this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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Today I Learned

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TIL most cultures and peoples all over the world have historically had trouble recognizing the color blue (www.ancientoriginsunleashed.com)
submitted 4 months ago by ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world to c/til@lemmy.world
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[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 25 points 4 months ago (1 children)

So I started skimming the article and:

Gladstone noticed Homer described the sea color as “wine-dark,”

I KNEW IT

It's the fuckin Greek thing again.

Listen, I'll tell a story in three parts.

  1. People started saying a few years ago that ancient Greeks didn't make a distinction between blue and red, because look at what Homer said, and the sea is obviously not wine colored. Or maybe they had blue wine? But anyway we think they thought they were the same color.
  2. I always thought it was a bunch of shit. Blue and red are different. They're so clearly different that some people morphed the whole thing into a lack of distinction between blue and green, since that makes quite a bit more sense sense and there definitely are cultures that don't have different names for similar colors like blue and green that English has different words for. But anyway, the issue here was blue and red, and to me, I was always convinced that it was a bunch of shit.
  3. And look - I WAS RIGHT. I was all ready to write up #1 and #2 in answer to your question and agreeing with you, but without the punchline, but just now I looked it up to be able to bitch about it a little more effectively, and learned that smart people have in the meantime figured out that the whole "wine dark sea" thing was talking about the sea being dark in brightness, like wine is dark, i.e. not light and clear and happy like the Mediterranean often is. But still colored blue presumably. So, not a bunch of surprising and confusing stuff about "blue=red" that sounds suspiciously like nonsense, but something that's perfectly sensible.

TL;DR you are correct. Blue is blue and always was. The people who are telling you blue and red used to be the same are probably just confused, and if Homer comes into the equation then that's a telltale sign that they are absolutely confused and you don't have to listen to them.

[–] ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That's not what the article is saying though? It doesn't say the Greeks thought the sea was red, it says they didn't have (or at least rarely used) a word for what color it is, so they only described it by its other attributes (like how dark it was).

[–] mozz@mbin.grits.dev 9 points 4 months ago

It says that they couldn't process the entire concept of blue, because they didn't have a name for it. Actually it goes further than that:

Extending his research, he discovered that references to the color blue were absent from all Greek literature. German Jewish philosopher Lazarus Geiger followed Gladstone's lead, analyzing ancient Icelandic sagas, the Koran, Hindu, Chinese folklore, Arabic, and an ancient Hebrew version of the Bible. Geiger found that blue was missing in these texts too. His findings underscored a widespread absence of blue in ancient writings, reshaping our understanding of historical color perception.

In the absence of specific terminology to describe the color blue, scholars were compelled to entertain the possibility that ancient societies didn't perceive this hue, leading to its omission from their lexicon. Were the visual faculties of ancient peoples markedly distinct from our own? What accounts for the apparent oversight of blue in their observations?

I mean she's sort of doing the Tucker Carlson thing here; she doesn't exactly come out and say that all of those cultures didn't have blue because they didn't have the word blue. But she does say in the headline that they couldn't see blue.

I did one DDG search for "word for blue in ancient hebrew," and found this. If what she was saying was what you were saying, I would think it made quite a bit of sense, but as it is I stand by my assessment.

Like reading the wikipedia article about how did this myth develop and what is the actual linguistic shift that was what was going on and some other examples, that was cool to me. And also I learned something from it. I'm not trying to be super critical of this person just writing an article but it just seems like way too much of it is just wrong, but then phrased in this "wouldn't it be cool if" type of way that shields it from being a problem that it's wrong.