watched this: https://radiolab.org/podcast/211119-colors
The German philologist Lazarus Geiger [2] reviewed evidence from even older sources: the Hindu Veda hymns of India, the Zend-Avesta books of the Parsees, and the Old Testament of the Bible, as well as ancient Greek and Roman sources. Geiger argued that color lexicons progressed over time from a BLACK-and-WHITE system to a BLACK-and-RED system (where RED was his term for white or warm colors), then differentiating YELLOW, then adding GREEN, then BLUE.
from: https://sites.socsci.uci.edu/~kjameson/ECST/Brown_ColorDictionariesAndCorpora.pdf
the podcast argued that people couldn’t name the colour they saw, because they hadn’t associated the object with the word (see this study by jules davidoff).
When shown a circle with 11 green squares and one blue, they could not pick out which one was different from the others — or those who could see a difference took much longer and made more mistakes than would make sense to us, who can clearly spot the blue square.
But the Himba have more words for types of green than we do in English. When looking at a circle of green squares with only one slightly different shade, they could immediately spot the different one.
Davidoff says that without a word for a color, without a way of identifying it as different, it is much harder for us to notice what is unique about it — even though our eyes are physically seeing the blocks it in the same way.
