JAD ABUMRAD: Hey I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. We're gonna keep going with our show on colors now with a story about well -

ROBERT: The color of the sky.

JAD: The most beautiful color.

ROBERT: Well. [clears throat]

JAD: Well I think.

ROBERT: Except red.

JAD: Nah.

ROBERT: Yeah. You gotta -

JAD: It's a story that we find really surprising frankly. And it comes from our producer Tim Howard.

TIM HOWARD: Yes. Hello.

JAD: Who heard it from—do you wanna ...

TIM: Yeah.

JAD: ... set up who this guy is?

TIM: so Guy Deutscher is a linguist and a writer -

GUY DEUTSCHER: —and -

TIM: I came across his book -

GUY DEUTSCHER: —called Through the Language Glass.

TIM: And he tells this one particular story in it that—starts in I think 1858 with this guy William Gladstone who was incredibly famous politician in England.

GUY DEUTSCHER: He was 4 times prime minister in the second half of the 19th century.

TIM: Every school kid knows who he is even now.

JAD: Mm.

TIM: But there's one thing that not many people know about Gladstone.

GUY DEUTSCHER: Well he was a Homer fanatic.

[VOICEOVER: As the soldiers marched the glean went dazzling from the magnificent bronze, all about through the upper air to the heavens.]

GUY DEUTSCHER: He was a deeply religious man and for him the Iliad and all this—they were almost like second Bible.

[VOICEOVER: Sipping the black blood, the tall shade perceived me. And cried out sharply]

GUY DEUTSCHER: He read them over and over again throughout his life.

JAD: So he was into Homer.

TIM: Yes. And so early on in his career. Gladstone decided to write the definitive history of Homer.

GUY DEUTSCHER: This huge book actually three books.

TIM: Thousands of pages.

GUY DEUTSCHER: Where he discussed a whole range of of issues relating to Homer and his world.

TIM: And here's the thing—as he was reading—doing his research and everything -

GUY DEUTSCHER: He made this very strange discovery. That the way Homer talks about color in the Iliad and the Odyssey is extremely odd.

TIM: It's odd?

GUY DEUTSCHER: Very very odd.

TIM: How so?

GUY DEUTSCHER: To start with—he uses extremely strange [XX?] colors of simple objects—the most famous one perhaps is ...

[VOICEOVER: The wine dark sea.]

TIM: The wine—wine dark -

GUY DEUTSCHER: The wine dark sea it's it's -

TIM: It looks like wine.

GUY DEUTSCHER: Looks like wine.

TIM: Is it possibly like a—a a poetic kind of thing?

GUY DEUTSCHER: That's what you would naturally think but the other thing he calls—wine colored—oxen.

TIM: But but it's more than just wine. Take the color violet which to me and probably to you is like -

JAD: Purple—purple?

TIM: Yeah

JAD: Light purple.

TIM: When Homer uses it -

GUY DEUTSCHER: He talks about the sheep.

[VOICEOVER: The cyclops rams were ...]

GUY DEUTSCHER: And the cyclops caves as having -

[VOICEOVER: A dark violet wool.]

JAD: But that's just fantasy I mean -

TIM: But the other thing that he also says is violet is iron.

JAD: Iron.

TIM: So.

JAD: Okay.

TIM: Chew on that.

JAD: [laughs]

TIM: Or how bout this one. What is both the color of honey and the color of—faces pale with fear.

JAD: no idea.

TIM: If you ask Homer those are -

GUY DEUTSCHER: Green.

[VOICEOVER: Green honey?]

GUY DEUTSCHER: He didn't call his forest green, he didn't call his leaves green—it all seems to be wrong.

TIM: And this was totally puzzling to Gladstone.

GUY DEUTSCHER: Homer was Gladstone's absolute hero so he found it difficult to understand or accept why someone who was so perceptive would use such defective terms as Gladstone called it.

TIM: So he starts going through the Iliad and the Odyssey again page by page. And he counts how many time each color appears.

JAD: You mean like how many times he uses the word black or blue or whatever?

TIM: Yeah. And it only takes a couple pages for him to notice -

GUY DEUTSCHER: The predominance of black of white.

TIM: That the term black -

[VOICEOVER: Black days. Black carrion flies. Black blood. Under his black brows. Black black black black black black black ...]

TIM: Occurred about 170 times in both books.

JAD: Huh.

[VOICEOVER: White arms. White clad. The white sail. White raft.]

