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The bizarre myth that Ancient Greeks couldn't see blue

Socrates Exarchopoulos

Don't overrate the power of language to shape minds

By Matthew Yglesias


Here’s something you may not know: pre-modern people couldn’t see the color blue.

One reason you probably didn’t know this is that it isn’t true. But that hasn’t stopped a lot of people over the years from claiming it’s true. Indeed, I recently learned via Noah Smith’s Twitter feed that there’s a whole cottage industry of people claiming that before the modern world, nobody could see blue.

What’s going on here? Why are all these people writing articles claiming that ancient people couldn’t see blue?

It is true that lots of ancient languages didn’t have a word that refers to the exact part of the color spectrum that we call “blue” in English. And there is also some evidence that a person’s native language influences their perception of colors. But for some reason, large swathes of humanity are strongly predisposed to believe the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that human thought is really controlled by language. It’s an idea you’ll find in “1984,” where the Party was going to make dissident thought impossible by forcing everyone to use Newspeak. It’s also one of the reasons we have such ferocious battles over whether to call people “illegal aliens” or “undocumented immigrants.”

The truth, though, is that while language influences cognition, the influence is much milder than most people seem to think. Ronald Reagan said “I believe in amnesty for illegal aliens,” which is cancel-worthy verbiage these days. But he then delivered on a large-scale path to citizenship for a huge population of undocumented immigrants. The dated-to-our-ears language didn’t prevent him from taking a humane view of the situation, and a generation of linguistic reform since then hasn’t conjured up a congressional majority for better policy.

Yet people are so in the grips of Sapir-Whorfdom that they were willing to endorse an incredibly extreme claim — that premodern people couldn’t see the color blue — on the basis of some arguably mangled linguistic history and an apparently fake experiment featuring one small population in Namibia.

Into the wine-dark sea

A common introduction to this topic is the observation that the Homeric epics include many references to the “wine-dark sea” but not a single use of any word that translates to “blue.”

This has bothered scholars for a long time, and one theory is that Ancient Greek wine was blue.

Further study has revealed that it’s fairly common for pre-modern languages not to have a word for the color blue, so the dominant interpretation of the Homer situation is that he doesn’t call the sea “blue” because Ancient Greek did not have a word for blue.

At this point I have to concede that I do not have any direct knowledge of Ancient Greek. At least one bona fide Hellenist, Peter Gainsford, says people are misinterpreting the Ancient Greek color words, and the terms “kyaneos” and “glaukos” cover most of the color space denoted as “blue” in English.

Rather than adjudicate this fully, I think we should say that there is a clear consensus that Ancient Greek color words do not correspond one-to-one to the color words of modern English. In general, different languages have different basic color terms and also differ in the number of basic color terms. Some languages have a system that distinguishes light from dark and red from not-red. The concept of “orange” as a distinct color seems to be relatively rare and also of recent origin. Chaucer described the color of a fox’s fur as “betwixe yelow and reed.” Shakespeare used the word “orange” to refer to the fruit, and he several times described things as “orange tawny” in color, but it’s only after his time that unmodified “orange” became a basic color word.

But per Chaucer, it’s not as if people couldn’t tell that some things have a color that blends yellow and red. Some Middle English sources use the word “geoluhread” for orange. And when English-speaking people became familiar with the once-exotic fruit the orange (whose name seems to come from distant Dravidian languages), they could see what it looked like, and eventually the name for the fruit became the name for the color.

Different languages use different words

This is a map of the inner portion of the Moscow Metro. It shows a purple line, a green line, an orange line, a red line, and a yellow line, but to distinguish line three from line four, I’d have to say that one is the dark blue line and one is the light blue line.

In Russian, though, they have actual different words for these colors. Line four is голубо́й (goluboy) and line three is си́ний (siniy).

But here I think it’s obvious to everyone that just because English doesn’t make a linguistic distinction between goluboy and siniy doesn’t mean that English speakers can’t see that these are different colors. If an American goes to Moscow, his problem navigating the metro is going to be that the station names are written in the Cyrillic alphabet; the fact that the lines are different shades of blue is interesting, but you’re not going to mix them up. The color space is just a lot richer than our vocabulary of basic color words.

On a computer screen, we work with the RGB color system where each pixel has a mix of red, green, and blue light. In standard HTML you can represent nearly seventeen million distinct admixtures of RGB light in terms of a six-digit hexadecimal code. And with the assistance of a handy random number generator, here are fourteen different colors.

Now you can see that some of these colors like D3D726 and C8CB28 are similar to the point where I could not easily describe to you the difference between these two different broadly olive greenish-yellow tones. But they are different, and if you can’t see that they’re different, that just goes to show you need a better computer monitor.

Read full article here: https://www.slowboring.com/p/greeks-blue?s=r