6 ms·

How to make sense of ancient Greek colours (2020)

46 points by benbreen 4y ago

thaumasiotes 4y ago
I'm a little uncomfortable with the author's insistence that hue, saturation, and value are objective physical measurements: > Outlined are the controls for three parameters which define the physical parameters of any colour uniquely. ‘Hue’ for the part of the spectrum the colour falls on; ‘saturation’ for the range from grey to vivid; and ‘value’ for lightness-darkness. > Hue, saturation, and value represent only the physical characteristics of coloured light. I don't think this is right. Hue, saturation, and value are statements about human perception, not about the physical characteristics of light. A description of the physical characteristics of some light would look like a histogram plotting the wavelength of the light against the amount of light present at each wavelength. How do you interpret HSV from that? Well, value is pretty straightforward: the greater the area plotted in your histogram, the higher the value, I guess. More light -> more value. This falls apart if we're considering light of a single wavelength, where increasing the amount of light doesn't cause the color to get more washed out. Saturation is less straightforward, but the idea is there: a color with low saturation (greyish) should have a histogram that looks more or less flat, and a color with high saturation should have a histogram characterized by a lot of zeroes and spikes. The number of spikes in the histogram is... completely arbitrary. Then we come to hue and our model completely falls apart. Hue is purely subjective and there's no way to systematically relate it to light wavelengths. The article comes close to suggesting that hue is objectively significant: > In the colour circle at the left, the direction from the centre represents hue > Most English speakers would be comfortable using ‘blue’ to refer to all of the top left quarter of the circle. But we wouldn’t feel nearly as comfortable grouping all of the bottom right quarter under a single term. This is true, but it's an artifact of an arbitrary definition of hue. You could change how much angular space is assigned to each color without causing any problems in the HSV model. There's another interesting claim in the piece: > Gladstone does make a starkly racist declaration that ancient colour systems are ‘less mature’ than contemporary English. It seems pretty likely that Gladstone would have been happy to claim that he and the ancient Greeks belonged to the same race. Why is this a starkly racist declaration?
- pvg 4y ago
  It seems pretty likely that Gladstone would have been happy to claim Well, he did write a book titled The Ethnology of the Greek Races. Victorians had a fairly different, more granular notion of 'race' but most of them took racial determinism as a given, they were fundamentally racist in the most literal sense. They came up with stuff like this, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_race
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- jacobolus 4y ago
  > Hue, saturation, and value are statements about human perception, not about the physical characteristics of light Color in general is a statement about human perception, not physical characteristics of light. As Newton said, “the rays are not colored”. Hue, chroma, and value are human-perceptual color attributes. They vary based on spatial and temporal context, and vary from observer to observer. But people should not use the HSV color model (or your favorite image editor’s color picker) for this kind of analysis. It is a garbage tool for just about every purpose, but especially for this one. Munsell’s model, which is much more perceptually uniform, or e.g. the World Color Survey chart based on it https://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/images/jrus-20100531/wcs-chart-4x.png https://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/images/jrus-20100531/wcs-... are much clearer.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > Color in general is a statement about human perception, not physical characteristics of light. As Newton said, “the rays are not colored”. The color is fully and solely determined by the wavelength of the light, and the wavelength is an objective physical phenomenon; it is not crazy to talk about the objective realities of color. But yes, it's full of pitfalls.
    - jacobolus 4y ago
wolverine876 4y ago
Scholarly articles are such a pleasure, I find. The author isn't supposing or hyperbolizing, but actually deeply informed, by a lifetime of work, and wields their knowledge well.
gumby 4y ago
> Personally, I think the more insidious problem is translation between languages. Anyone who has multiple common languages with a friend knows this well. It’s quite common to drop a word from a different language into the middle of a sentence even when the sentence’s language has a word for it, just because there can be meaningful nuance or partition that the speaker wants to convey. Strangely, doctrine in the US seems to be that one shouldn’t mix languages in a sentence when speaking to children. Somehow it will confuse them. Yet I’ve never seen anyone manage that in a polyglot household with kids.
- jacobolus 4y ago
  > doctrine in the US seems to be that one shouldn’t mix languages in a sentence when speaking to children Whose “doctrine” is this?
  - gumby 4y ago
    It’s pretty stamdard advice in articles about bilingual kids; the advice from teachers of the Spanish-primary bilingual public school my gf sent her kids to, etc. Like I said I’ve never seen anyone practice this, though I have heard some parents in the US apologies for not doing so. My own kid went to non-US bilingual school and there was none of that.
  - PeterWhittaker 4y ago
    My experience (Canadian in Canada) may shed light. Our daughter’s speech development seemed delayed. A speech therapist with experience with bilingual parents with different mother tongues gave us great advice: I was to speak to her exclusively in English, her mother in French, so that she could tell the difference. What we spoke between us was irrelevant. Within a very short time she was speaking both equally well and it wasn’t long before she was switching mid sentence as well. So the “doctrine” could be a more rigid, simplified statement of that advice. It is very common for kids to acquire multiple languages simultaneously, but it seems to require clearly distinct user groups, e.g., think immigrant kids who speak one language at home and another with their friends or at school. But if the user groups are less distinct, it may be harder for the child to puzzle the languages apart and learn how either works.
ggm 4y ago
We understand things like the great vowel shift and the like by words which are clearly intended to rhyme, one shifted and the other didn't. We have a basis of comparison. And so too with Homeric comparison to olive leaves and sky or wine and sea. So when Homer said "wine dark sea", I worth bearing in mind we've no reason to believe the colours of the sea across time have shifted, and there isn't one sea colour, it depends on season, time of day, local conditions. Nonetheless the chances are, in the Mediterranean we're looking at Homer's wine dark sea. Question is, is it diluted wine, or boiled wine must? I believe the Greeks diluted wine with seawater sometimes.

