The colour that did not exist

One colour is missing from the oldest texts of humankind: blue. Homer, in the Odyssey, describes the sea as dark as wine and calls the sky bronze, but never blue. In ancient Hebrew, in early Chinese, in the Icelandic sagas, the word is slow to appear or is simply not there.

It is not that those people were colour-blind. Their eyes saw exactly what ours see. What was missing was the word, and without a word a colour goes almost unnoticed. Blue was, in almost every culture, the last to be given a name, perhaps because it barely exists in nature as a pigment: there are no abundant blue flowers or animals, and blue dye was among the hardest to manufacture. Ancient Egyptian, which did know how to produce it, was among the first to name it.

To name something is to begin to see it. Language does not only describe the world: it decides which parts of it we pay attention to.

Source: Radiolab (WNYC Studios)