By
Anna Wichmann
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Although
Greece is full of many shades of blue — iconic blue roofs found across the
islands, rich sapphire seas, and bright blue skies — linguists and experts in
the ancient world have long been puzzled by the conspicuous absence of a
distinct word for the color in the country’s archaic past.
Yet
does this mean that ancient Greeks could not see the color
blue, as some argue, or that they just saw it differently, considering it not
as a distinct color, but as part of a spectrum of shades?
We know
that language, especially regarding colors, has a significant impact on the way
we experience the world around us. As linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
wrote, “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
The Color Blue in the
Ancient World
Surprisingly,
the word blue is simply missing from nearly all other ancient languages. There
is no distinct word for the color in Chinese, Hebrew, or Sanskrit. Rather, the
color that we call blue is usually grouped in with other colors, like green.
Egyptians,
however, did have a distinct word for the color blue, and not surprisingly,
they were one of the only ancient peoples who had created blue dye from very
early on in their history.
In the
history of nearly all languages, the word for blue emerged much later than
other colors. Through careful examination of ancient texts, linguists have
discovered that almost all languages followed a fairly standard timeline of
when names for distinct colors were introduced — black and white are the most
ancient colors, followed by red.
In
general, the way colors are referred to in Ancient Greek is completely
different from most modern conceptions of them. Rather than describing a
specific color, ancient Greeks frequently referred to the shade or tint of the
hue instead, considering colors on a shade from dark to light.
Colors in Ancient Greek
In
Ancient Greek, the word kyaenos was often used for colors on
the darker end of the spectrum, including what we now know was violet, black,
dark blue, brown, or dark green. Our modern word “cyan,” a greenish blue, comes
from this word.
Glaukos was
frequently used in reference to lighter colors, including yellow, grey, light
green, or light blue. While both kyaenos and glaukos can
be used for a range of colors, there were distinct words for the colors
included in this range — except for blue.
Classicists
have pored over Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey, searching for any mention of the
color blue, but it does not appear once in the texts. Although other colors
such as black, red, white, yellow, and green are all specifically mentioned in
Homer, blue incredibly never makes an appearance.
When
referring to a specific color, ancient Greeks would often compare it to another
object of the same shade. This makes Homer’s comparison of the sea not to the
sky, or another blue-colored thing, but to wine, quite interesting. Throughout
Homer’s poetry, the sea is referred to as “wine-dark.”
Strangely,
Homer also refers to honey as “green” and sheep as “violet” in his work,
leading 19th-century academics to believe that ancient Greeks were all
colorblind, or hadn’t yet developed the necessary capabilities to see colors
like we do now.
Early Theories
However,
science has since revealed that humans indeed developed the ability to see
colors on the spectrum of visible light tens of millions of years ago, long
before the ancient Greeks.
This
colorblind theory was used to fuel racist arguments regarding the biology of non-Europeans
in the nineteenth century. Anthropologists took the theory about ancient Greek
colorblindness and posited that, while modern Europeans had evolved past the
ancient Greeks and could now see blue, non-Europeans were biologically
“delayed.”
This theory
was spread after anthropologists discovered that Aboriginal Australians living
on Murray Island considered the sky to be black rather than blue.
These
anthropologists believed that this signaled that the people of Murray Island
lacked the capability to see the color. Instead, colors in their language are
categorized as light or dark, on a spectrum from black to white. To them, the
color of the sky was included with all dark colors, without its own distinct
name.
The
iconic blue roofs of the island of Santorini. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Linguists
argue that ancient Greeks perceived blue in a similar way. Greeks certainly
could see the color blue, but they didn’t consider it separate from other
shades, like green, complicating how exactly they perceived the hue.
Language and Reality
In
English, color can function in the opposite way linguistically. Consider the
color pink: pink is on the red scale, so if we had no word for pink, it could
easily be considered a light red, and we would call it such. Yet, as we have a
distinct name for the color pink, we perceive it as a different color than red.
The
Himba people, native to Namibia in southwest Africa, live a life largely
separate from Western society, maintaining their ancient traditions, customs,
and language to this day. Uniquely, the Himba people only have five words for
color, which describe what most people would consider a group of many disparate
shades.
For
example, some greens, reds, beiges, and yellows, what many would consider to be
wildly different, fall under the same word in the Himba tongue. Most
interestingly, what we would consider to be different shades of green, the same
color, are perceived as entirely different colors in the Himba language.
When
linguists and scientists showed a color wheel featuring green squares, with one
of them a very slightly different hue, the Himba people almost immediately
picked out the differing shade, a feat that would take most others quite a
while to accomplish.
However,
when asked to pick out the bright blue square placed among the green ones, the
Himba hesitated — while clearly a different shade, it falls under the same
color name as green in the Himba tongue.
While
some argue that this means that the Himba people “can’t see blue,” it’s clear
that they can — they just perceive of it on a spectrum of color, much as the
ancient Greeks surely did.
