I always learned “ROYGBIV” as the colors of the rainbow. Red, orange, yellow, blue, indigo, violet.
What’s up with the last two? Isn’t indigo basically just dark blue? Why is it violet and not purple? Can’t it just be “ROYGBP”?
I always learned “ROYGBIV” as the colors of the rainbow. Red, orange, yellow, blue, indigo, violet.
What’s up with the last two? Isn’t indigo basically just dark blue? Why is it violet and not purple? Can’t it just be “ROYGBP”?
Actually, the answer turns out to be pretty interesting.
The short version is that what colors are considered “distinct” are heavily influenced by culture and Newton, from whom we get ROYGBIV, came from a culture which valued the dye called “indego.”
Edit: It also seems Newton thought the number 7 had cosmic significance and thought there ought to be 7 colors.
More info in this short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf7WT6TLy8s
The history of Orange is fascinating. In English it wasn’t really considered a major colour but referred to as a shade of red (as in red deer), yellow (sometimes red-saffron). It was the introduction of Oranges that led to things being called Orange coloured.
There’s a similar lack of distinction between Green/Blue in the ancient world.
I still see people without color-blindness have trouble distinguishing some shades of red/yellow/orange.
How would that arise? There’s blues in the sky that are very distinct from the greens of plants. Or are the blue detecting rods (or is it the cones that detect colour?) that new that we can perceive blue more than they could in early recorded history?
They were simply considered shades of the same colour, that’s all. The light spectrum is continuous our breakdown of the continuity into discrete colours is purely arbitrary.
The colour we call sky-blue is considered a separate colour altogether in Japan (Misu)
Pink is named after the flowers Pinks and is called Rose in some languages but we use Rose for a different colour which is more magenta.
Notice how we don’t have words for some colours so use adjectives (bluey -green) There are some languages that don’t use or have any words for colours but alsways describe them. For example “bright fire like”
You know how some people can tell you the exact shade of two colors that you consider identical? Turns out that giving colors distinct names in our mind makes us way better at seeing the difference and that is how we chop up the color spectrum from an infinite number of colors to seven. You think blue is completely different because you went to school and being able to tell the difference between blue and green was a requirement for you. If the school told you that the sky is a light shade of green and the forest is a dark shade of green you would adjust your brain accordingly.
I guess my point is that all colors are made up by the state and we indoctrinate our children into the government sanctioned system at an early age.
That last paragraph took a turn, haha.
There’s a great Radiolab about this, highly recommend a listen.
Bonus: The Colors episode
You can actually see it in modern times. The Himba tribe in Africa doesn’t have a concept of the colour blue. There’s not even a word for it, as far as they’re concerned blue is just a shade of green. To us it seems obvious, the sky is blue and the plants are green but to them it’s all different shades of green. It’s not a genetic thing, they’re seeing the exact same colours as anybody else, their culture just doesn’t distinguish between the two colours.
Huh, I had always assumed oranges got their name from the color, not the other way around…
Orange the fruit comes from the Sanskrit name naranga through other languages. Along the way it lost the N (well technically the n moved to the a, so we have an orange 🙂)
Well it was the 1600s and he was a natural philosopher. Back in those days, all sorts of weird stuff ended up in the books because it fit a certain philosophy. Our modern understanding of empirical science is a relatively new idea.