Colors are something that we're all familiar with. The colors are amongst the first things that we teach children. But what if I were to tell you that not every culture has the same colors? And by that, I don't mean that they have different words for colors. but some very basic colors have no words at all. For some reason, blue is the color that divides many cultures. And it isn't the only interesting thing about blue.
Learn more about the color blue and what makes it interesting on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. You know, when I started this podcast, it felt like I had to become 10 people overnight. Producer, editor, marketer, designer. It was a lot. And I kept thinking, I wish I had someone in my corner to help me figure this out. That's why I love... today's sponsor shopify it's like having a built-in business partner
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all to help you better understand the world around you. Tune in to Planet Money every week for entertaining stories and insights about how money shapes our world, stories that can't be found anywhere else. Listen now to Planet Money from NPR. I'm going to start this episode with a very simple question. How many colors are there in the rainbow? You can probably quickly answer this question and your answer would be that there are seven.
You've probably learned the mnemonic device when you were a kid, ROYGBIV, for Red Orange Yellow, Green Blue Indigo Violet. Very simple. However, if you look really closely at a rainbow, or the spectrum as it comes through a prism, you'll notice that there's obviously more than seven colors in it. There are gradients and changes between colors. It isn't as if nature had seven crayons and there are sharp divisions between the colors.
We say that there are seven colors because it makes it easy to comprehend what is happening in the visible spectrum. In Western languages, particularly English, there are 12 basic color terms that are commonly found. They're based on the work of the anthropologist Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, who proposed a universal pattern in the development of color terminology. These colors are black, white, red, green, yellow, blue,
brown, pink, orange, purple, and gray. The 12th color is usually beige or turquoise. These are considered basic because they are monolexemic, meaning that they're a single word, not a compound like light blue. They're not subsumed by another color like... Crimson is a type of red. And finally, they're commonly known and used across the speakers of a language. However, these colors are not universal.
In fact, Berlin and Kay's research found a trend amongst languages. As languages add colors, they tend to add them in a particular order. Hunter-gatherers often have words for only a few colors. The first words that any language will have for colors are for black and white, or more generally, between dark and light. The Piraha people who live in the Amazon rainforest have no words for color beyond these.
After that, the next color that gets added is a word for red. The fourth word is usually yellow or green, and the fifth color is also yellow or green, depending on which one wasn't chosen first. And then finally comes blue. There's been an internet rumor circulating that certain colors are unable to see blue, which is why they lack a word for it. And this is not true. Even in cultures without a distinct word for blue, people can still see blue just as well as everyone else.
The difference is linguistic categorization, not visual perception. However, language does influence how quickly and easily people distinguish colors in tests. For example, people who linguistically separate blue and green can more quickly differentiate shades between them. There's another interesting thing, however, when it comes to blue.
Some languages use a single word to describe what English speakers would consider both green and blue. And this is called the grew phenomenon, which is just a portmanteau of green and blue. This phenomenon isn't something that just happens in hunter-gatherers. This occurs in some very developed languages. In Vietnamese, the word sighing refers to both blue and green, although modifiers can specify which one.
Sengziachoi means sky blue. In ancient Japanese, the word ao used to mean both green and blue. While modern Japanese now distinguishes green, remnants of the old system persist, particularly in the names given to green traffic lights. The Himba people in Namibia reportedly have no single word for blue, and they use the same term for blue and some shades of green, affecting how they distinguish those colors in tests.
But there's even another interesting thing about how language adopts a word for blue. There is some evidence of a loose correlation between a language's latitude, particularly distance from the equator, and whether it has a distinct word. for blue, but it's not a straightforward or universal relationship. The connection is influenced by environmental, cultural, and technological factors, many of which are correlated with latitude but not directly caused by it.
The big question then is why? Why did words for blue either not exist or were often lumped with green in some languages? The rarity of naturally occurring blue objects in the ancient world may have contributed to their delay in naming. While the sky is blue, its color was not often linguistically conceptualized as distinct from white, gray, or black in early literature. Homer, for instance, never used the word blue.
He famously described the sea as wine dark. Blue dyes were also historically difficult to produce, and when they did appear, they were expensive and very culturally specific. There aren't a lot of blue foods, and there isn't a whole lot of blue in the animal world. So the short answer is that some cultures didn't develop a word for blue because there wasn't a whole lot of blue in the world that was relevant to them.
And here I want to shift gears a bit and focus on one aspect of this. The development of blue as a dye and pigment. There were several colors that ancient people found very easy to create. Black was trivial, just... Rub the end of a burnt stick against a rock and you have black. Ancient people obtained yellow and red colors for rock art, primarily from naturally occurring iron oxide minerals. Red came from hematite, while yellow was derived from limonite or girthite.
