4 ms·

Hah! What if Homer's "wine-dark seas" really were wine-dark!?

by thechao 3y ago

layer8 3y ago
Maybe it’s more indicative of the wine color at the time than the sea color. ;)
- twoodfin 3y ago
  My guess is that it’s about drawing contrast with the crystal-blue seas near the Greek shore. The difference between the Mediterranean as experienced along the shoals of a beach vs. out among the waves is night and day. Not unlike the difference between a glass of water and a glass of (surely murky in the era) wine.
- bitwize 3y ago
  Hackernews told me it's because the Greeks couldn't see the color blue -- and neither could anyone else until we invented a word for it.
  - sidlls 3y ago
    That’s physically impossible. The color receptors in our eyes are unlikely to have spontaneously gained the ability to process blue wavelength light only after a word was invented for it. More likely is that people simply didn’t use a separate word to distinguish colors of wavelengths between green and violet.
    - Tenoke 3y ago
      While likely still wrong, Sapir-worf doesn't state that you developed the receptors at the same time but rather that things were processed/compressed/remembered differently when/if there was a single word for e.g. blue and purple. It's closer (if we steelman a bit) to how if I think of different shades of purple as just purple I might not notice a difference between 2 objects while someone else would immediately tell that one is lavender and the other wisteria.
      - thechao 3y ago
        Your latter example (but with green) is a testable hypothesis, with some weak support for being true! The rest of S-W is popsci garbage.
    - adrian_b 3y ago
      There are many languages where there is a single word for green and blue, but Greek was not one of those languages. Since the earliest texts, Greek had distinct words for blue and green, even if many modern authors have confused them, because they did not compare enough texts to be able to understand the correspondences between words and colors. Ancient Greek was not uniform, there were many dialects, so there are many authors who use different words for colors. Blue was frequently described as the color of the pigment ultramarine blue or more rarely as the color of the sky. For green there were more words, some of whom have uncertain meaning, like "chloros", which is used in many modern terms for green, but which might have meant something else in Greek. The words whose meaning is certain describe green as the color of grass or as the color of emeralds or as the color of leek.
    - ralferoo 3y ago
      Reminds me of this old image (can't find the original link, but it's the same picture) that jokes about the difference between men and women with names for colours: https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/styles/article-inline-half-caption/public/field_blog_entry_images/color_differences.jpg https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/styles/a... Oh, and of course the xkcd follow-up: https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
      - bitwize 3y ago
        Fuchsia was named after a botanist named Leonhard Fuchs. To remember its spelling I think of Fred Fuchs, aka Fred Fucks from the AVGN videos, and then add -ia.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    This is a myth generated by people with little knowledge of chemistry and mineralogy, which prevented them to understand the Greek words that they were reading. Already in Homer, the Greek word for blue was frequently used: "cuaneos", which means "the color of cuanos". "Cuanos" is a word borrowed by the Greeks from Anatolia and which initially designated the blue pigment now named "ultramarine blue", which was imported from Afghanistan. Later, the same word was also applied to other cheaper blue pigments used as a substitute for the expensive ultramarine blue, like azurite and the Egyptian blue. English has the word "cyan", which is derived from the Greek word for blue, but which is now erroneously used with the meaning of blue-green. The Greeks and the Romans described blue-green as the color of the beryls, or of turquoise, or of the littoral sea. They never used "cuaneos", i.e. "cyan", for blue-green. Unfortunately there are many dictionaries with erroneous explanations for Greek words referring to chemical substances, minerals, animals or plants, because the philologists who have worked at the dictionaries have not consulted experts in the other sciences.
    - ano-ther 3y ago
      Yes. The flag of Greece also suggests some fondness for blue (as does its architecture). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Greece https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Greece
    - diogenes4 3y ago
      This would have been an excellent argument had the word been evidenced in use contemporaneously with the Iliad. We have no such evidence of this.
      - daveguy 3y ago
        The translation of the Iliad used in the Gutenberg Project[0] refers to deep blue seas twice. [0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2199/2199-h/2199-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2199/2199-h/2199-h.htm
        diogenes4 3y ago
        You seem to have linked a translation—that is not useful here. Start here instead: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0133 https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1...
  - tremon 3y ago
    I prefer this reading: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sea/winelike-sea https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sea/winelike-sea > Rather than being ignorant of color, it seems that the Greeks were less interested in and attentive to hue, or tint, than they were to light. As late as the fourth century BC, Plato named the four primary colors as white, black, red, and bright, and in those cases where a Greek writer lists colors “in order,” they are arranged not by the Newtonian colors of the rainbow [..] but from lightest to darkest. > The phrase “winelike,” then, had little to do with color but must have evoked some attribute of dark wine that would resonate with an audience familiar with the sea [..] such as the glint of surface light on impenetrable darkness, like wine in a terracotta vessel. (located at about 70% of the text. Ctrl-F "Plato" for the impatient)

