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Wine-dark sea

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Re: Wine-dark sea

#31

Post by pvg »

DFHippie wrote: post #27
bhaak wrote: post #22

One 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.

Curiously enough, people now think ancient Greek statues and architecture were painted in (if reconstructions are to be believed) rather vivid colours.

Re: Wine-dark sea

#33

Post by twic »

tony_cannistra wrote: post #19

Man, 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…

I have similar memories of translating the Odyssey and the Anabasis from Greek at school!

There's a lovely line in the Anabasis about seeing an enemy army approaching from afar which describes "the flash of bronze". I always found that image so powerful; you can barely see these guys in the distance, just a smudge on the horizon, and then there's this flash of light as they lower their spears and the sun glints off them, and you know you're about to have a bad day.

There is a line in the Odyssey where someone (Telemachus?) puts an arrow on a table for the suitors to try and shoot from Odysseus's bow. The arrow is described as "naked", which i think is a poetic way of saying it was alone and conspicuous. This is the arrow with which Odysseus will soon begin his execution of the suitors, and you know that's coming, so this is a moment of real foreboding. The line ends "... γυμνός", and the feel of those syllables in my mouth is somehow incredibly heavy, like a gavel falling in judgment, or a tomb being sealed. I read that twenty years ago and the feeling is still with me.

Re: Wine-dark sea

#35

Post by bladedtoys »

Even between closely related cultures using the same language, there are color differences. Even though both the British and Americans have the words "pink", "magenta" and "purple", the British use the word "pink" over a larger range that includes colors most Americans would call "purple" or "magenta".

Re: Wine-dark sea

#36

Post by simonh »

DFHippie wrote: post #26
pavlov wrote: post #11

Isn’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.

I’d want to know why we are translating that word to mean green? Is is used to describe other green things, if so What? Did they have a word for yellow, and if so what was that used to describe?

Re: Wine-dark sea

#37

Post by cmroanirgo »

DFHippie wrote: post #26
pavlov wrote: post #11

Isn’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.

Pale honey in a morning light can definitely have a tinge of green. I'm no good at photography, but an sure others have captured it. It might be environmentally related and isn't actually green.

Eg. green sky (ignoring northern lights) can happen just before dawn when there is a slight smog (bushfire perhaps). But it's more white than anything, but it's definitely a band between the red sunrise and the blue sky. The honey green is similar... It's definitely still a pale golden color.

Re: Wine-dark sea

#38

Post by fluorocarbon »

Since I began studying Greek, the whole wine-dark thing has struck me as pretty silly. The actual phrase is οἶνοψ πόντος (oinops pontos) which means "wine-face sea." Pontos refers to the open sea, not the shallows or the sea near shore.

For some reason the English-speaking world thinks it has to be translated as a color word. Maybe because it was incorrectly translated as wine-dark? But it's not exclusively a color word, just like "metallic" is not exclusively a color word in English. It means exactly what it says: wine-faced, having a wine-like surface.

The Greeks didn't drink wine in glasses like we do today. They mixed wine in a giant mixing bowl called a κρατήρ (krater). It could be different colors and was sometimes cloudy, like natural wines are today. They often mixed in honey, herbs, and fruit. Wine was also seen as a god: we say that Dionysos was the god of wine, but to the Greeks, wine itself was commonly thought of as being Dionysos.

So when imagining an oinops pontos, instead of picturing of a glass of pinot noir, imagine a huge bowl sitting in a candle-lit room, filled with a dark cloudy liquid, still swirling and bubbling slightly, shapes occasionally surfacing, a sheen reflecting the flickering candle light, containing a mysterious divine power. That's what Homer's referencing when he says wine-faced. The surface of the sea is like the surface of that bowl of wine–probably with the implication of a mysterious divine power beneath.

Re: Wine-dark sea

#39

Post by olah_1 »

romaaeterna wrote: post #7
radamadah wrote: post #4

I know researchers have found how the ancient Greeks used to paint their sculptures, and that they used blue, green, and red as separate colors ( https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/true-colors-1788... ). I always considered that phrase in Homer as a poetic flourish, or maybe just something that was a figure of speech in his time period.

Yes, the ancient Greeks knew about the color blue, as do most old world primates. Here is an linguistic explanation of color language around the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg The sculpture reconstructions you've linked are rather imaginative -- German grad students with UV lights, not chemical reconstructions -- and are probably only vaguely like the original colors. Where original colors have ac…

>the ancients display a reasonable eye for beauty in color.

And yet, the reconstructions there are reminiscent of Indian religious art today. Do Indians not have a reasonable eye for beauty in color?

Re: Wine-dark sea

#40

Post by akanet »

Slenth wrote: post #29
jowday wrote: post #24

Reminds 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.

Or, even more in the spirit of the GP, is it a photograph that Severian calls a painting because he's never seen a photograph?
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