this video about "why the ancient greeks 'couldn't see' blue" is better than most of the bullshit out there but it gets a loooot of the descriptions of the real answer very wrong

firstly, before i go on about the general wrongth: the comment that he makes about the Himba is.. kind of bogus

yes its true that they take longer to distinguish the colors as described, but it's literally only tens of milliseconds and you need lots of data and stats to see it

i'll come back to the Himba issue later but on to the real issue:

the video presents the issue as "they didn't have a word for blue but they did have words for 'black' etc"

but this is wrong and misleading

to say that they "had a word for black" sounds, to the average person..

..that.. well, they had a word for black. that is to say, that there is a word in that language that has the same meaning as the word "black" does in English

but, is that true? no, of course not. if you look at what they say in the video, and how people use the words..

..its clear that what's actually happening i that there is some word which has as its meaning colors that _include_ black, but ALSO include blue

and this is being translated as "black"

but this is just a BAD TRANSLATION

so right off the bat we can CLEARLY see that it's not true that "they had a word for black"

because no, they did not have a word that had the SAME MEANING as the english word "black", just, demonstrably and by admission of the same people saying it

this is the same thing for red, yellow, green, etc. always always always whats going on is that there are words in these other languages that do NOT line up with color words of English, but for some reason people have insisted on translating them with English words

and so people who come to this situation later get terribly confused and think that this means that they "had a word for black" but then they also used that word for other colors too, in some desperate attempt at metaphor, or whatever

now, this is sloppy thinking on @AsapSCIENCE's part, but they're not the only one who does this, almost everyone who engages in popular science discourse does this

as a former academic linguist, my senses regarding semantics are little more attuned to this kind of issue

now, back to the Himba instance, because it's quite interesting and demonstrates some further problems with popsci nonsense about language:

everything you watch about the Himba color stuff portrays them as ~dramatically~ slower at determining if two color swatches as the same

just absolutely everything. i saw one video that included footage from the experiments that showed like MULTI-SECOND PAUSES WITH CUTS for the slow cases

but this is ALL for effect. if you dig up the actual paper you find that the actual timing differences are 10s of milliseconds

and its important here to note that, while they almost certainly do have different timings, the question that we usually hear -- "are these the same color?" -- is NOT the actual question that is being asked, because of course that can have so many interpretations

are they the same as in very very similar visually? or are they the same as in "would i use the same name for them?"

which you're asking is going to strongly influence the behavior you get from people because the former is not *necessarily* depending on naming conventions

the latter will _require_ engaging linguistic knowledge and so might expect some strong timing differences when you're near so called "boundaries" (which are never really boundaries tbh)

but the former MIGHT be completely detached from language, and we should expect it to be

coming to all of these issues from a an academic linguists perspective means having it drilled into my head for a decade that our first responsibility as linguists is to merely describe facts of language as they exist without judging them

the statement that "the ancient greeks had the word black", as is often described, is a conclusion not a description of a fact

i mean it should be superficially false because they literally didnt have the word "black" they had some greek word instead!

and this should be everyone's first clue, including @AsapSCIENCE's, that there was something fishy going on in the reasoning, because the moment you say instead the mere fact

"the ancient greeks had a color word 'mélanos', which meant 'black'", you cant help notice the flaw

the flaw being... "why did you think it meant black? what if that's not true?"

and as a linguist, we're trained to do things like stop at the comma:

"the ancient greeks had a color word 'mélanos'"

and then we ASK, "ok now what did it mean?"

and if we merely describe the _facts_, we can see, it was used to mean a whole range of colors

thats what it meant. it meant black, blue, brown, etc etc etc.

it was NOT a word for black.

this is the same restraint we must use with the question posed to the Himba

we must ask, what does "same" mean here? what are they actually being asked? etc.

we must be careful to not judge the experiment and instead report on it

they were not asked, in english, "are these the same color?"

they were asked some other question, in himba

the entire exercise must be one of restraint -- just describing facts absent judgment or conclusion (which includes translation), because everything else is problematic

another thing to keep in mind when looking for linguists who talk about these things is that funding comes from agencies that determine things based on apparent importance

if you can make your life's work and passion out to be some deep, profound thing about How Humans Think..

..then that's big and impactful and you'll get funded. if on the other hand you say "oh this is a relatively minor effect and doesnt have any significant impact on human behavior" that's not going to inspire the NSF to give you a million bucks

some linguists have built their careers on this kind of over selling of their work, making it sound more profound than it actually is because thats the best way to get funding: massive hype machine, with a healthy dose of overzealous conclusion bullshit

ive seen this happen from the inside, seeing grant proposals being written in this flowery language that makes some mundane thing sound like its the biggest brain insight since the discovery of neurons, and ive seen the other side, of the people judging proposals

ive seen the NSF committee folx advise students to play up the importance, to make it all sound amazing, because it makes the NSF look good if they fund big important impactful research

this is the necessary PR bullshit that we get in academia under capitalism