What's odd is that there are many instances of odd use of color in descriptions but there is no normal (to us) usage, and from what I've read the same applies to other ancient sources. Honey is green (in Homer), but there's no green trees, green leaves, grass, etc; there is no blue sky or blue sea. The linguistic analysis of when separate colors were introduce into languages also shows they were added at very different times. William Gladstone wasn't very careful in his phrasing when he wrote on the topic and so it from the start got a bit of a reputation of a crazed theory, but there is something odd about the whole thing. I think it's not resolved because serious researches familiar with ancient egyptian and sumerian languages don't find this interesting enough to research it? Perhaps there's too few of them and too many other, more important and unresolved questions?
Wine-dark sea
21–30 of 84 posts
Re: Wine-dark sea
#22One of the proposed explanations is that the ancient Greeks didn't have a fully developed mental model of colors and used them more along on a light/dark axis than dividing the colors into strictly separate color terms (also remember that bright pure colors weren't a thing).
I can relate to this idea as my memories are not filled with vivid colors. They are also not completely colorless as I remember there being colors but pinpointing what color certain objects had is sometimes difficult if the color was not a significant property of the object.
For example, remembering/picturing that grass is green is not a problem. Or that the sea at the beach was of a vivid blue because this was the memorable impression. But remembering which exact color the dress somebody was wearing had, this might be difficult. I'll remembering that it was a brightly colored dress and therefore will be "seeing" in my mind a bright dress that is colored, but without "seeing" a specific color but also "seeing" it with some excluded colors (like dark gray, brown, jeans blue) that are not bright.
It might be significant that Homer's stories were told for a relatively long time before they were written down. Oral poetry has other requirements than written poetry as you have to keep everything in memory and can't rely on an external source.
Re: Wine-dark sea
#23related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Basic_color_terms
Green/Yellow are grouped together which explains the description of Honey as yellow in the greek text...
Re: Wine-dark sea
#24Reminds me of Gene Wolfe's use of language in Book of the New Sun. BOTNS is set on a far-future dying earth, and (unreliably) narrated by the protagonist Severian and translated into contemporary English.
Close readings reveal dramatic differences between the book's setting and our world that aren't at all apparent if you rush through the books. The protagonist refers to his pet as a dog, but reading his descriptions of the creature closely you might realize his definition of a dog is very different from our own. At another point in the story, the protagonist has a vision of a blue sky and describes it as incomprehensibly bright, indicating that the sun has dimmed and the planet is stuck in a sort of perpetual twilight.
Once the reader notices these things, they might start to realize just how different the setting of the book is. Suddenly everything in the text is open to interpretation. At one point you realize that people who operate spaceships in this setting are referred to as sailors. Does that mean all of the other 'sailors' that Severian encountered previously are actually interstellar travelers? What about the character who spoke with a sailor's accent? Was that horse that Severian rode an actual horse, or some far-future alien analog? Many of these moments are very brief and easy to miss - the book doesn't take time to explain or emphasize this divergent use of language. You can read this book over and over and still get something new out of it.
Re: Wine-dark sea
#25Man, one of the teachers who has made the most significant impact upon me was my middle school Latin teacher back in Providence (we translated Homer from Latin). She had such a passion for the language, and for idioms like this, that it was infectious, even to a bunch of shithead middle schoolers. I still get a little pang of excitement when I read this phrase, such was the drama of translating the Iliad. Word-for-wo…
> we translated Homer from Latin
Maybe you mean Horace? Homer wrote in Greek. It seems like if you were going to translate a Latin epic you'd go for the Aeneid.
Re: Wine-dark sea
#26Isn’t “wine dark” used in Homer to describe the sea at dawn? I’ve associated it to mean dark with a hint of purple from the rising sun — not literally ruby-colored. It seems odd that English-speaking people would get overly literal about this expression when English itself is full of similar exaggerative coloring: someone “ashen-faced” is presumably not light gray and devoid of hue all over their skin, etc.
I think phrases like "yellow dog", "red cow", and "bluegrass" make sense if you understand them to mean relatively yellow, red, or blue. That is, a yellow dog is a dog that is yellow for a dog. A red cow is redder than you expect a cow to be even if relative to a bird, say, it is brown.
I don't know how you go from here to green honey, though.
Re: Wine-dark sea
#27One of the proposed explanations is that the ancient Greeks didn't have a fully developed mental model of colors and used them more along on a light/dark axis than dividing the colors into strictly separate color terms (also remember that bright pure colors weren't a thing). I can relate to this idea as my memories are not filled with vivid colors. They are also not completely colorless as I remember there being colo…
Another thing to keep in mind is that until the advent of dyes most things were just their natural color. You don't need a separate word for green if unexpected things are never green. And even if they sometimes are, you can just say that the unexpected thing has the same color as something you expect to be green.
Re: Wine-dark sea
#28Isn’t “wine dark” used in Homer to describe the sea at dawn? I’ve associated it to mean dark with a hint of purple from the rising sun — not literally ruby-colored. It seems odd that English-speaking people would get overly literal about this expression when English itself is full of similar exaggerative coloring: someone “ashen-faced” is presumably not light gray and devoid of hue all over their skin, etc.
I think phrases like "yellow dog", "red cow", and "bluegrass" make sense if you understand them to mean relatively yellow, red, or blue. That is, a yellow dog is a dog that is yellow for a dog. A red cow is redder than you expect a cow to be even if relative to a bird, say, it is brown. I don't know how you go from here to green honey, though.
Even today, we often refer to cats or dogs with grayish fur as "blue", even though there's nothing blue about that color.
Re: Wine-dark sea
#29Reminds me of Gene Wolfe's use of language in Book of the New Sun. BOTNS is set on a far-future dying earth, and (unreliably) narrated by the protagonist Severian and translated into contemporary English. Close readings reveal dramatic differences between the book's setting and our world that aren't at all apparent if you rush through the books. The protagonist refers to his pet as a dog, but reading his descriptions…
One of my favorite moments in this book that brought this concept to light for me, is when Severian describes a painting of a knight in a desert wearing a featureless orange helm. It's a painting of an astronaut on the moon.
Re: Wine-dark sea
#30Man, one of the teachers who has made the most significant impact upon me was my middle school Latin teacher back in Providence (we translated Homer from Latin). She had such a passion for the language, and for idioms like this, that it was infectious, even to a bunch of shithead middle schoolers. I still get a little pang of excitement when I read this phrase, such was the drama of translating the Iliad. Word-for-wo…
> we translated Homer from Latin Maybe you mean Horace? Homer wrote in Greek. It seems like if you were going to translate a Latin epic you'd go for the Aeneid.
Yeah, I realize. Perhaps we just read Homer in English. Either way, translating epics like the Aeneid was thrilling.