Unsolved Question of Philosophy

"Are blue and green separate colours?"

HALT! The answer is not "of course lol," believe it or not. MOST languages in the world DO NOT have a separate word for "blue" and "green"

Yes; you heard me correctly. MOST languages out there do not have separate words for "blue" and "green."

Chinese (at one point) did not. They even used a blanket term, 青 (qīng).

Japanese borrowed this blanket term, calling it ｢あお｣. Later, they borrowed the kanji ｢緑｣ in 1185, calling it ｢みどり｣. HOWEVER, Until after World War II ｢緑｣ was considered a shade of ｢青｣.

Many of these cases can be explained by sun exposure to the eyes, but I want to ask:

"What is your opinion?"

[Personally, I feel that green is a separate colour from blue.]

This is not a serious discussion.

Let me ask you; in what way is this not serious?

I am not a troll, my good sir.

I'm asking an honest question that has various answers depending on the language being spoken.

I'm trying to find out the opinions of others on this subject.

Colours don't exist. It's only wavelengths.

So how do these wavelengths broadcast a similar image in every human's eye?

Well, considering that there are some culteres that count as 1, 2, 3, many, it's pretty odd. I can see where culture may see the two as merely seperate shades.

This is a pretty understandable topic.

Like the Quran they used words in a poetic and metaphoric way. However I say that 1500 years ago they didn't have enough vocabularies to exactly specify their meaning of words.

It is all a evolutionary process which heightens the person's sense of learning over the time.

They sometimes make up words to just fill that blank in.

The first words of human beings were " Uh uga gagagag ugaha ", now they use words far more superior and understandable, all thanks to the evolution within the brain.

Indeed.

A good bisen of what you're saying is the word "green" itself.

The word is derived from the same root as the words "grass" and "grow."

Blue, on the other hand, is derived from a root word meaning "colour", making it a doublet of the word "blee."

I believe it was like that in the past because the person's sense of understanding were far more superior back then than today's brains of understanding many words in a sentence.

People in the past just knew how to communicate without much words.

Like a sort of telepathy.

Yea.

Primarily because one would associate with nature, as opposed to today's folks who always associate with anything but (nature.)

Blue has a wavelength of roughly 450 nanometers and green has a wavelength of roughly 550 nanometers.

There are two steps to viewing a colour:
First off, white light is reflected off a surface. Depending on the materials properties, it will absorb some wavelengths of light, and reflect other wavelengths. For example, chloroplast, which plants use to absorb light from the sun, absorbs all wavelengths except green which is reflected off, giving plants their green colour.

Second is the eye actually viewing colours. This is done by an array of various sensory nodes, each set is unique from another, and respond to corresponding wavelengths of light. For example, when a light wave of roughly 700 nanometers enters the eye, it will activate a certain set of sensory nodes that react with that wavelength. This applies to the entire visible spectrum.

Blue != Green.

/thread

interesting. It's funny that you said that; Cause that's exactly how i would describe if thatgamecompany's journey online experience. With no voice & nothing but emptiness all around. People were left to figure out how to complete a complicated task. "How to communicate with out words". I know that many got around this problem. But I played it un-mod-ed, & I have to say that it was great many enlightening to me. I can tell you that the first thing that I did was to connect to my friend online. It felt a little like cheating so, we agreed that we could complete the whole game without talking, or IMing. So after that we turn off our phones & continue on playing. It so frustrating at first, but after some jumping around, sand gliding & what look like echoing we found our way of communicating. I felt like we unlocked something so great; something that seem like it was lost to the endless sands. now that we can communicate, we can finally get thing done more effectively. Thing when a lot more smoother after that.(I'm not to go on describing how the game play was for us two. but all going to say is that if "You want to get know your friend deep when i highly suggest you play this game like we did".

I saw it on youtube as well with the same info.

It's just our eyes that can see colors.
Some animals can't, some can (maybe).
Green is different than blue, but I mistakenly said blue instead of green or other way around quite often.

OT: Green is a separate color from blue? Hmmm, before I say my answer, define "separate".

The english language does not have a single word for oniisan and neesan.

That does not mean "elder brothers" and "elder sisters" are the same thing.

Is green a different color than blue? Yes, they are different values of wavelength, they are received by different cones of the eye, and they form mentally distinct perceptions. They aren't the same because they're different.


There's a bigger mystery though. Colors as perceived by the brain are imaginary. If you think about it critically, light's 'color' is measured by the wavelength of the light but this is only a number. The things we see aren't numbers, they are strange perceptions I'm not even sure how to describe exactly. We know how light is sensed in the retina, but we don't know how the brain converts these numeric values into what we see. Erwin Schrodinger had this to say: "The sensation of colour cannot be accounted for by the physicist's objective picture of light-waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous processes set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the brain? I do not think so."

Although I can tell you that green is a different value than blue, I can't tell you what green and blue exactly are.

Well, it is high school biology and high school optics and everyone should have learned it.

I agree Stenta.

True, but (in the case of "green" and "blue) there are many people from sundry tongues that are adamant in their saying of green being a shade of blue.

Heck, Ancient Greek only differentiated dark blue from green, calling dark blue "κυανος" and any other shade of blue "χλορος" (a word that shares the same root with the word "yellow", and the Irish word "geel/gelu", which means "white").

Modern Greek makes the distinction, however, with the word "μπλου"; a loanword from French "bleu" (which is a loanword from Frankish "blaw", or Old English "blau", itself!)

Philosophy is never serious discussion imo...