
The sea was never blue - prismatic
https://aeon.co/essays/can-we-hope-to-understand-how-the-greeks-saw-their-world
======
baldfat
I have studied Ancient Hebrew and Classical Greek in Under Grad and Grad
School. I really always struggle with this idea that they didn't see blue.
They just described different aspects of things based on their world view. For
instance the sky was a solid object that was made of a highly reflexive
bronze. That bronze isn't blue wasn't the issue it was the so called shine.

The people were much more physical in their writing styles. Take "Apple of my
eye." That was an ancient terms. It means that when you look closely at an
apple you see your own eyes' reflections. It meant that they keep their eyes
close to you.

~~~
ty_a
The best explanation I've heard is that words for colors come to exist after
the invention of artificially produced pigments and dyes.

~~~
baldfat
I heard that but WE have blue sky, and yellow flowers. We can't say we didn't
have yellow till we transferred the dye from a yellow flower to a fabric? We
have documentation of dye millennium before Homer and Cave paintings nearly
forty thousands years before them. [https://zady.com/features/the-history-of-
fabric-dye](https://zady.com/features/the-history-of-fabric-dye)

~~~
marcosdumay
We still have a huge number of colors that don't have names.

Blue is not a color that used to appear often on daily objects, and naming the
sky's color is quite a useless act.

~~~
dboreham
I discovered that there were roughly three times as many colo[u]rs in the USA
vs the UK when I moved 20 years ago. But thanks to globalization I bet they
have Aqua and Taupe in Blighty now...

~~~
stevekemp
Move to Finland, there are far fewer colour-names there!

(UK definitely has taupe these days, "aqua" sounds like the kind of name a
paint-salesperson we use!)

------
jpfed
>The common view today is that white light is colourless and arises from the
sum of all the hues of the spectrum, whereas black is its absence.

Pet peeve: white is itself a color experience. It's not colorless.

The infinite basis that forms the spectrum is different from the basis of
three cones (receptive to bands of long, medium, and short wavelengths
respectively), which itself is different from the basis formed by color
opponencies (white/black, red/green, blue/yellow). Since the projections that
go from one of these spaces to the next are not 1:1, to speak precisely we
should not identify a spectrum with a color experience. (And, of course,
because of other complications that this skips over like lateral inhibition
and habituation.)

Physics talks about spectra and wavelengths. Retinas talk certain bands of
wavelengths. Only brains talk color. The spectra that usually make brains
experience white can be separated into spectra that make brains experience
other color experiences.

~~~
khedoros1
> Pet peeve: white is itself a color experience. It's not colorless.

The way that I thought about color before being educated in the properties of
light _was_ to think of white as colorless. It's the thing that's easiest to
_add_ color to in a subtractive color model (e.g. using crayons paints as a
child). It doesn't represent my science-based understanding, but I wouldn't be
surprised to observe someone looking at something white and saying "Huh, it
needs some color".

~~~
naravara
How much of this is just an artifact of the fact that all our writing surfaces
tend to be shades of white?

------
Cryptid
I would also recommend Caroline Alexander's A Winelike Sea
[http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sea/winelike-
sea](http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/sea/winelike-sea) and the ensuing
discussion at MetaFilter "Achilles sat on the shore and looked out to the
wine-dark sea" [https://www.metafilter.com/130875/Achilles-sat-on-the-
shore-...](https://www.metafilter.com/130875/Achilles-sat-on-the-shore-and-
looked-out-to-the-wine-dark-sea)

~~~
nsxwolf
Why would it look "wine dark", whatever that means, and not green? If other
cultures describe blues as just different shades of green, why would Homer
describe it as red - or maybe black?

Also, if the literal translation is actually "wine face sea", not "wine dark
sea" [1], are we really sure we have any idea what this means?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_dark_sea_(Homer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_dark_sea_\(Homer\))

~~~
robotomir
You're all overthinking it. When you are on a boat and you enter deep water in
the Aegean, the color does become very dark like thick red wine, different to
the blue waters you see from the coast.

~~~
dkarl
I once had a similar discussion about a phrase that was something like "smooth
soft stone," describing a surface someone was walking on. It's a
straightforward description of a sensation: if you're walking on a stone
surface in bare feet, smooth stone feels much softer than rough stone. If you
know how it feels, the phrase sounds perfectly smooth and natural, but if
you've never experienced it, or don't remember experiencing it as a child, you
might think the phrase is meant to sound jarring paradoxical, instead of
gently referencing a paradox doesn't even feel paradoxical to us because it
agrees with how we perceive the world.

------
empath75
So basically the greeks didn't cleanly separate hue from the other aspects of
the surface appearance of things. So that if something was glimmering, or
dark, that was considered to be as important or more important than the hue,
for the purposes of description.

