• @ace_garp
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    1610 months ago

    That certain tribes who live in a jungle setting can discern and have names for about 40 different shades of green, where a city dweller would see them all as being exactly the same shade.

    • @paddirn
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      English
      810 months ago

      I think I’ve read before that our eyes are most sensitive to the color green out of any other color, something about it that wavelength of light is absorbed more readily by the cones in our eyes. Being exposed to it daily and maybe having their survival dependent on it probably helps them develop that ability.

      • Justas🇱🇹
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        fedilink
        210 months ago

        Yes, I paint in free time and getting the right shade of green to make natural scenes look realistic is extremely difficult.

      • @niktemadur
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        010 months ago

        Another one is how Eskimos have 53 words for “snow”, not just “powder” and “slush”, but everything in between and beyond.

        Fun fact: if we could see through the intensity of sunlight to pick up its’ color, it turns out green light is the most prevalent photon wavelength.
        Surely this and phenomena like photosynthesis are directly related.

      • @Paragone
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        -110 months ago

        Linux Journal was interviewing a guy who’d worked on OS/2 at IBM…

        He said that we’ve got 2x the sensitivity to green as to red, & 2x the sensitivity to red as to blue.

        Basically, we’ve got 1-bit more sensitivity to green than to red, & 1-bit more sensitivity to red than to blue.


        I’ve read in linguistics stuff that tribes that have 2 words for color have 1 word which means bright & 1 word which means dark,

        tribes with 3 words have a word for blood-color, as well…

        green doesn’t seem to be as significant in the words-for-it department of tribal life, from what I’ve read.

        _ /\ _

    • @[email protected]
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      410 months ago

      Do you have a source? There is a common myth that innuits have 100+ words for snow, which is stretch beyond any reasonable sense, I’m afraid this might be similar.

      • @ace_garp
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        510 months ago

        The main studies of a persons language constraining their colour perception derive from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

        This article explains some of the different language and perceptions across different cultures:

        https://abnormalways.com/color/color-perception-across-cultures/

        The peoples I had heard of previously, are the Himba tribespeople, with a ‘hyper-perception’ of green hues.

        This is an ongoing research area, and I was hoping someone in the field could outline the recent key changes in understanding of cultural effects on colour perception.

        There are papers such as this one, that I can partially follow, but would benefit from an interpretation from others more knowledgeable than me.

        https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0158725