These minerals were ground into fine powders and mixed with binders like water, animal fat, or plant resin to create lasting pigments. Green can be achieved through leaves or other plant parts that contain chlorophyll, and white could be gotten from chalk if that was around. In a previous episode, a long time ago, I covered how rare purple dyes were in the ancient world. They were only created by a sea snail off the coast of Lebanon that were a prized commodity produced by the Phoenicians.
that purple became the color associated with royalty. The color blue was also rare in dyes and pigments in the ancient world because the materials required to produce it were scarce, difficult to process, and often expensive. Unlike the previously mentioned colors, which could be extracted relatively easily from common minerals, plants, and animal byproducts, blue did not occur frequently in the natural world in a stable or even unstable form.
As a result, achieving a vivid, lasting blue was both a technical and economic challenge. One of the earliest and most famous sources of blue pigment was lapis lazuli. Lapislazoite is a deep blue metamorphic rock that's been prized since antiquity for its intense color and rarity. Composed primarily of the mineral lazarite, along with calcite, pyrite, and other trace minerals, it's been mined for over 6,000 years.
especially from the Sar Isang Mines in the Badakhshan region of northeastern Afghanistan. The stone was ground into a powder to produce a pigment known as ultramarine, which was extraordinarily vivid and durable. but also costly due to the rarity of the raw material and the labor-intensive process required to purify it.
Ultramarine was so expensive that centuries later, it was often reserved solely for paintings of the robes of the Virgin Mary in religious art. One of the first cultures to regularly use a blue pigment in art was ancient Egypt. In ancient Egypt, blue pigments were highly valued for their symbolic association with the heavens, the Nile, and rebirth and were widely used in art, statuary, and decorative objects.
Because natural blue minerals like lapis lazuli were rare and costly, the Egyptians developed one of the first synthetic pigments in history, known today as Egyptian blue. This pigment was created by heating a mixture of sand, copper compounds such as malachite or azurite and lime to high temperatures, resulting in a crystalline substance called calcium copper silicate.
Once ground into a fine powder, it produced a bright durable blue color that was used to paint tombs, ceramics, statues, and wall reliefs. Egyptian blue was not only visually striking, but also symbolically important, representing divinity, protection, and the eternal. It remained in use for over a thousand years.
Other Mediterranean cultures later adopted it as it was the easiest way to achieve a blue pigment. For textiles and dyes, however, blue was even more elusive. The primary source was the indigo plant, which grows in warmer climates and produces a blue dye through a complex fermentation process.
Indigo dye is extracted from the leaves of the indigo plant through a complex process involving fermentation, during which the leaves are soaked in water to convert a colorless compound into indigo tin, the blue dye. After fermentation, the liquid is aerated to oxidize the indigo tin, which then precipitates out as a blue paste that can be dried and traded. This labor-intensive process produced one of the most vibrant and lasting blue dyes known to the ancient world.
India became the primary center of indigo production for most of history, exporting the dye across Asia, the Middle East, and later to Europe via overland and maritime routes. The Greeks and Romans used imported indigo as a luxury product, and during the Islamic Golden Age, knowledge of its production spread further west. By the 16th century, indigo became a highly sought-after commodity in Europe, rivaling woad, a native European blue dye.
European colonial powers, particularly the Dutch, British and French, established indigo plantations in the Americas, West Africa and South Asia to meet rising demand. In colonial India, British authorities transformed indigo into a major cash crop. often forcing Indian farmers to grow it under oppressive conditions, leading to revolts such as the Indigo Rebellion of 1859. Indigo's global importance declined only with the invention of synthetic blue dyes in the late 19th century.
The previously mentioned woad is a plant native to parts of Europe and Western Asia, and it was historically used as a source of blue dye long before the widespread availability of indigo. The dye derived from woad comes from the leaves which contain a precursor to the blue pigment indigo tin. To extract the dye, the leaves were first harvested, crushed, and formed into balls which were then left to ferment.
The fermentation process allowed the chemical precursors in the leaves to break down and eventually oxidized, producing a blue dye similar in composition to that of indigo, although generally less vibrant. The Celts are famously said to have used woad to paint their bodies before battle, although the historical accuracy of this claim is sometimes debated.
During the Middle Age, woad became a major industry, especially in regions like France, Germany, and England, where towns built their economies around its cultivation and processing. However, Woe dyeing was messy and foul-smelling due to the fermentation process, and Woe generally produced a paler, less color-fast blue compared to true indigo.
When indigo began to be imported in large quantities from India and the Americas in the early modern period, it gradually supplanted woe due to its superior quality and intensity. My guess is that most of you have never given a second thought to the concept of blue. Yet it's something that some cultures don't even have a word for. And for those that did, it was extremely rare to use in dyes and pigments.
for thousands and thousands of years. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Oakton and Cameron Kiefer. I want to thank everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. I'd also like to thank all the members of the Everything Everywhere community who are active on the Facebook group and the Discord server.
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