Martin Krikorian wrote:
Hey, this is fun! It seems to me that culture has a great impact on color perception. Ancient Navaho had a color perception that differs from those in the modern world - their rainbow had only five colors, where we all 'know' that there are seven.
When Isaac Newton was describing the spectrum, he asked his assistant (who apparently had better colour vision) to describe the colours. His assistant said "seven" - Newton's own opinion had been "six": so could you point out the indigo bit, again?
They had several different colors for what we would today look at and call black, i.e., the black of soot and the black of the night sky were different colors, as different as blue and yellow are to us.
As different as, say red and orange - except of course that the colour "orange" didn't have a name in English ("red" or "yellow" being used to describe it instead) until the eponymous fruit was imported into Britain sometime round the fourteenth century, via Orange in France and a pun. But on the other hand, the Welsh language is awfully hazy on the difference between blue and green. Which isn't to say that to the Welsh the sky and the grass appear to be the same colour.
Oliver Sacks ...
Hm. speaking of indigo; didn't he have an interesting anecdote on the subject? Morgan L. Owens "I call this colour scheme 'Sapphire and Steel'."