• kamen@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    22 hours ago

    There’s a joke in Bulgarian somewhat related to that. What’s commonly referred to as a prune plum we call something that roughly translates to “blue plum”. The joke goes something like this:

    – Dad, what’s this?

    – It’s a blue plum.

    – Why is it red?

    – Because it’s green.

    Language is weird, but it’s ironic that our use of it makes it so.

  • Tiral@lemmy.world
    35·
    2 days ago

    So, this is kinda weird, but general colors didn’t have names for a long time. Like in Greek texts by Homer he describes the water color as dark wine color because the name “blue” wasn’t a word. So it’s possible when they named a “red onion” purple wasn’t a color and considered a shade of red.

    Also as others have said purple was the color of royalty and they didn’t want an association.

    • FrChazzz@lemmus.orgEnglish
      16·
      2 days ago

      It’s kind of wild when you learn that words for blue are relatively new in human language.

      • Seleni@lemmy.world
        9·
        1 day ago

        In Japanese it’s the reverse; ‘blue’ is used for blue and green; designating green as the different color is relatively recent for them

      • koella@lemmy.zip
        6·
        2 days ago

        I started thinking that it kind of makes sense as blue is not a common naturally occurring color and then I remembered the sky.

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
          2·
          10 hours ago

          Yeah, that’s the part I have trouble with. Leaves are green, the sky is blue. They are very different colours. It’s not ambiguous like whether teal or turquoise is green or blue (I could easily see either of those being labelled as either blue or green), or different shades of the same colour like fuscia or maroon. They are different primary colours of light.

          It’s just weird to me that two very common every day colours that don’t look anything alike wouldn’t get distinct names. I understand that the blue photoreceptors we have are the newest ones and are less sensitive than the red and green ones, but I wouldn’t have figured that our evolution of it to the point where we see what we currently see (if you aren’t colour blind) would have been that recent. I expected hundreds of thousands of years, not tens of thousands or just thousands, which is what it would need to be to explain cultures that didn’t differentiate between the two until recently.

  • Doom@lemmy.world
    661·
    2 days ago

    Because they are only purple on the inside. Do you think apples are white? Or bananas?

  • BunScientist@lemmy.zipEnglish
    106·
    2 days ago

    From what I know, it has to do with the word red covering the purple part of the spectrum long ago, and the “need” for the word purple came out later but purple things that were named red didn’t get renamed.

    You can look at japanese right now and 青い covers both blue and green, with a relatively recent addition of 緑 to cover only green (thus possibly pushing 青い in the future to be only blue, who knows)

    • vortic@lemmy.world
      1·
      17 hours ago

      The Japanese part of this is evidenced by the fact that some traffic lights are blue rather than green. As far as I know, they are standardizing everything to green now to avoid any confusion, but some older lights are still blue because the words were the same for blue and green.

    • VindictiveJudge@lemmy.worldEnglish
      32·
      2 days ago

      Similarly, the red fox is clearly orange, but English speakers were exposed to that species of fox before developing a word for that specific color. For bonus linguistical oddities, ‘orange’ was used for the fruit before it was used for the color.

      • metallic_z3r0@infosec.pub
        6·
        2 days ago

        And the fruit’s name is different from other countries’ names for it because “a naranj” was misheard as “an orange” and it stuck. Yellow-red wasn’t much adopted, though it did exist. Such is language, what a fun collective hallucination.

    • JamieDub86@piefed.socialEnglish
      12·
      2 days ago

      Well whys it called Shepherds Pie when it doesnt contain shepherds, or Cottage Pie when its nothing to do with cottages or cottagimg? How about that one…checkmate!!!

    • Apytele@sh.itjust.works
      11·
      2 days ago

      I already knew this about colors (it’s also why “redheads” have orange hair) but I recently dug more into how the musical spectrum and how tones are defined is very similar in it’s cultural variance. Another thing is how the cardinal directions are divided radially and how time is counted. Shit counting bases even, most of the imperial measurements are based on either base 12 or base 16 math.

      Wild to think that something you grew up with as a fundamental fact of the world might actually be super culturally subjective.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      2 days ago

      I’ve always hated the “blue, indigo, violet” end of the English words for the rainbow. I only recently found out that the 7 colours of the rainbow in English is especially BS.

      At the beginning of Newton’s time, there were thought to be 5 colours in the rainbow: red, yellow, green, blue and violet. Newton added Orange and Indigo because he thought (for spiritual reasons) there should be 7 colours. There were 7 days of the week, 7 planets (known at that time), 7 notes in the (western) musical scale, etc.

      But, Newton’s blue isn’t our blue today. For newton, the colour “blue” is what we currently call “cyan”, so the 7 colours of the rainbow were really red, orange, yellow, green, cyan (blue), blue (indigo) and violet. That makes a lot more sense.

      But, there really could be arbitrarily many colours in the rainbow. We could have “rust” as a colour, in between red and orange, or “gold” in between orange and yellow. We could even have a spectrum that didn’t include “green” but included “lime” which is between today’s yellow and green, and cyan on the other side, and no “green” at all.