The sun is green.

Olioxenfree
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Anonymous 3 wrote: Sun Jun 04, 2023 3:16 pm I often wonder if everyone's colors are the same. Why? I don't know. I'm friggen weird.

For example, you are told a banana is yellow. Great. But do other people see it as your yellow, or do they see it as red? All they know is someone told them this is "yellow". Someone could hand you a sheet of paper and say "This is white". But maybe what is white to that person is seen as blue by the person they told. We'll never know.

I need a life, I guess.
We know that the majority of people see the same colors because we have studied the structure of the eye and the brain, why is what creates our vision and perception of color. Everyone’s eyes have slight differences which is why people may have more or less ability to recognize shades of colors, but for the most part they look the same. We can tell by studying the eye that other species have different perceptions of color, for example dogs see fewer colors while turtles see more.
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Aletheia
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Anonymous 1 wrote: Sun Jun 04, 2023 12:24 pm When you calculate the suns wavelength or visible light, it emits energy around 500 nm, which is close to blue-green on the visible light spectrum. So that means the sun is actually green!
Actually the sun emits light at more than one wavelength:

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mater-three
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Olioxenfree wrote: Mon Jun 05, 2023 12:32 am
mater-three wrote: Sun Jun 04, 2023 7:24 pm
Anonymous 3 wrote: Sun Jun 04, 2023 3:16 pm I often wonder if everyone's colors are the same. Why? I don't know. I'm friggen weird.

For example, you are told a banana is yellow. Great. But do other people see it as your yellow, or do they see it as red? All they know is someone told them this is "yellow". Someone could hand you a sheet of paper and say "This is white". But maybe what is white to that person is seen as blue by the person they told. We'll never know.

I need a life, I guess.
Who decided things should be called what they are? In other words, why is a car called a car and not a pencil?

We are very similar is our lack of life(ness). 😄
Car comes from the Latin word carrus, which refers to a wheeled vehicle. That’s why car is also the beginning of the words cart and carriage. All words have an origin.
I know that - but that’s not what I asked. Who decided what the word should be? It’s not about where it came from; it’s about the decision that it should be this. All the way back when cars were first invented - and, for that matter, who decided carrus should be a wheeled vehicle. Hopefully, that makes the question easier to understand. There is no answer to the question because no one knows it.
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RIZZY
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mater-three wrote: Mon Jun 05, 2023 8:49 am
Olioxenfree wrote: Mon Jun 05, 2023 12:32 am
mater-three wrote: Sun Jun 04, 2023 7:24 pm

Who decided things should be called what they are? In other words, why is a car called a car and not a pencil?

We are very similar is our lack of life(ness). 😄
Car comes from the Latin word carrus, which refers to a wheeled vehicle. That’s why car is also the beginning of the words cart and carriage. All words have an origin.
I know that - but that’s not what I asked. Who decided what the word should be? It’s not about where it came from; it’s about the decision that it should be this. All the way back when cars were first invented - and, for that matter, who decided carrus should be a wheeled vehicle. Hopefully, that makes the question easier to understand. There is no answer to the question because no one knows it.
I think you would really enjoy reading Sausser and the history of linguistics. There is more than one theory about how languages form. I personally think Sausser is spot on.
Mamaof5
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Anonymous 3 wrote: Sun Jun 04, 2023 3:16 pm I often wonder if everyone's colors are the same. Why? I don't know. I'm friggen weird.

For example, you are told a banana is yellow. Great. But do other people see it as your yellow, or do they see it as red? All they know is someone told them this is "yellow". Someone could hand you a sheet of paper and say "This is white". But maybe what is white to that person is seen as blue by the person they told. We'll never know.

I need a life, I guess.
I think about this a lot too. It’d make sense as to why people have different opinions on what colors go together
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RIZZY
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Anonymous 3 wrote: Sun Jun 04, 2023 3:16 pm I often wonder if everyone's colors are the same. Why? I don't know. I'm friggen weird.

For example, you are told a banana is yellow. Great. But do other people see it as your yellow, or do they see it as red? All they know is someone told them this is "yellow". Someone could hand you a sheet of paper and say "This is white". But maybe what is white to that person is seen as blue by the person they told. We'll never know.

I need a life, I guess.
I think I remember reading about how men tend to have a harder time distinguishing between different shades of the same color than women do, in general. Even when you account for cultural differences and rule out color blindness, there seems to be a genetic or physiological component to it. That explains why my husband can put on 3 different shades of green and not understand how his outfit doesn't match, lol.
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Aletheia
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The way people split the different frequencies into named ranges does differ, not only between individuals, but also between societies.

For example, Europeans didn't have a separate name for the frequencies we now think of as "orange" until quite recently (only about 500 years ago).

If you're more interested in the physiology than the psychology, there are details about the normal human rods plus 3 types of cone:

https://www.unm.edu/~toolson/human_cone_response.htm

and the rarer Tetrachromacy:

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They did. they called orange: yellow-red. Not super creative, but there’s plenty of evidence that they knew what orange as a color was. They both referenced and used it as a color in paintings
Aletheia wrote: Mon Jun 05, 2023 8:22 pm The way people split the different frequencies into named ranges does differ, not only between individuals, but also between societies.

For example, Europeans didn't have a separate name for the frequencies we now think of as "orange" until quite recently (only about 500 years ago).

If you're more interested in the physiology than the psychology, there are details about the normal human rods plus 3 types of cone:

https://www.unm.edu/~toolson/human_cone_response.htm

and the rarer Tetrachromacy:

Image
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Aletheia
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Anonymous 1 wrote: Mon Jun 05, 2023 8:51 pm
Aletheia wrote: Mon Jun 05, 2023 8:22 pm Europeans didn't have a separate name for the frequencies we now think of as "orange" until quite recently (only about 500 years ago).
They did. they called orange: yellow-red. Not super creative, but there’s plenty of evidence that they knew what orange as a color was. They both referenced and used it as a color in paintings
There are shades we variously call "greeny blue", "greenish blue" or "blueish green". But I'd argue those are more a description of those shades, than a separate actual name.

So, yes, in the year 1000 people could use words to indicate a patch of paint that we'd now name "orange", but I'd argue that the words they'd used to do the indicating were more like a description that a specific name.

Or, to put things another way, they moved from using the categories

"red" | "somewhere between red and yellow, but hard to say for certain which it is" | "yellow"

to

"red" | "somewhere between red and orange, but hard to say for certain which it is" | "orange" | "somewhere between orange and yellow, but hard to say for certain which it is" | "yellow"
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