TIM: Occurred about 100 times.

[VOICEOVER: White white white ...]

TIM: But—red?

[VOICEOVER: A blood red serpent.]

TIM: Only clocks in at about 13 times.

[VOICEOVER: The red wine to the gods.]

JAD: That's a big drop.

TIM: Yellow?

[VOICEOVER: Dawn in her yellow robe.]

TIM: Under 10 times. Green?

[VOICEOVER: His teeth chatter in green fear.]

TIM: Also under 10.

JAD: Hmm.

TIM: And then—Gladstone realizes something crazy. The color blue?

[VOICEOVER: Um ... [pages flipping]]

TIM: Zero times.

JAD: What?

GUY DEUTSCHER: There's just nowhere that describes the color blue in any of Homer's poems.

JAD: He does not use the word blue at all?

GUY DEUTSCHER: No blue.

TIM: No blue.

JAD: Not even once.

TIM: Nope. So Gladstone thought Bizarre.

JAD: Yeah.

TIM: And he started looking in other classic Greek texts too. And there he kept finding all of these strange uses of color.

GUY DEUTSCHER: Violet hair and things like that.

TIM: And after thinking about this for a long time -

GUY DEUTSCHER: Gladstone concluded that Homer was colorblind. But also that all the Greeks were colorblind.

TIM: Wait he thought all of them were colorblind?

GUY DEUTSCHER: Yes. That they saw the world in black and white—maybe with a touch of red.

TIM: His thought was that they were straining to see these other colors that were kind of just outside of their reach. And then—their kid—would inherit that effort. Or their kid would just be a little bit better.

JAD: Oh so that's how we got color.

TIM: So Homer Jr would be able to see a little bit of yellow cause Homer tried really hard to see yellow and ...

JAD: And then Homer the third would be better than Homer the second and so -

TIM: Yeah and then this would happen again and again every generation down 3,000 years to the present day.

GUY DEUTSCHER: It does seem the only you know the only the only possible explanation.

JAD: That's ridiculous. That's ridiculous!

GUY DEUTSCHER: We know today of course that that there—our color vision goes back probably about three million years.

TIM: You know, so like when we were climbing trees.

GUY DEUTSCHER: Exactly. So generally -

TIM: People mocked him.

GUY DEUTSCHER: No one took him seriously.

JAD: So then how did people explain the no blue in Homer thing?

TIM: Well so here the plot thickens. 10 years after Gladstone's Homer debacle, this other guy -

GUY DEUTSCHER: A German-Jewish philologist called—Lazarus Geiger.

TIM: Lazarus Geiger.

JAD: A German Jewish what did he say?

TIM: A philologist which I thought was a linguist. It basically means he studies ancient texts. He finds pretty much the same kind of weird stuff that Gladstone did. But he finds it not just in Ancient Greek texts but all over the place.

[VOICEOVER: Sorry this one?]

GUY DEUTSCHER: He looked at the old Icelandic sagas.

[VOICEOVER: [Icelandic]]

GUY DEUTSCHER: Ancient Chinese.

[VOICEOVER: [Chinese]]

GUY DEUTSCHER: Ancient Vedic hymns.

[VOICEOVER: [Vedic]]

GUY DEUTSCHER: the Bible.

[VOICEOVER: [Hebrew?]]

GUY DEUTSCHER: And surprise surprise what did he find there?

TIM: No blue.

JAD: Even the Bible had no blue?

TIM: In the original Hebrew.

BROOKE WATKINS: [Hebrew]

TIM: It has no blue.

JAD: Huh.

TIM: So what where—what's this room?

BROOKE WATKINS: Right now we're in the public catalogue room.

TIM: I actually went to the NY public library and talked to this librarian.

BROOKE WATKINS: [German]

TIM: Who can speak German.

TIM: [German]

TIM: And we got out Geiger's book.

BROOKE WATKINS: Development history of mankind.

JAD: Wait a second I know this voice. Really?

TIM: Yeah that's that's my girlfriend.

BROOKE WATKINS: my name is Brooke Watkins and I'm a librarian at the New York Public Library.

TIM: She helped me find some very cool passages in Geiger's book.

TIM: Let's see it first—let's do it in German.

GUY DEUTSCHER: Geiger has this amazing quotation.

BROOKE WATKINS: Okay, [German]

GUY DEUTSCHER: But in the Vedic poems.

BROOKE WATKINS: [German?]