46 points by benbreen 4y ago

I'm a little uncomfortable with the author's insistence that hue, saturation, and value are objective physical measurements: > Outlined are the controls for three parameters which define the physical parameters of any colour uniquely. ‘Hue’ for the part of the spectrum the colour falls on; ‘saturation’ for the range from grey to vivid; and ‘value’ for lightness-darkness. > Hue, saturation, and value represent only the physical characteristics of coloured light. I don't think this is right. Hue, saturation, and value are statements about human perception, not about the physical characteristics of light. A description of the physical characteristics of some light would look like a histogram plotting the wavelength of the light against the amount of light present at each wavelength. How do you interpret HSV from that? Well, value is pretty straightforward: the greater the area plotted in your histogram, the higher the value, I guess. More light -> more value. This falls apart if we're considering light of a single wavelength, where increasing the amount of light doesn't cause the color to get more washed out. Saturation is less straightforward, but the idea is there: a color with low saturation (greyish) should have a histogram that looks more or less flat, and a color with high saturation should have a histogram characterized by a lot of zeroes and spikes. The number of spikes in the histogram is... completely arbitrary. Then we come to hue and our model completely falls apart. Hue is purely subjective and there's no way to systematically relate it to light wavelengths. The article comes close to suggesting that hue is objectively significant: > In the colour circle at the left, the direction from the centre represents hue > Most English speakers would be comfortable using ‘blue’ to refer to all of the top left quarter of the circle. But we wouldn’t feel nearly as comfortable grouping all of the bottom right quarter under a single term. This is true, but it's an artifact of an arbitrary definition of hue. You could change how much angular space is assigned to each color without causing any problems in the HSV model. There's another interesting claim in the piece: > Gladstone does make a starkly racist declaration that ancient colour systems are ‘less mature’ than contemporary English. It seems pretty likely that Gladstone would have been happy to claim that he and the ancient Greeks belonged to the same race. Why is this a starkly racist declaration?

pvg 4y ago
It seems pretty likely that Gladstone would have been happy to claim Well, he did write a book titled The Ethnology of the Greek Races. Victorians had a fairly different, more granular notion of 'race' but most of them took racial determinism as a given, they were fundamentally racist in the most literal sense. They came up with stuff like this, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_race
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jacobolus 4y ago
> Hue, saturation, and value are statements about human perception, not about the physical characteristics of light Color in general is a statement about human perception, not physical characteristics of light. As Newton said, “the rays are not colored”. Hue, chroma, and value are human-perceptual color attributes. They vary based on spatial and temporal context, and vary from observer to observer. But people should not use the HSV color model (or your favorite image editor’s color picker) for this kind of analysis. It is a garbage tool for just about every purpose, but especially for this one. Munsell’s model, which is much more perceptually uniform, or e.g. the World Color Survey chart based on it https://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/images/jrus-20100531/wcs-chart-4x.png https://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/images/jrus-20100531/wcs-... are much clearer.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > Color in general is a statement about human perception, not physical characteristics of light. As Newton said, “the rays are not colored”. The color is fully and solely determined by the wavelength of the light, and the wavelength is an objective physical phenomenon; it is not crazy to talk about the objective realities of color. But yes, it's full of pitfalls.
  - jacobolus 4y ago

wolverine876 4y ago

Scholarly articles are such a pleasure, I find. The author isn't supposing or hyperbolizing, but actually deeply informed, by a lifetime of work, and wields their knowledge well.

gumby 4y ago

> Personally, I think the more insidious problem is translation between languages. Anyone who has multiple common languages with a friend knows this well. It’s quite common to drop a word from a different language into the middle of a sentence even when the sentence’s language has a word for it, just because there can be meaningful nuance or partition that the speaker wants to convey. Strangely, doctrine in the US seems to be that one shouldn’t mix languages in a sentence when speaking to children. Somehow it will confuse them. Yet I’ve never seen anyone manage that in a polyglot household with kids.

jacobolus 4y ago
> doctrine in the US seems to be that one shouldn’t mix languages in a sentence when speaking to children Whose “doctrine” is this?
- gumby 4y ago
  It’s pretty stamdard advice in articles about bilingual kids; the advice from teachers of the Spanish-primary bilingual public school my gf sent her kids to, etc. Like I said I’ve never seen anyone practice this, though I have heard some parents in the US apologies for not doing so. My own kid went to non-US bilingual school and there was none of that.
- PeterWhittaker 4y ago
  My experience (Canadian in Canada) may shed light. Our daughter’s speech development seemed delayed. A speech therapist with experience with bilingual parents with different mother tongues gave us great advice: I was to speak to her exclusively in English, her mother in French, so that she could tell the difference. What we spoke between us was irrelevant. Within a very short time she was speaking both equally well and it wasn’t long before she was switching mid sentence as well. So the “doctrine” could be a more rigid, simplified statement of that advice. It is very common for kids to acquire multiple languages simultaneously, but it seems to require clearly distinct user groups, e.g., think immigrant kids who speak one language at home and another with their friends or at school. But if the user groups are less distinct, it may be harder for the child to puzzle the languages apart and learn how either works.

ggm 4y ago

We understand things like the great vowel shift and the like by words which are clearly intended to rhyme, one shifted and the other didn't. We have a basis of comparison. And so too with Homeric comparison to olive leaves and sky or wine and sea. So when Homer said "wine dark sea", I worth bearing in mind we've no reason to believe the colours of the sea across time have shifted, and there isn't one sea colour, it depends on season, time of day, local conditions. Nonetheless the chances are, in the Mediterranean we're looking at Homer's wine dark sea. Question is, is it diluted wine, or boiled wine must? I believe the Greeks diluted wine with seawater sometimes.