[HN Gopher] The sea was never blue (2017)
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The sea was never blue (2017)
Author : hobble
Score : 20 points
Date : 2021-08-01 14:16 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (aeon.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (aeon.co)
| adrian_b wrote:
| The interpretations given in this article to many Ancient Greek
| words referring to colors are frequently encountered in comments
| about the Ancient Greek literature, but for many of them it is
| extremely doubtful that they have any connections with reality.
|
| For example there is nothing to justify the idea that "kuaneos"
| was used "to denote a dark shade of blue merging into black" and
| even much less that it has ever meant "blue-green", as "cyan"
| means now in English.
|
| The only certain thing about "kuaneos" is that its original
| meaning was "of the color of the pigment ultramarine blue". The
| Greek name of the ultramarine blue pigment was "kuanos", from
| which "kuaneos" was derived in a regular way. Besides "kuanos"
| there was another pigment frequently mentioned by Homer,
| "miltos", which was red iron oxide, so that is another color
| whose meaning is certain.
|
| So "kuaneos" meant, without doubt, just "blue". Homer and other
| poets did not use the color terms very precisely. In many cases
| they chose the words that sounded better in that positions of the
| verse and not those that would have been more appropriate in
| meaning. Therefor "kuaneos" could be used for any kind of bluish
| colors, usually for colors of darker hues, because there were few
| if any objects of light blue color at that time. Nevertheless,
| the meaning of the word was just blue as a blue paint, without
| other connotations.
|
| Also in the article, "polios" is said to be "whitish". I do not
| know where did the author find such an interpretation. There is
| no doubt that "polios" meant "gray", i.e. the color intermediate
| between white and black. It means neither "whitish" nor
| "blackish" but just the middle between white and black.
|
| Some later authors say this precisely, but even in Homer and
| Hesiod there is no doubt about the meaning. "Polios" is used for
| iron, for platinum-group metal alloys (a.k.a. "adamant"), for
| gray wolves, for the hair of aging people who are not yet old
| enough to have white hair.
|
| The precise meaning of "glaukos" is not known, but there is very
| little, if any, proof that it might have meant "blue-gray".
| "Glaukos" was mostly used about eyes, so it might have meant
| "light blue" as there are few eyes that would suggest the color
| "blue-gray".
|
| And so on.
| Florin_Andrei wrote:
| "glaux" IIRC originally meant a kind of owl that was sacred to
| Athena. So likely "glaukopis" meant something more like "owl-
| eyed", at least for a while. And Glaukopis is often seen as an
| epithet given to Athena.
|
| Athena being, among other things, the goddess of practical
| intelligence (as Athena Ergane she was the patron of
| craftsmen), and visual perception having an important part in
| that, the metaphor is fitting.
|
| No doubt the meaning kept shifting in time.
| avnigo wrote:
| That makes me wonder whether "okeanos", Greek for 'ocean', is
| related kuaneos. I haven't been able to find the proper
| etymology of ocean.
| black6 wrote:
| Calvin: Dad, how come old photographs are black and white? Didn't
| they have color film back then? Dad: Sure they did. In
| fact, those old photographs ARE in color. It's just the WORLD was
| black and white then. Calvin: Really? Dad: Yep. The
| world didn't turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was
| pretty grainy color for a while, too. Calvin: That's really
| weird. Dad: Well, truth is stranger than fiction.
| Calvin: But then why are old PAINTINGS in color?! If the world
| was black and white, wouldn't artists have painted it that way?
| Dad: Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were insane.
| Calvin: But... but how could they have painted in color anyway?
| Wouldn't their paints have been shades of grey back then?
| Dad: Of course, but they turned colors like everything else did
| in the '30s. Calvin: So why didn't old black and white
| photos turn color too? Dad: Because they were color
| pictures of black and white, remember?
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Source:
|
| https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1989/10/29
|
| Thanks to this excellent search engine:
|
| https://michaelyingling.com/random/calvin_and_hobbes/
|
| which might be of more interest to HN viewers.
| dhosek wrote:
| My greatest triumph as a parent is that I've had this actual
| conversation with my son. At the age of 7, he still believes
| this.
| dogorman wrote:
| This is a very interesting article, but the headline is an unholy
| synthesis of gaslighting and clickbait. Better title from the
| URL: _Can we hope to understand how the Greeks saw their world?
| "_
| throw0101a wrote:
| Some fellows named Berlin and Kay put forward a colour term
| development hypothesis/theory:
|
| > _Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (1969;
| ISBN 1-57586-162-3) is a book by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay.
| Berlin and Kay 's work proposed that the basic color terms in a
| culture, such as black, brown, or red, are predictable by the
| number of color terms the culture has. All cultures have terms
| for black/dark and white/bright. If a culture has three color
| terms, the third is red. If a culture has four, it has either
| yellow or green._
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue-green_distinction_in_lang...
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(page generated 2021-08-02 23:02 UTC)