Re: Odp: Color Words - purple

----- Original Message -----

From: Mark Odegard

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Sunday, November 21, 1999 1:43 AM

Subject: [cybalist] Re: Color Words - purple

Piotr writes:

I can't discuss Linear B semantics confidently, but in Classical Greek porphuros was in all likelihood as primary as English purple.

I was talking about Homeric and Mycenaean Greek, and not Classical Greek (ca. Aeschylus and later). I assume this is what Piotr is speaking of too.

 

I will concede that the Mycenaean power-elites might have had a larger vocabulary of primary color terms, and that once the palace-economy despots were disloged by the Dorians, such terms might have been lost (or rather, the surviving speakers never had them in the first place). It's as if hordes of Valley-Speak barbarians sacked Redmond, Washington, causing the loss of MS-Speak until recovered by archaeologists of 3.5 millennia hence. 'Purple', if a genuine color-word at the time, could have easily been a part of the professional jargon.

 

--
Mark Odegard
markodegard@...

---

I think we've reached agreement here. Let me add, as a curiosity, that English purple is a notoriously difficult word to translate into Polish. All the other primary colours are in a one-to-one correspondence between Polish and English, with the "archetypal" hues as similar as matters, but in the area between red and blue the colour space is divided somewhat differently. Polish has squeezed an extra primary colour there, too. It's called fioletowy, and its "centre of gravity" roughly corresponds to English violet (a spectral hue, just what you find at the end of the physical spectrum of visible light). What a speaker of English migh call purple is for a Pole a transitional hue between violet and red. Even more confusingly, we have the word purpurowy, which means dark, saturated purplish-red.

 

The human eye is most sensitive to the red component of our physiological RGB code, hence the plethora of names for hues and shades of red relative to the other primary colours in most languages.

 

And a self-correction before Sabine corrects my Greek. The Classical Gk. word is actually porphureos (with the Aeolic variant porphurios); sorry for the typo.

 

Piotr