TIM: And what does this say?

BROOKE WATKINS: These hymns of more than 10,000 lines are brimming with descriptions of the heavens. Scarcely is there any subject about more frequently the sun and reddening dawns play of color day and night cloud and lightening—the air and the ether are unfolded before us. And over and over in splendor and vivid fullness. But there's only one thing that no one would ever learn from those ancient songs who do not already know it. And that is that the sky is blue.

TIM: It gets weirder.

JAD: Mm

TIM: You ready?

JAD: I'm—yeah.

TIM: You all ready for this?

JAD: I'm totally ready.

TIM: All right. Cause Geiger then wondered all right if there's no blue in any of these old texts then when did blue come into these languages?

JAD: Yeah.

TIM: So he did this massive analysis to trace when each color term was first introduced to each language. And what he found was -

GUY DEUTSCHER: The order at which languages seem to acquire these color terms is not entirely random.

TIM: First black and white—every language has black and white. Then when they get their first color term.

GUY DEUTSCHER: Red always comes first.

TIM: Always red.

GUY DEUTSCHER: After red it's always yellow.

JAD: Really?

TIM: Yeah

GUY DEUTSCHER: And then green and blue only at the very end.

JAD: So black white red green yellow and then blue?

TIM: Yeah.

JAD: And that's universal?

TIM: Well as people discovered more and more languages they found some exceptions. But a couple things held, even from Geiger. Out of these colors red is always first and blue is always last.

JAD: Why?

TIM: Well.

JAD: I mean why would there be an order at all and why would blue always be last?

TIM: Well here's where you get to the guessing part.

JAD: Okay.

TIM: Guy thinks it might have to do with a couple of things. First—in Homer's world, you wouldn't have actually been exposed to a lot of blue things.

GUY DEUTSCHER: Actually if you think about it blue is extremely rare in nature.

TIM: Blue foods?

JAD: No

TIM: Blue animals?

JAD: Blue animals -

TIM: How bout plants?

JAD: There's a few blu—blue plants.

TIM: Like what?

JAD: Uh...

GUY DEUTSCHER: Flowers that are really blue are extremely rare.

TIM: Lot of flowers that we think of as blue—they're actually -

GUY DEUTSCHER: Artificial flowers.

TIM: We made them blue. -

JAD: Genetically made them blue.

TIM: Yeah.

JAD: What about blue eyes?

GUY DEUTSCHER: Blue eyes at the time were in short supply—among the Greeks.

TIM: But here's where we get to Guy's main point. He says you don't really need a word for a color until you can make that color reliably. And the reason that red might have been first is because red is apparently one of the easiest to produce. You can just take a dried piece of red clay and you can use it as a crayon which is why paints made out of ochre go back something like 60,000 years. And blue? Blue is the hardest of all. For thousands of years no one had it.

GUY DEUTSCHER: One exception, the Egyptians.

TIM: Oh!

TIM: The Egyptians. And they and only they had their own word for blue.

JAD: So that's it? That's your answer?

TIM: Yeah.

JAD: Like—tell—no blue dyes, no blue words?

TIM: That's not interesting?

JAD: I—I want more than that.

TIM: Wait what do you mean more?

JAD: I don't know—something more to say than just about dyes.

TIM: All right well, here you go. As I was calling around I ran into something that made me think ...

[VOICEOVER: Is that two?]

TIM: A little differently about Gladstone's whole theory of color blindness.

JAD: Hm.

TIM: Called this guy named Jules Davidoff.

JULES DAVIDOFF: Professor of Neuropsychology, London University.

TIM: And a few years back, he got interested in this particular tribe in Namibia. Called the Himba.

JULES DAVIDOFF: The Himba. Like many languages in the world they don't have a different word for blue.

TIM: You might think of them as like a very poor stand in for Homer.

JAD: All right

TIM: And to make a long story short. Jules went to Namibia. He sat down with a bunch of members of the Himba tribe, whipped out of a laptop and showed them 12 colored squares.

JULES DAVIDOFF: All identical except for one.

TIM: And there's actually some really cool video footage of his research assistant doing this. And they asked them very simply -

JULES DAVIDOFF: Which one is different?

TIM: Now you look at this and you see that 11 of these squares are green.

JULES DAVIDOFF: A color we would call green -

TIM: Very green. And the other one is blue. This blue one it's it's shouting—it's like hey!! I'm blue! Over here I'm blue!

