Выбор и восприятие цвета в античности
Structure: — About Homer’s color terms — How color terms appear — do we now use multi-layered color terms as Greeks
The Color Terms of Homer
None of those who carefully read the classics could help but notice some strangeness in the Greek use of epithets that indicate color.
Homer’s sea wasn’t blue, it was wine-colored. In addition to the sea, the oxes were wine-colored, with sheep «very large and beautiful, with violet wool.»
It is difficult to reconcile these three uses with the idea of a common color. The sea is blue, gray or green. Bulls and sheep are black or brown.
The pale face, the olive tree sticks of Cyclops and the honey Homer call them green.
It’s not hard to know that most color terms describe tone more than color. It can be concluded that Homer and his contemporaries felt the world in a way closer to a black and white movie than to a coloured movie.
Is it true that people have seen the world differently than we have seen before?
How do languages come up with color terms?
In fact, of course, the ancient Greeks saw exactly as we did — just the evolution of the language at the time allowed them to use only those color terms.
Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, in their famous 1969 work «Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution», conducted a major study and found that basic colour terms appeared in all languages in a universal way. At first, only two concepts distinguish between languages: dark, black, cold and light, white, warm. That’s why Homer’s choice of color terms relies more on tone.
In the second stage, a red color appears: it is the first in any culture to receive its own term. Why is it red? The first thing Red does is mark the danger, because it’s the color of blood. In addition, red pigments are quite easy to manufacture, and interest in color as abstraction develops hand in hand with paint manipulation. The red is followed by yellow and green, and then the blue appears. Yellow and green are the colors of vegetation, and the difference between them was practical (e.g. between ripe and unripe fruit). Yellow dyes are pretty easy to make, too.
The cultural value of blue is rather limited. The blue is very rare as the color of the material, and in simple cultures, a person can live his life without ever seeing a really blue object.
Of course, blue is the color of the sea and the sky, but without any practical blue material, the need to find a special name for this long void was not particularly acute.
Do we now use multi-layered color terms like Greeks?
Are glitter, texture, and emotion important to us, and do we now use multi-layered color terms like Greeks? Of course, we use it, especially when it comes to feeling.
The simplest example is two colors that are similar in the spectral position and the pigment, red and red. There’s a huge difference between them. The difference is not in the shade, but in the history and impression of the word it leaves. What color is heavier and denser, and which color is light?
And the word is ash? Yeah, it has a shade, it’s muffled, it’s gray, but it’s got a feeling. It conveys the moistness, the dryness, the dullness, and even the note of melancholy and boredom.
Or, for example, seroburomalin. There’s no logic in it, but there’s an exhaustive description of something that doesn’t make sense in color.
And in all these cases, like the ancient Greeks, we describe not just the color, but the whole complex experience of the color, deeply related to our culture. In the future, researchers may wonder when reading a different color term and wonder what we meant.
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