Before we can even name a hue, we have felt it as a sensory reality in our bodies. Blue and green affect us differently from red and yellow. As Kym Maclaren argues in an essay on embodied perception, 'That the stimuli of short duration produce an effect in in persons’ bodies before a colour is explicitly sensed, suggests that it is our sensitive-perceptual motor body, and not a knowing, thinking subject, that sense colours.' Colour acts in us.
∆ Siri Hustvedt, from The Drama of Perception: Living, Thinking, Looking
ref: _In 1969, two Berkeley researchers, Paul Kay and Brent Berlin, published a book on a pretty groundbreaking idea: Every culture in history invented words for colors in the exact same order.
They reached their conclusion based on a simple color identification test, where 20 respondents identified 330 colored chips by name. If a language had six words, they were always black, white, red, green, yellow, and blue. If it had four terms, they were always black, white, red, and then either green or yellow. If it had only three, they were always black, white, and red, and so on.
The theory was revolutionary, and it shaped our understanding of how color terminologies emerge. But the idea comes with a few caveats, since all languages do not treat colors the same way grammatically as English does.
ref: The Himba tribe - Because of the ways in which their colours are categorised, it influences the way Himba’s perceive the colours/ The findings supported the claim that language can in fact affect the way in which you see colour._