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Wine-dark sea

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Re: Wine-dark sea

#61

Post by lsb »

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…

There's a beautiful essay by the late William Harris about exactly this: http://wayback.archive-it.org/6670/20161201175416/http://com...

The ancient Greek word purphureos, which comes into English as purple, meant something like "dark and shimmering", and described wine and blood and the sea as purphureos. Much like we describe many things as "iridescent" that aren't rainbow-y (Gk iris = rainbow)

Re: Wine-dark sea

#62

Post by crazygringo »

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…

Wow, thank you. I'd always wondered about the whole theory of missing terms for colors, as it had seemed like something wasn't adding up.... but your explanation makes so much more sense. Much appreciated.

Re: Wine-dark sea

#63

Post by ncmncm »

egdod wrote: post #52
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.

There is, about insisting on it. Especially since the Greek in question says nothing about "dark" or about "blue".

Re: Wine-dark sea

#64

Post by lsb »

michaericalribo wrote: post #48

Then there are the Homeric epithets, which recur and are believed to be a mnemonic device...so "wine-dark sea" is not only a descriptor, but an anchor to remember the surrounding verse. I believe this was a 20th-century discovery, no less, and even "ancient" texts have dimensions that are easily overlooked

It's a "formula". Kleos aphthiton I think was the first discovery, back in the 1790s, that's etymologically equivalent to sravas aksitam in the Sanskrit (hence, they are from an Indo-European language family), but you're dead on, it was only in the 1930s or so Milman and Parry documented oral composition of stories in Eastern Europe, with tape recorders of the time iirc

The Cal Watkins book "How To Kill A Dragon" is superb for a discussion of formulae in Indo-European languages

Re: Wine-dark sea

#65

Post by thaumasiotes »

Iv wrote: post #47
lqet wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it suddenly a description of color there? Why not? This is poetry, not an exact science, so playing with the meaning of words is not only completely acceptable, but desirable. Why shouldn't 'wine-faced' relate to the surface texture of wine in one occasion, and to its color in another? There certainly wasn't room for any confusion, because even if the ancient Greeks had a different understanding of colors than o…

> (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…

> So is it possible that in the distant past, a civilization would consider dark red and dark blue the same color? That instead of one "blue" category they would mix several other unnamed colors?

> I can believe it.

Different cultures divide the color space differently, but they don't lay it out differently. For a civilization to consider dark red and dark blue to be the same color, those colors would need to show similar activation profiles, both for blue-yellow cones and for red-green cones.

Re: Wine-dark sea

#66

Post by RomanBob »

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…

Maybe you should add it to the wiki discussion page?

Re: Wine-dark sea

#67

Post by valarauko »

krilly wrote: post #46
lqet wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent write-up, which to me makes complete sense. Something that also struck me as strange was this remark in the Wikipedia article: > The Bible mentions a "red horse", not far from Homer's red oxen, while honey is described using variations of green in both of these texts. Here is a glass of honeydew honey: http://www.honig-onlineshop.at/upload/imgproc/398479_eb.jpg For which, in my opinion, "variations of green…

The reason 'red' is acceptable to describe the horse, despite the fact that it is clearly not red, is because the concept of orange only entered the English languange relatively recently. Before that it was described as red, and some vestiges of this remain (e.g. redhead). Imagine a continuous colour wheel. Most people from the same culture today will draw the same boundaries between colors. Red, purple, blue, green,…

Red through blue covers a vast segment of your continuous colour wheel analogy, perhaps some two thirds. How likely is it that an ancient culture would have a single word for such a vast expanse of the natural world? Not impossible, just highly unlikely.

Re: Wine-dark sea

#68

Post by Iv »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #65
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…

> So is it possible that in the distant past, a civilization would consider dark red and dark blue the same color? That instead of one "blue" category they would mix several other unnamed colors? > I can believe it. Different cultures divide the color space differently, but they don't lay it out differently. For a civilization to consider dark red and dark blue to be the same color, those colors would need to show si…

Or they would have to attribute more importance to luminosity than hue. In the absence of artificial light, low-light vision is much more important than differences in color as humans would spend a huge part of their awaken time in luminosity insufficient to discern colors.

Re: Wine-dark sea

#69

Post by vidarh »

Iv wrote: post #57
lqet wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

But we have many terms that are not clear cut in most western languages either.

Ask people what they consider cyan vs.turquoise, and some will insist they are the same and some will insist they are distinct. Ask them to draw a boundary between either and blue or green, and the boundaries will be different.

Ask them what is magenta vs. purple vs violet or even pink and again some will insist two or more of them are the same,and some will have strong opinions of what falls on either side that may not match the ’objective' categorization.

Re: Wine-dark sea

#70

Post by ars »

simonh wrote: post #36
DFHippie wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You are correct, the word that is today translated as green "Yarok" meant yellow in those days.

It is used to describe gold and an egg: http://www.balashon.com/2006/08/yarok.html?m=1

The language shifted not the color.

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