not have a word for “orange” until they found actual oranges in the sixteenth century. Orange was considered a version of red. Hence the linguistic remnant.
I’m unconvinced of that the reason Greek’s had no word for “blue” was because they had a limited awareness of a color that doesn’t occur much in nature. Their art was covered in blues and purples. Is this article implying that Greek artists didn’t have a word for a pigment they purposefully manufactured to make art? Perhaps it was a unique word, but they had to have some way of referring to it.
It makes a lot of sense that different cultures would have words for some and not the others. It all goes back to the very beginning when humans were just evolving. Cave paintings were done in red and black, using red clay or soil and burnt sticks and charcoal. These were the colors that were important to this specific group of people, and probably earned names as language developed. Colors are all about what is around us. People in different parts of the world lived in different landscapes with different trees, flowers, plants, rocks, animals, and soil. Different cultures used these natural things, some more than others, and those are the colors that earned a name. These important colors are still alive in most cultures today, even if the people of these cultures live in other terrains now.
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