JULES DAVIDOFF: It's easy enough for us to do.

TIM: It's a no brainer. But the Himba who don't have a separate word for blue in their language -

JULES DAVIDOFF: They find this distinction a little difficult.

TIM: When they stare at this screen—they just stare and stare ...

JAD: They don't see the difference between the blue and the green?

TIM: No.

JAD: Well is there something wrong with their eyes?

JULES DAVIDOFF: No definitely not. We completely rule that out. They don't see color—the individual colors differently.

JAD: But then wait ...

JULES DAVIDOFF: It's so easy to say they're seeing different colors to us, and they're not.

JAD: Well then how does he explain it?

JULES DAVIDOFF: Okay. When we—when we decide to put colors together in a group.

TIM: And then give those colors a word like blue.

CHOIR: Blue

JULES DAVIDOFF: Something happens.

TIM: He says what happens is that now that there's a category for that thing—the thing in the category jumps out. It gets louder and louder to your eyes. The category actually feeds back on your perception—so that you notice it more.

JAD: You're saying that having the word for blue unlocks your ability to see blue?

TIM: I mean it—that's how it feels to me and Jules says ...

JULES DAVIDOFF: No it's not quite that.

TIM: He says without the word you're still seeing the blue no matter what. You're just not noticing it. Your—your eyes are just kind of glossing right over it.

JAD: So you don't see it.

TIM: [laughs] It's hard it's—it's—it's harder to spot, says Jules.

JAD: But whatever I don't quite understand that difference but -

TIM: The blue would not jump out and say hi five! The way it does with us.

JAD: But if it doesn't

TIM: Um

JAD: jump out to that extent—then—this is starting to sound very Gladstone-y to me.

TIM: [laughs] Yeah

JAD: I mean maybe he was a little right! Like cause if Homer had no word for blue and the word somehow enables the blueness of the blue—then maybe his world was less blue than it would be for us. I mean maybe the blue went through his eyes in the same way but it—perhaps didn't get into his mind in the same way.

TIM: Yeah blue didn't matter.

JAD: Wait a second. Do you know where this breaks down?

TIM: Where?

JAD: The [bleeped out] sky! I mean you look up and there's the bluest blue in the world and then it's right there above our heads. It's been there since the dawn of time. So why wouldn't blue matter more. I mean why wouldn't it be the first color instead of the last?

TIM: Well that's what I thought too and I asked Guy about that.

TIM: Yeah why is the sky blue is the first question that you always think of.

GUY DEUTSCHER: Exact—allegedly the first question that all children ask.

TIM: Yeah.

GUY DEUTSCHER: But I wanted to see how obvious or striking this blueness of the sky is. So I decided to make an experiment.

TIM: Guy has a very young daughter.

GUY DEUTSCHER: About 18 months. She was learning to speak.

TIM: What's her name?

GUY DEUTSCHER: Alma. I talked a lot about colors with Alma and taught her all the colors including blue. And we would play all these games that dads play with their children.

TIM: You know, pointing at objects.

GUY DEUTSCHER: I would point at a blue question and ask her what's the color of this—she would say boo. Boo for blue.

TIM: Oh okay. [laughs]

TIM: Soon enough Alma was a total pro she could identify any color.

GUY DEUTSCHER: Show me the red object show me the this—and -

TIM: Right.

GUY DEUTSCHER: The only thing I didn't do and I asked my wife not to do was ever mention that the sky was blue.

TIM: [laughs]

GUY DEUTSCHER: That was the setup.

TIM: So one day Guy and Alma were taking a stroll and they're practicing the colors.

GUY DEUTSCHER: What's this tree what's this what's this—and then I pointed at the sky and said—what color is that? And...she wouldn't give me any answer.

TIM: Huh.

GUY DEUTSCHER: Although she had just a second before would—was happily telling me that something was blue and red or green. She just looked up and looked at me incomprehendingly. Sort of—what are you talking about?

TIM: She thought you were kidding?

GUY DEUTSCHER: I think she didn't understand what I was on about.

TIM: Huh.

GUY DEUTSCHER: In retrospect there was no object there. There was nothing with color for her.

TIM: You're just pointing into the void basically.

GUY DEUTSCHER: Pointing into nothingness. So she wouldn't say anything.

TIM: But Guy kept asking every single time they went out.

GUY DEUTSCHER: Of course I would do it only when the sky was blue.

TIM: And she would never answer him. And this went on for two months.

