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Wine-dark sea
- Tharkun 7y agoI can recommend the book "Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages" to anyone interested in this sort of stuff.
- shredprez 7y agoEvery 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?
- vinceguidry 7y agoAlso maybe they literally had blue wine?
- Raphmedia 7y agoRed wine will turn blue when the pH gets too alkaline. You can also make actual blue wine using the grapes to make a dye, see Gïk's blue wine.
- jrumbut 7y agoThey also, to my understanding, mixed grape varieties, vintages, water, and perhaps other things in their wine, so it was quite a different beverage.
- wazoox 7y agoAs someone having sailed on the Mediterranean Sea, I never questioned the comparison of the colour of deep sea with red wine. Also remember that Homer didn't drink wine in glass, but in earthenware, often glazed black. I'm pretty sure a red wine seen in a black crater is very dark indeed, like the deep sea.
- gradstudent 7y agoThis 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.
- odyssey7 7y agoAnd 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.
- robotomir 7y agoAs discussed previously, people are seriously overthinking this. Everyone who has been on a boat knows that the deep water is almost black. Like, you know, thick red wine in a ceramic container.
- radamadah 7y agoI 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-17888/ 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.
- romaaeterna 7y agoYes, 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 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 actually survived, in frescoes, etc., the ancients display a reasonable eye for beauty in color.
- radamadah 7y agoYea, I agree the coloring they present in what I linked is quite... ugly. But what I was trying to get at is that it does seem that, at that point, the Greeks could distinguish between the color of wine and the color blue. And that therefore Homer's "wine-dark" is in reference to something other than color. (I had seen that video before, it's very enlightening.)
- olah_1 7y ago>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?
- mrmonkeyman 7y agoExactly. It is objectively ugly.
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- steanne 7y agorelated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Basic_color_terms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Basic_color_terms
- dmix 7y agoGreen/Yellow are grouped together which explains the description of Honey as yellow in the greek text...
- pavlov 7y agoIsn’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.
- asark 7y agoIt's not like bodies of water are always blue anyway. The ocean's not. I've seen the same broad stretch of the upper Mississippi appear anywhere from pale green to battleship grey, along with several shades of blue including almost sapphire. The lower part of the Missouri's mostly brown or grey. I'd assume anyone who described it as any kind of blue without apparent purpose or calling attention to how unusual that is had simply never seen it. The later example in TFA of the Bible using the phrase "red horse" is an odd one. There are red horses. Hell Steinbeck wrote a novella titled "The Red Pony". They're pretty common. What's the big deal?
- DFHippie 7y agoI 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.
- duskwuff 7y agoEven today, we often refer to cats or dogs with grayish fur as "blue", even though there's nothing blue about that color.
- simonh 7y agoI’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?
- googleanalytics 7y agohttps://medium.com/@skallasp/homers-wine-dark-sea-faq-15004acbccca https://medium.com/@skallasp/homers-wine-dark-sea-faq-15004a...
- klez 7y agoGreat read, but I take issue with a passage unrelated to the issue at hand > This would explain the obsession with mixing wine and water when it is is unheard of today. In Italy we still mix water with wine, especially when drinking during a meal. It's not like we do this all the time, but it's a thing.
- jrumbut 7y agoI will recommend, as I have before, the Lattimore translation of the Iliad which leaves in the wine dark sea, wine dark oxen, winged words (my favorite Homerism), and glancing eyed helmets. It preserves the fact that you are reading something that comes from a world no one alive today truly understands, even at a vocabulary level.
- tony_cannistra 7y agoMan, 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-word it was an adventure.
- DFHippie 7y ago> 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.
- tony_cannistra 7y agoYeah, I realize. Perhaps we just read Homer in English. Either way, translating epics like the Aeneid was thrilling.
- twic 7y agoI 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.
- rainydaybook 7y agoWhat'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?
- bhaak 7y agoOne 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.
- DFHippie 7y agoAnother 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.
- jowday 7y agoReminds 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.
- Slenth 7y agoOne 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.
- akanet 7y agoOr, even more in the spirit of the GP, is it a photograph that Severian calls a painting because he's never seen a photograph?
- Mediterraneo10 7y agoWhat is the evidence that Triskelion is not just a dog?
- glamp 7y agoFor anyone interested in more on this, Radiolab did a really good episode on colors which includes a bit about Homer: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/211119-colors https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/211119-colors
- awinter-py 7y agowine-face = smooth surface? texture not color?
- bladedtoys 7y agoEven 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".
- fluorocarbon 7y agoSince 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.
- lqet 7y agoExcellent 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 http://www.honig-onlineshop.at/upload/imgproc/398479_eb.jpg For which, in my opinion, "variations of green" is a perfectly valid description. I would also be perfectly comfortable with describing the color of this horse as "red": https://img.freepik.com/fotos-kostenlos/rotes-pferd-das-an-der-wiese-weiden-laesst_97070-595.jpg?size=626&ext=jpg https://img.freepik.com/fotos-kostenlos/rotes-pferd-das-an-d...
- krilly 7y agoThe 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, etc. What is to say these boundaries are objective? If in our own language red through orange was once referenced with a single word, why shouldn't red through blue have a single name in ancient Greek?
- michaericalribo 7y agoThen 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
- lsb 7y agoIt'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
- ncmncm 7y agoCultures 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.
- egdod 7y agoWe 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.
- ncmncm 7y agoThere is, about insisting on it. Especially since the Greek in question says nothing about "dark" or about "blue".
- jorblumesea 7y agoThe article cited by wikipedia as a source is really good: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sea/winelike-sea https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sea/winelike-sea
- samirillian 7y agoI 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 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.
- denkmoon 7y agoTribal 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.
- ars 7y agoThey did have a word for blue, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekhelet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekhelet
- petjuh 7y agoPerhaps 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.
- fpoling 7y agoThere were interesting tweets a year ago that perhaps ancients did have words for blue, https://twitter.com/search?q=blue%20(from%3APaulSkallas)%20until%3A2018-07-15%20since%3A2018-05-01&src=typed_query https://twitter.com/search?q=blue%20(from%3APaulSkallas)%20u...
- chx 7y agoI 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.
- Kecelij 7y agoTaleb writes about this extensively in his Antifragile.