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Wine-dark sea

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Re: Wine-dark sea

#51

Post by ncmncm »

Cultures with few color words are, generally, those without paints to choose among. You just don't need any particular precision about colors if you don't need to make decisions about them.

People from cultures we like to call "primitive" are routinely astonished at how blind most of us are to critical distinctions in their world. Imagine, we have only one kind of uncle! "We" doesn't say whether the listener is included, or whether the group are all blood relatives. There's no end to this stuff, including in ancient Greek, so quibbling about color distinctions when we have to wash out so much to translate is distinctly ... hick.

Re: Wine-dark sea

#52

Post by egdod »

ncmncm wrote: post #51

Cultures with few color words are, generally, those without paints to choose among. You just don't need any particular precision about colors if you don't need to make decisions about them. People from cultures we like to call "primitive" are routinely astonished at how blind most of us are to critical distinctions in their world. Imagine, we have only one kind of uncle! "We" doesn't say whether the listener is inclu…

We might not have a particular word to call out those distinctions, but they’re hardly mysterious. They can be described in a couple or a few words, and everybody would understand. They just aren’t considered important enough to warrant a dedicated word.

Not drawing a distinction between blue and dark, however, is quite alien. And there isn’t anything hick about admitting that.

Re: Wine-dark sea

#53

Post by odyssey7 »

gradstudent wrote: post #16
reb wrote: post #3

Every time this wanders across the front page of HN, I wonder: What are the chances this is more a description of the murkiness or opacity of a dark sea (compared to water near the shore) rather than the literal color of the water?

This comment should be higher. That a poet should want to compare the viscosity and opacity of the sea to wine is a much more simple explanation -- and to my mind much more likely -- than exotic theories to explain why ancient Greeks didn't have the colour blue.

And the blue-was-perceived-differently theory has so much other evidence for it that is compelling besides this one metaphor. It's a beautiful choice of words that inspire, but people put too much weight on it as a riddle that can be or has been cracked.

Re: Wine-dark sea

#54

Post by danans »

CrazyStat wrote: post #42
fluorocarbon wrote: post #38

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 w…

It's a nice theory but how do the wine-face oxen fit into it? Is it suddenly a description of color there, or are they also a dark cloudy liquid, still swirling and bubbling sightly, etc.?

We have a much more abstract concept of color today than people had in the pre modern area.

Before the days of color charts, the colors and textures of objects were often described by analogy to other objects.

And the color descriptive analogies didn't have to be consistent across all their uses. They just had to work in the context in which they appeared.

Re: Wine-dark sea

#56

Post by povertyworld »

fluorocarbon wrote: post #38

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 w…

Coincidently, I was just reading the M.L. West translation of Hesiod earlier today, and he also used the term "wine-faced sea" a few times.

Re: Wine-dark sea

#57

Post by Iv »

lqet wrote: post #50
Iv wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (example: in our color system, wine is red, and a traffic light is red. Yet you distinctly know that a red traffic light does not have the color of wine) But would you call the green light blue? Because I know some Japanese who do. Green/Blue is not as clear cut in some colors. And for many in Japan, the shinto gates (The torii) is not red. It is of its own color, between red and orange. I see it is often translate…

> But would you call the green light blue? Because I know some Japanese who do But that was not my point. Obviously, color categories are not fixed and may differ from culture to culture, yet you still know that "wine" (classified as red in western culture) has a different color than a traffic light. It does not matter that Japanese would call the green light blue, the same color they would (probably) say a clear sum…

I have learned French (native) then English and German without encountering that problem. My exposure to Japan is the first time that brought this up. I think it is not a very common knowledge.

And especially coming from a culture where some colors seem to be labeled as "objective" categories (we learn at school that magenta, yellow, cyan, are the core colors. Tech people learn the same for red green and blue) it is strange at first to realize that some cultures do not consider these categories so clear-cut.

Re: Wine-dark sea

#58

Post by danans »

CrazyStat wrote: post #42
fluorocarbon wrote: post #38

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 w…

It's a nice theory but how do the wine-face oxen fit into it? Is it suddenly a description of color there, or are they also a dark cloudy liquid, still swirling and bubbling sightly, etc.?

Fwiw, oxen can be very wine-colored, i.e:

https://smallfarmersjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/s...

Re: Wine-dark sea

#59

Post by samirillian »

I remember that "On the Sublime" references the phrase wine-dark, and considers it prototypically sublime. I think the metaphor is inherently mysterious, as all good metaphors are.

c.f., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Sublime

edit - found the passage

How unlike to this the expression which is used of Sorrow by Hesiod, if indeed the Shield is to be attributed to Hesiod:

Rheum from her nostrils was trickling. (Shield of Heracles 267)

The image he has suggested is not terrible but rather loathsome. Contrast the way in which Homer magnifies the higher powers:

And far as a man with his eyes through the sea-line haze may discern,

On a cliff as he sitteth and gazeth away o’er the wine-dark deep,

So far at a bound do the loud-neighing steeds of the Deathless leap. (Iliad 5. 770)

He makes the vastness of the world the measure of their leap. The sublimity is so overpowering as naturally to prompt the exclamation that if the divine steeds were to leap thus twice in succession they would pass beyond the confines of the world.

Re: Wine-dark sea

#60

Post by denkmoon »

Tribal societies not having a word for blue is fascinating. How do they describe the colour of the open sky??

Blue pigments are quite rare in nature, but seeing the open sky has to be a universal human experience.

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