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Wine-dark sea

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Re: Wine-dark sea

#71

Post by thaumasiotes »

Iv wrote: post #68
thaumasiotes wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In the absence of artificial light, people mostly sleep when it's dark.

Re: Wine-dark sea

#72

Post by ars »

lqet wrote: post #41
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…

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 yellow/green thing from the Bible is simply a mistake in Wikipedia.

The word that today means green "yarok" was used in the past to describe gold and an egg: http://www.balashon.com/2006/08/yarok.html?m=1

Re: Wine-dark sea

#73

Post by ars »

denkmoon wrote: post #60

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.

They did have a word for blue, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekhelet

Re: Wine-dark sea

#74

Post by wirrbel »

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…

These are all languages from the same spot n earth with lots of cultural exchange. I am not very surprised that you didn't encounter drastic differences.

I think though there are tiny ones that are interesting.

German "blaues Auge" - (blue eye) is a black eye in English (like one after a bar fight). This is because blue is associated with sadness in English and blue eyes (correct me if I am wrong, not an English native) are sad eyes. Blue in German is however rather overloaded with being drunk. And the blue eye doesn't seem to conflict with that. "Blau machen" is to call in sick to work while actually not being sick.

So who knows what associations were made with wine color? Maybe the lack of control, similar to being drunk..

For red, orange and yellow I think there is large variance in how people would classify a given color that is not really red or really yellow.

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My personal guess would be that I could believe that Greeks did not really have a name for blue. I'd say it is implausible that they were biologically incapable of differentiating things, but it may just have been a different shade to them.

Re: Wine-dark sea

#75

Post by petjuh »

Perhaps people didn't need a word for blue because they could say "the color of sky". For example the English word "green" comes from "grow" in PIE, meaning "the color of (plant) growth".

Even "yellow" comes from "grow" although the sound changes there are significant enough that it's not as obvious as "green" is.

Re: Wine-dark sea

#76

Post by stevula »

danans wrote: post #54
CrazyStat wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kind of like orange, rose, pink... though I doubt most people consider the literal meaning when using those adjectives (except for rose perhaps).

Re: Wine-dark sea

#77

Post by petjuh »

ars wrote: post #72
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 yellow/green thing from the Bible is simply a mistake in Wikipedia. The word that today means green "yarok" was used in the past to describe gold and an egg: http://www.balashon.com/2006/08/yarok.html?m=1

What's interesting is that both green and yellow come from a common root wood which originally meant grow/growth.

They were the colors if plant growth - green in summer and yellow in autumn.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-E...

Re: Wine-dark sea

#78

Post by petjuh »

pvg wrote: post #31
DFHippie wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those statues are from a later period than Homer. Not saying that they didn't have access to dyes during his time, though.

Re: Wine-dark sea

#80

Post by chx »

I can wholeheartedly recommend the book Wikipedia mentions Deutscher, Guy (Aug 4, 2016). Through the Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages. Random House.
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