> Pjotr:
> 'Kyanos' was also Homer's word for steel, accompanied e.g. in Ilias
11,24 by the color word 'melanos' (later usually translated as black,
but the sea has also this color, meaning dark - if I understand my
dictionary correctly its root is the same as the German 'Mal', mark,
sign).
Of course colour terms evolve and Homer's "metallic"
could be "blue" several generations later. The Slavic
languages have several different terms
for "blue", and Old English had no equivalent
of Modern English BLUE (which is a loanword from French).
> Sandarakos is another name for the red-orange mineral realgar
(chemically AsS) that used to be a painters' color in the old times
(there is also an ancient remedy sandarakos, but that was made of a
north African tree resin and has nothing to do with the color).
> Now tell me, Pjotr, could the Lin. A/B sign 33 that looks like a
crocus and has the phonetical value ra(i) be the acronym of a word from
the IE 'red'-root *hroudho-/hrudh-ro-?
Dunno. It is too short and the only similarity
to the "red" word is the consonant. Too little
food for speculation, I'm afraid.
> The Aegean or IE name of the flower (that played a large role in
Minoan ritual iconography) seems to have been lost, replaced by the now
known words 'krokos' and 'saffron' (supposedly going back to
Hebrew/Arabian) - well-known plant for dying reddish-yellow, the drug
often used as dark red powder (a vessel containing this might be seen
on a fresco from Akrotiri in the hands of a young girl with a red
colored ear).
>
> Best wishes from Crete where the first Saffron flowers will be
opening up soon.
>
> Sabine
Lucky you. We have wild crocuses in the mountains
and they're also grown in gardens, but at this
latitude we'll see the first ones in February or March.
Piotr