From: "P&G" <petegray@...> ( Sun Jan 26, 2003 9:46 am)
Subject: Re: [tied] Yellow as an PIE word
<<As for lapis lazuli, and skies and such blue things, the Romans certainly
valued them - but how did they see them? Probably as we did - but my point is
that that is very hard to prove.>>
Actually, I don't thinking we are talking about how the Romans or (rather
more relevantly) earlier people SAW colors. It's rather how they TALKED
about them.
Linguists will speak of ancient color words shifting too much in meaning.
But that's from our perspective. For the perspective of an original speaker,
they simply may not have been "color words" but words related to outward
appearance in general.
We see samples of a gradiated spectrum of colors on swatches at the paint
store or on a computer color wheel, and those colors exist quite apart from
objects. This was not the case in the old days. Except for maybe samples of
textiles, colors and the appearance of objects were often one and the same
thing. The gleaming of an olive or an eye was as much noteworthy as its hue,
and so we get ourselves confused by calling the Greek <glaukus>,
bluish-green, trying to squeeze a wide range of objects in context into our
modern color wheel, where clearly neither lion's eyes or the Moon or olives
are normally "bluish-green."
Hue is just an aspect of "color" and an even smaller aspect of an object's
outward appearance. We should not be surprised that a blue gemstone looked
more like a red gemstone than a blue contusion on somebody's leg, to
observers who were living in a world where artifically produced pure colors
were rare.
An important difference is our tendency to idealize the color of objects
without regard for context. I once noted that there are very few pure red
objects in nature in my neck of the woods. The response was that blood is
red. But a third response was that in Homer blood is black, not red. And
that suggests again that our surprise may not be due to semantic shifts, but
to a mistranslation. The word Homer used, interpreted as black, does perhaps
match a deeper pool of fresh, thick blood. Perhaps he was describing blood
before it spilled out more thinly and showed its red color -- though he never
calls blood red.
So, perhaps Homer was not describing color in particular, but making a
comparison to a pool of a dark fabric dye or describing an absence of
transparency in the liquid. When Homer describes the blood stains on
Diomedes' legs, he compares it to the look of purple dye being applied by
worker women to ivory. It was the general visual effect of a surface stain
spread on a rounded object that Homer was describing, not precise color
equivalency.
This whole idea of color existing apart from an object was part of a bigger
intellectual change-in-thinking I'd associate with the influence of Plato and
neo-Platonism. The whole idea was that there is an abstract place (in one's
head or in another world) where such things as a perfect square or circle
exist. Not a square or circle of something, not even a drawing of a circle.
But the pure form of a square or circle, from which all earthly squares were
just weak, imperfect approximations. I think that the same thing happened to
colors. They were separated from any particular object or texture and made
into "pure" independent entities. And that is where we started to lose
communication with the ancients, and started to misunderstand why they spoke
about "color" the way they did.
Steve Long