------
huac
In Chinese, the character for green, "绿" (lǜ), also means light blue.
Apparently, this is a more linguistic coincidence
([https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/6832/what-is-
the...](https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/6832/what-is-the-
difference-between-%E7%BB%BF-and-%E9%9D%92)).

~~~
khedoros1
In Japanese, "青" (ao) traditionally covered certain shades of both blue and
green (blue sky, blue traffic lights, blue apples and many other plants).

"緑" (midori) is more solidly green, coming from a root word used to describe
flourishing trees. I think that it's still considered a shade of ao. They'll
sometimes use a phonetic rendering of English "green", and I'm not really
clear on the difference in meaning there.

------
chx
If this interests you, Through the Language Glass: How Words Colour Your World
by Guy Deutscher is a must read.

~~~
Buttons840
Yes, that was an entertaining book. Some of the interesting things I remember
(and I might not remember them exactly correctly):

\- Most languages developed a word for the color red before any other colors.
Probably because blood is red and uniquely present at the most dramatic times
of life.

\- Blue is rarely seen in nature, and so many cultures wouldn't feel the need
to distinguish between purple and blue, because neither was seen very often.
There is one obvious exception though, the blue sky. Although anecdotal, the
author used some precious scientific equipment, his daughter, to perform an
experiment. He purposely avoiding telling his daughter the color of the sky,
yet taught her the color of many physical objects. Once he was sure she knew
all the colors he finally popped the question on a clear day: "What color is
the sky?" His daughter seemed confused and eventually decided that the sky was
white.

~~~
joeyo

      > Most languages developed a word for the color red before
      > any other colors. Probably because blood is red and
      > uniquely present at the most dramatic times of life.
    

Red has high contrast against the backgrounds of natural scenes (greens,
blues, browns, etc) and is distinguishable in a variety of lighting
conditions. For this reason it is one of the standard "warning" colors used by
the natural world. Moreover, plants have co-opted red for positive signaling,
too: many fruits and berries are red. If that weren't enough, many mammals
(including humans) use red hues for signaling emotional and sexual states.
Discriminating red hues was apparently important enough that primates "re-
evolved" a red-detecting cone in the retina, despite ancestral mammals losing
a similar one earlier in evolutionary history.

------
edw
This submitter mines a lot karma by re-posting articles featured on Arts and
Letters Daily (aldaily.com). I find that site far more valuable than HN for
informing me in ways that make me a better programmer, businessperson—and
person. As a bonus: no comments!

------
giorgosts
The greek language is not dead, it is still spoken by about 15 mil. people
worldwide. "Porfyro" is the deep red color that can be frequently experienced
in esp. greek orthodox churches (even in apparell dating many hundreds of
years), and "Glauco" is the shiny blue of the aegean sea that made the greek
islands famous worldwide.

The words that the greeks used (and still use) have the purpose of describing
the natural world, not of scientificaly defining colors according to a theory
of vision.

Even the modern theory of color vision acknowledges the principles of color
constancy and color adaptation.

------
scentoni
Try
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate)
instead

------
woodandsteel
If the Greeks saw colors completely differently than we modern Westerners do,
then their artistic representations of color, like in frescos and painted
pottery, would look quite bizarre to us. Is that the case?

~~~
gumby
_No_ , since they produced representative art (not abstract art as far as we
can tell) they tried to make water watery and the sky sky-y.

 _Yes_ , since language reflects which paints we pick up, and you can see this
from greek sculpture (the victorians didn't manage to get _all_ the color off
_all_ the sculpture): their color choices were more garish than we would use
today. In fact their color choices are closer to those of hound sculpture. And
note that the bronze-age aryan invaders to India and Persia also invaded
Greece at the same time...

In other words, "yes, but not as much as you might think"

~~~
woodandsteel
>their color choices were more garish than we would use today.

Maybe that was just an artistic choice.

The reason I am pushing on this is that there is a widespread idea, especially
in academia, that people in different cultures see the world completely
differently than we modern Westerners do. But that is simply not true. On most
basic things, like the fact that human beings live in space, have to eat, and
so on, different cultures agree.

~~~
gumby
Do you read Classical Greek? Have you read Gladstone's book? In my case the
answer to both is yes. And, with a Hindu Indian parent and much time spent
there through my life I am quite aware of the ancient cultural ties between
those two cultures.

There is plenty of work in cultural anthropology, biology, and casting that
people are incredibly alike in most ways even in regards to things that appear
to be learned, and yet also have elements that are strongly dissimilar despite
seemingly being innate. What about people with innate absolute orientation and
no concept of right/left. That's not a "historical" phenomenon but a
contemporary one.

Sometimes things can be scientific and not ideological you know.

Why was an oxe the color of wine?

------
sn9
Text really isn't the best medium to discuss color perception. This Vox video
summarizing the research of linguistic anthropologists is much more clear:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg)

------
Qworg
There's a Radiolab on this as well: [http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-
isnt-blue/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-isnt-blue/)

