Many linguists and Youtubers will tell you something that may seem a bit out of the world. They will tell you that Ancient Greeks, and other ancient civilizations, could not see the color blue. or that they saw it as a shade of green or black. Parts of this is true, but it’s complicated.
People say that ancient texts such as the Iliad always describe the sky as white, and oceans are often black, dark, purple, or even ‘green’. However, this is mainly due to the belief that the sky, and by extension water is blue is a relatively modern one, as ancient people saw the sky as a shade of white or black. During night, the sky is black, and it gets lighter in day. So, the ancient people just thought the sky was grey. And it is true that on overcast days the sky is usually grey or white.
The Himba people of Namibia are a tribe that doesn’t have a separate word for blue and green. However, they differentiate different levels of brightness and shades of green. In a color test with shades of green and blue, the Himba people were unable to identify different colors as quick as English speakers. However, in a test with slightly different shades of green, the Himba people were able to quickly differentiate between shades of green than English speakers were. So for some people, language does change the way they perceive certain colors.
In English, we say ‘red’ hair or ‘ginger’ hair, even though nowadays the specific color is orange. Did people just have redder hair back in the day? Or is this another linguistic conundrum? The latter, I’m afraid. Oranges are fruits that grow in Asia, and since they are the most common really ‘orange’ thing in nature and they weren’t really available to Old English speakers, they identified shades of orange as red. However, when stuff started coming in through trade, people found ginger roots, so they named the color ginger. Then came oranges, which are the closest in shade to the hair of a lot of redheads. Since there were already names for people with red hair, the color orange became used to describe other things.
So, did the Ancient Greeks see blue? Well, yes, but they may not have understood it the same way we do today, just like how we used to not have a word for orange.
Anay Ganesh 