The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
Tam multa, ut puta genera linguarum sunt in hoc mundo: et nihil sine voce est.
Monday, November 22, 2021
The Sun and the Moon are the same color.
Monday, April 12, 2021
Is Homer's wine-dark sea related to the mystery of violet?
Some months ago, I recorded a vivid fantasy in which I saw the Homeric heroes Ajax and Epicles fighting under a blue sun and noted that this would explain Homer's famous "wine-dark sea."
Homer's "wine-dark sea" seems bizarre to us moderns, for whom wine is red and the sea is blue. Under a blue sun, though, the sea would not look any bluer than anything else, and "red" -- reflecting less blue light than any other visible color -- would be a close cousin to "dark."
Obviously, I don't really believe the Sun was ever blue, though, so Homer's sea remains a mystery.
Homeric Greek (like several other languages) apparently only had four basic color words -- black, white, red, and yellow. Of the four, black is obviously the best fit for the color of the sea, and arguably for "red" wine as well. (The color of tea is similarly ambiguous. The sort of tea that is called "black" in English is called "red" in Chinese.)
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Basically red, or basically black? |
So it's not surprising at all that Homer would use the same color word -- black -- to describe both wine and the sea. Still, "wine-dark" is surprising. Many languages consider pink a shade of red and would call a pink piglet "red" -- but would they ever call it blood-red? Even if piglets and blood are both "red" in some languages, a piglet obviously isn't the color of blood and would never be described that way. We can see something similar in English. In Old English, as in modern Russian, there was a basic distinction between light blue (Russian голубой) and dark blue (Russian синий), similar to the distinction between pink and red. Modern English uses blue (originally meaning "light blue") for both -- but sky-blue is still used exclusively for things that are light blue like the sky, not dark blue like the sea. Homer's calling the sea "wine-dark" is precisely as strange as a modern English speaker calling it "sky-blue."
On the other hand, there's my wife, who (like my father) is incapable of distinguishing certain shades of blue (that of my eyes, for instance) from gray. At first I thought this was purely a linguistic phenomenon -- that she applied the label blue to a somewhat different range of colors than I did. Once, though, we were arguing over whether a particular blanket was blue (as it very obviously was!) or gray, and I said, "When I say gray, I mean the color of a mouse. Look at that blanket. Could a mouse be that color?" And she insisted that, yes, a mouse could be that color!
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Grey as a mouse? |
Ace of Hearts
On the A page of Animalia , an Ace of Hearts is near a picture of a running man whom I interpreted as a reference to Arnold Schwarzenegger....
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