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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  1294 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What color IS the "wine-dark sea", Homer?

Fuckin' Internet.

Pre-Internet we all learned that Homer was blind. Post-Internet? Tens of thousands of late-night freshman dorm conversations about how, like, the Greeks didn't see color, maaaan. 'cuz of the "wine-dark sea." Like, what's up with that? Wine isn't blue!

Every navel-gazer that can't quite grow a beard will happily tell you that ancient civilizations were obviously so inferior they couldn't fucking see color but none of them are even aware of the fact that mmmmmaybe Sirius used to be red.





goobster  ·  1291 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I didn't see those claims in the article...?

I was mostly interested in how the perception of colors, and how we describe them, changed. And how those changes have happened in other words - like food - as our palates become more educated by being exposed to more and diverse flavors.

What I saw in the article was the way perception and language play off each other and develop over time...

kleinbl00  ·  1291 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah everyone does without recognizing that the Iliad and Odyssey were verbally transmitted 'round the campfire 2700 years ago and that they originated with a legendary poet who was reputed to be sightless.

A thousand years from now, if we're lucky, people will be arguing about what bandersnatches were and whether "frumious" is an indication of the plasticity of language since everyone else uses the word "furious".

Look up "blue in ancient greek." Here's the top link from Wikipedia:

    The Greek word for dark blue, kyaneos, could also mean dark green, violet, black or brown. The ancient Greek word for a light blue, glaukos, also could mean light green, grey, or yellow. The Greeks imported indigo dye from India, calling it indikon.

Here's the second link from Business Insider:

    No one could see the colour blue until modern times ...

So okay, They had a specific word for "dark blue" because they paid money for it but since the word we know about for "dark blue" actually just means "dark" clearly the fuckin' greeks couldn't see blue, a blind man thinks wine must have been!

These discussions are never about the way "perception and language play off each other" they're about the fact that we don't know something for 100% fact 2700 years ago so obviously the ancient greeks are fuckin' ancient colorblind aliens.

https://www.ancientpages.com/2017/02/23/mysterious-sumerian-statues-big-blue-eyes-sign-gods/

The Sumerians (5,000 years ago) mined lapis. नील is Sanskrit for "blue." So either the Greeks forgot and the Romans remembered or this is archetypal ancient aliens shit.