GUY DEUTSCHER: And then finally she did consent to give me a color name but it wasn't blue, it was white.

TIM: [laughs]

GUY DEUTSCHER: For a few times she said white and then finally after a month and a half or two more months she said blue for the first time.

TIM: Wow.

GUY DEUTSCHER: But even then it wasn't consistently blue. So she—then she said once blue—mm no white mm no blue.

TIM: Did she eventually decide though—you know what dad it is blue.

GUY DEUTSCHER: Well no she never said it this way but eventually when I asked it became consistently blue. So she just would say blue.

TIM: Okay.

GUY DEUTSCHER: This was for me—really the point where I I could you know convince myself—convince at least my heart that this sort of allegedly perfect example of blue is not -

TIM: not so perfect.

GUY DEUTSCHER: So you know for Homer who never ever probably saw a blue object except the sky and the sea—never had a dad who sort of went on about blue objects and asking what the color of the sky was—the fact that he didn't lose sleep over it—doesn't seem so strange anymore.

JAD: You know it's kind of—now that I've heard this I'm a little—I'm a little rueing the moment when Alma decided the sky was blue. Let her have whatever color she wants it to be. Doesn't have to be blue.

ROBERT: Weirdly then color is a loss of innocence.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: It's like

JAD: Kinda.

ROBERT: having something fixed that for a while is just between you and your frenzied heart you know just -

JAD: And the sky is many colors, truthfully. On the other hand though—I'm disagreeing with myself now. If we all agree the sky is blue then that's something we can share—that she can share.

ROBERT: And then she's in conversation.

JAD: And then eventually she'll understand you know—this kind of blue.

ROBERT: Yeah there aren't blue moons, but there—but you know what one would—you know what one would—you know what it feels like.

JAD: Oh yeah.

ROBERT: It's not a happy night.

JAD: Mm mm

Masc Singer:—call me Mr. Blue

JAD: Still think it's the most beautiful color.

ROBERT: I just took red just to be contrary—I'm trying to think what my favorite color is, I don't -

JAD: I wanna thank all the musicians who were so generous to let us use their music this hour and joined in in our covers of the rainbow project.

JAD: You heard Reggie Watts with Rainbow Connection. Barbara Bennery with Over the Rainbow, Lonesome Organist with Green Onions, Nymph with Brown Rice, Yellow Ostrich with Sound and Vision, Rya Brass Band with Painted Black, Nico Mulley with Big Yellow Taxi, Shearwater with Black with the Color, Eric Freelander with Blue in Green, Marcy Playground with Whiter Shade of Pale, The Heat with Mellow Yellow, Tao Win with Blue, Snow Blink you just heard with Blue Moon. Dan Deacon right here with Colors. Busmans Holiday, Mr. Blue and our very own Tim Howard, aka Soultero—performing Green River. We'll be doing some cool things with these songs for the moment. Visit Radiolab.org.

[GUY DEUTSCHER: Hello Radiolab, this is Guy Deutscher.]

[BROOKE WATKINS: This is Brooke Watkins.]

[JASON LECROIX: This is Jason LeCroix.]

[GUY DEUTSCHER: Here's the notice. Radiolab is produced by—I don't know how to pronounce this—Jad Abumrad]

[BROOKE WATKINS: Our staff includes Ellen Horne, Soren Wheeler ...]

GUY DEUTSCHER: Pat Walters, Tim Howard ...]

[JASON LECROIX: Brenna Farrell ...]

[BROOKE WATKINS: Lynn Levy ...]

[GUY DEUTSCHER: Dylan Keefe,]

[JASON LECROIX: Melissa O Donnell and Sean Cole.]

[VICTORIA FINLAY: With help from Douglas T Smith, Brendan McMullon, and Rafael Bennin.]

[GUY DEUTSCHER: Okay.]

[VICTORIA FINLAY: Special thanks to Sarah Montague,]

[JASON LECROIX: Paul Heck, Nick Capudiche,]

[VICTORIA FINLAY: Ryan Levitt,]

[JASON LECROIX: Ivan Zimmerman,]

[VICTORIA FINLAY: [XX?]]

[GUY DEUTSCHER: [XX?]]

[BROOKE WATKINS: Winter Woodie,]

[JASON LECROIX: [XXX?] Walter,]

[VICTORIA FINLAY: And Carver Throdson.]

[GUY DEUTSCHER: Thanks, bye.]

-30-

 

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