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Who decided the colours?

Who decided the colours?

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P

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Way back in time someone must have decided to name the colours. Who and how? This, by the way is a serious question and not a riddle.
Any of you clever chaps know the answers? 😕

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Ok, so far i`ve got Aristole with Sun, Moon Yellow & Blue. Elements, Fire, Earth, Water & Wind. But i want to go further back, like what made Aristotle deide to call Yellow, Yellow 😕

F
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yellow
O.E. geolu, geolwe, from P.Gmc. *gelwaz, from PIE *ghel-/*ghol- "yellow, green." Adj. meaning "light-skinned" (of blacks) first recorded 1808. Sense of "cowardly" is 1856, of unknown origin; the color was traditionally associated rather with treachery. Yellow-bellied is from 1924, probably a rhyming reduplication of yellow. Slang yellow dog "contemptible person" first recorded 1881. Yellow journalism "sensational chauvinism" is 1898, Amer.Eng. from newspaper agitation for war with Spain, originally from use of colored ink in "Yellow Kid" comic strip as a publicity stunt (1895) by the "New York World."

O.E. = Old English. P.Gmc = Proto-Germanic. PIE = Proto-Indo-European

T
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Originally posted by Paulie
Ok, so far i`ve got Aristole with Sun, Moon Yellow & Blue. Elements, Fire, Earth, Water & Wind. But i want to go further back, like what made Aristotle deide to call Yellow, Yellow 😕
Yellow sounds nice, i guess...

Acolyte
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Here's a different, but related question: suppose someone had a condition from birth that caused them to see all greens as reds, and all reds as greens. Would they, or anyone else, be able to tell that their vision was different from other peoples'?

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Originally posted by Acolyte
Here's a different, but related question: suppose someone had a condition from birth that caused them to see all greens as reds, and all reds as greens. Would they, or anyone else, be able to tell that their vision was different from other peoples'?
No, they wouldn't. Because they have that condition, they name the colors "wrongly". What they see as our red, they call red, simply because that's how they leaned it. Since there is no way to tell what a person sees, you cannot make sure if he sees everything the same as we.

If you had mean parents, and they taught you that yellow was named "purple", you wouldn't have been able to tell until classmates started to make fun of you. A similar situation.

Only by diagnosing the condition would you learn that what you see as red, really is seen as green by others...

Acolyte
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Originally posted by TheMaster37
No, they wouldn't. Because they have that condition, they name the colors "wrongly". What they see as our red, they call red, simply because that's how they leaned it. Since there is no way to tell what a person sees, you cannot make sure if he sees everything the same as we.

If you had mean parents, and they taught you that yellow was named "pur ...[text shortened]... ing the condition would you learn that what you see as red, really is seen as green by others...
Actually you might be able to tell; it may be that certain responses to colour are 'hard-wired', eg if you put a prisoner in a blue cell, they are more likely to become depressed. But the effect would be pretty subtle at best, and I don't know if you'd be able to test for it. What I'm saying is that we have no way of knowing whether we perceive colours in anything like the same way as other people, so any attempt to describe colours is either relative ('as blue as the ocean'😉 or completely subjective. Perhaps Aristotle was a synaesthete, and when he wrote the word 'yellow', it looked yellow to him!

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Originally posted by Acolyte
Actually you might be able to tell; it may be that certain responses to colour are 'hard-wired', eg if you put a prisoner in a blue cell, they are more likely to become depressed. But the effect would be pretty subtle at best, and I don't know if you'd be able to test for it. What I'm saying is that we have no way of knowing whether we perceive colour ...[text shortened]... aps Aristotle was a synaesthete, and when he wrote the word 'yellow', it looked yellow to him!
Any idea what "yello" reads like in ancient Greek? assuming of course that`s what Aristotle was writing.

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Originally posted by Paulie
Any idea what "yello" reads like in ancient Greek? assuming of course that`s what Aristotle was writing.
the word yellow probably comes from some germanic word. a word for something that is yellow. It is not that Aristotle invented it or gave it to us, and that we use for that reason the same word for it. As happened to sugar or radio.

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this color reversal condision you speak of is an imposibility to begin with, as what we precive as color is just a pattern of nerons fireing, as there is no actual picture, there are no colors to reverce, mearly the sensation of colors, these can not be reversed, as they are themselves just conparisons to other things, we do not proceive actual color, just that the light reflected off of one object reacts with our eye in a manner simmiler to the way light reflected off of another object, thus we say that "these objects are the same color."

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