Started by Lin Chen (@linchen_cog) ·
why did Homer call the sea wine-dark?
6 sources · 44 min down the hole
How I got here
- Started with
- Did the ancient Greeks really not see blue?
- Ended at
- Linguistic relativity and the color naming debate
The Trail
- “homer wine dark sea no word for blue” (google.com)
- Wine-dark sea (en.wikipedia.org)
- William Ewart Gladstone (en.wikipedia.org)
yes, the prime minister. in the 1850s he wrote a whole study of color words in Homer
- Blue–green distinction in language (en.wikipedia.org)
- Basic Color Terms (en.wikipedia.org)
- Linguistic relativity and the color naming debate (en.wikipedia.org)
What I came away with
Their eyes were fine; the language just divided color up differently. Berlin and Kay (1969) found languages tend to gain basic color words in a similar order, with blue usually coming late, and plenty of languages still use one word for blue and green. Whether words change perception is debated: there's evidence of small effects on how fast people tell colors apart, not on what they can see.
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