Hah! What if Homer's "wine-dark seas" really were wine-dark!?

layer8 3y ago

Maybe it’s more indicative of the wine color at the time than the sea color. ;)

twoodfin 3y ago
My guess is that it’s about drawing contrast with the crystal-blue seas near the Greek shore. The difference between the Mediterranean as experienced along the shoals of a beach vs. out among the waves is night and day. Not unlike the difference between a glass of water and a glass of (surely murky in the era) wine.
bitwize 3y ago
Hackernews told me it's because the Greeks couldn't see the color blue -- and neither could anyone else until we invented a word for it.
- sidlls 3y ago
  That’s physically impossible. The color receptors in our eyes are unlikely to have spontaneously gained the ability to process blue wavelength light only after a word was invented for it. More likely is that people simply didn’t use a separate word to distinguish colors of wavelengths between green and violet.
  - Tenoke 3y ago
    While likely still wrong, Sapir-worf doesn't state that you developed the receptors at the same time but rather that things were processed/compressed/remembered differently when/if there was a single word for e.g. blue and purple. It's closer (if we steelman a bit) to how if I think of different shades of purple as just purple I might not notice a difference between 2 objects while someone else would immediately tell that one is lavender and the other wisteria.
    - thechao 3y ago
      Your latter example (but with green) is a testable hypothesis, with some weak support for being true! The rest of S-W is popsci garbage.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    There are many languages where there is a single word for green and blue, but Greek was not one of those languages. Since the earliest texts, Greek had distinct words for blue and green, even if many modern authors have confused them, because they did not compare enough texts to be able to understand the correspondences between words and colors. Ancient Greek was not uniform, there were many dialects, so there are many authors who use different words for colors. Blue was frequently described as the color of the pigment ultramarine blue or more rarely as the color of the sky. For green there were more words, some of whom have uncertain meaning, like "chloros", which is used in many modern terms for green, but which might have meant something else in Greek. The words whose meaning is certain describe green as the color of grass or as the color of emeralds or as the color of leek.
  - ralferoo 3y ago
    Reminds me of this old image (can't find the original link, but it's the same picture) that jokes about the difference between men and women with names for colours: https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/styles/article-inline-half-caption/public/field_blog_entry_images/color_differences.jpg https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/styles/a... Oh, and of course the xkcd follow-up: https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
    - bitwize 3y ago
      Fuchsia was named after a botanist named Leonhard Fuchs. To remember its spelling I think of Fred Fuchs, aka Fred Fucks from the AVGN videos, and then add -ia.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  This is a myth generated by people with little knowledge of chemistry and mineralogy, which prevented them to understand the Greek words that they were reading. Already in Homer, the Greek word for blue was frequently used: "cuaneos", which means "the color of cuanos". "Cuanos" is a word borrowed by the Greeks from Anatolia and which initially designated the blue pigment now named "ultramarine blue", which was imported from Afghanistan. Later, the same word was also applied to other cheaper blue pigments used as a substitute for the expensive ultramarine blue, like azurite and the Egyptian blue. English has the word "cyan", which is derived from the Greek word for blue, but which is now erroneously used with the meaning of blue-green. The Greeks and the Romans described blue-green as the color of the beryls, or of turquoise, or of the littoral sea. They never used "cuaneos", i.e. "cyan", for blue-green. Unfortunately there are many dictionaries with erroneous explanations for Greek words referring to chemical substances, minerals, animals or plants, because the philologists who have worked at the dictionaries have not consulted experts in the other sciences.
  - ano-ther 3y ago
    Yes. The flag of Greece also suggests some fondness for blue (as does its architecture). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Greece https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Greece
  - diogenes4 3y ago
    This would have been an excellent argument had the word been evidenced in use contemporaneously with the Iliad. We have no such evidence of this.
    - daveguy 3y ago
      The translation of the Iliad used in the Gutenberg Project[0] refers to deep blue seas twice. [0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2199/2199-h/2199-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2199/2199-h/2199-h.htm
      - diogenes4 3y ago
        You seem to have linked a translation—that is not useful here. Start here instead: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0133 https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1...
- tremon 3y ago
  I prefer this reading: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sea/winelike-sea https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sea/winelike-sea > Rather than being ignorant of color, it seems that the Greeks were less interested in and attentive to hue, or tint, than they were to light. As late as the fourth century BC, Plato named the four primary colors as white, black, red, and bright, and in those cases where a Greek writer lists colors “in order,” they are arranged not by the Newtonian colors of the rainbow [..] but from lightest to darkest. > The phrase “winelike,” then, had little to do with color but must have evoked some attribute of dark wine that would resonate with an audience familiar with the sea [..] such as the glint of surface light on impenetrable darkness, like wine in a terracotta vessel. (located at about 70% of the text. Ctrl-F "Plato" for the impatient)