Posted on 03/03/2016 7:12:14 PM PST by MtnClimber
When you look back across the history of art, things go missing. Interesting things.
For example, it seems ancient people didn't have a word to describe the color of the sky. The "b" word-blue? They didn't use it. That’s the argument, anyway......
It wasn't until much later, when blue paints were invented (which happened in Egypt), that "blue" became a descriptor—when you could buy or sell it.....
The Newest Missing Thing
That was our guess. And now-ta-da-I've got another one, a second thing that ancients saw all the time but failed to describe. And this one is even more basic.
I'm talking about plants.
Take a look, a long rambling look, at the cave paintings that Paleolithic artists drew as far back as 40,000 years ago. There are hundreds of them, in Spain, in France, all over the world. What do you see?
There are, says Richard Mabey in his new book, The Cabaret of Plants, "galloping horses and rippling bison," reindeer, cattle, the occasional rhino—animals you might eat, animals you might chase, or simply admire, maybe even worship …
(Excerpt) Read more at phenomena.nationalgeographic.com ...
Why did God make the sky Carolina Blue?
Because he hadn’t been to New Mexico yet
I remember reading a book on photography many years ago, in which the author suggested that there is no blue in Homer because the eyesight of the people of that time and place may not have evolved to where they could perceive blue distinctly.
-JT
In eastern Oklahoma the sky is a weak cerulean blue. In Western Oklahoma and west it is Prussian blue.
There is quite a lot about “Rosy fingered dawn” in his poems.
This is an interesting article:
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2
-JT
Maybe the gathering part of their life was too boring to provide any reason to immortalize it on the cave wall? Like we don’t watch competitive gardening for entertainment, or at least most don’t, but will watch sports? Maybe wall painting was a man thing, and the women didn’t get to depict their scenes of gathering berries and roots?
Freegards
This has the smell of intelekshulism to me.
Someone making pronouncements on a language that hasn’t been spoken for thousands, or 10s of thousands of years, based on rudimentary cave paintings alone?
Just making crap up as they go along. Intelekshuls and their constant mental masturbations.
I don't think I saw blue sky until I was in the 4th grade.
Clearly the author is ignorant of the fact that most things were in black and white up until the 1960s ;-)
Actually makes sense to me... until humans could harness something, they didn’t name or illustrate it.
This is interesting to me. I have very green eyes - they aren’t hazel or anywhere near blue. But my Bolivian friend always referred to my eyes, in Spanish, as ‘azul’, and said that her father’s eyes were the same color...
-JT
my understanding from the little I looked into it is that every language developed this differentiation between blue and green later in their development. I don’t have the references, just discussions with profs from the past. (80s-90s)
It’s interesting. At the time, all I could think was that the word ‘verde’ may have had connotations that just didn’t apply to eyes...
-JT
Another thought: if languages didn’t differentiate between blue and green until late, maybe it could be, after all, that we didn’t really perceive the difference until later in our evolution - or that people in certain areas didn’t.
-JT
Cavemen didn’t seem to be all that into background and scenery in their wall art.
True, not very good at being metrosexuals at all.
Could be but that would also mean that various cultures went through the genetic changes related to that perception at different times, whereas the linguistic differentiation could have just been cultural - similar to the eskimos having 20 or 30 words for ice.
very interesting - is Vietnamese a tonal language like Chinese is? In Japanese it’s aoi (adj form) for blue and midori for green.
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