Dirty Words
Want to make your world strange? (Without chemicals, I mean?) Learn an ancient tongue.
The familiar turns exotic. Blue is blue, right? The word ought to be recognizable and unchanging over millennia. But names of colors turn out to be among the slipperiest words. If you read the "Odyssey," you meet Homer's "wine-dark" -- oinopos -- an adjective which Homer uses 17 times of the sea and twice of oxen, and Sophocles uses once to describe someone's arm. Ancient Greek references to the star Sirius, an icy blue to us, describe it as "red."
Even closer to home, in Anglo-Saxon, the spectrum of color is strange. In "Beowulf," yellow is the color of linden wood (used to make shields). The favorite color-adjective for gold, however, is red.
Is color real? Was the sea a different color to the Greeks? Did the Saxons see the same colors that we do? Was Homer blind? (Well, yes, but his audience wasn't.)
Yet, as this "Scientific American" article explains, color perception is remarkably consistent across the human spectrum. (One exception is the tendency to blur blue into green.)
I still don't know what the Greeks were seeing. But I think the case with the Anglo-Saxons is that, like the New Guineans, they saw color with different values than we do.
Many surviving color words from Old English -- dun, wan, sallow, bleak, dusky, swarthy, bright, murky, dark -- refer to colors which are not hues. These words have more to do with chroma (reflectivity, brightness, quality of light) than with hue (wavelength). We tend to think of color only as hue.
Old English brun and hwit both meant "bright, shining," though now both are used to mean hues -- "brown" and "white" (although we still speak of "burnished" wood or metal). One of the knottiest linguistic problems in Old English is blæc, which is the common ancestor of the seemingly irreconcilable modern words "black" and "bleach." The Old English word seems to have been used to refer to a type of colorlessness.
Out of all this you can get an insight into that world. Look around you and subtract all the artificial, man-made pigments from your world. Then look at what is left, and you may see why glitter and dark mattered more than pink and purple in naming what you see. Northern Europe through most of the seasons is a landscape of brown, gray, and dull green. The eruptions of color in spring and fall must have been brief and amazing, with an almost hallucinogenic intensity.
The familiar turns exotic. Blue is blue, right? The word ought to be recognizable and unchanging over millennia. But names of colors turn out to be among the slipperiest words. If you read the "Odyssey," you meet Homer's "wine-dark" -- oinopos -- an adjective which Homer uses 17 times of the sea and twice of oxen, and Sophocles uses once to describe someone's arm. Ancient Greek references to the star Sirius, an icy blue to us, describe it as "red."
Even closer to home, in Anglo-Saxon, the spectrum of color is strange. In "Beowulf," yellow is the color of linden wood (used to make shields). The favorite color-adjective for gold, however, is red.
Is color real? Was the sea a different color to the Greeks? Did the Saxons see the same colors that we do? Was Homer blind? (Well, yes, but his audience wasn't.)
Yet, as this "Scientific American" article explains, color perception is remarkably consistent across the human spectrum. (One exception is the tendency to blur blue into green.)
Kay and Berlin hit on color terminology in the early 1960s while comparing notes on their field research. Kay, a New York City–born, New Orleans–bred cultural anthropologist, had just returned from 15 months in Tahiti. Berlin, a linguistic anthropologist reared in Oklahoma, had been researching a Mayan language of southern Mexico. "We found that in both our languages, all the major color terms but one were exactly like those in English, and in the one area of difference, they differed in exactly the same way." (They grouped green and blue to form what Kay and Berlin called "grue.") That two such profoundly unrelated languages should name colors alike seemed to point to some universal linguistic pattern.
In the mid-1960s Berlin and Kay ended up at Berkeley. They had their graduate students scour the Bay Area for native speakers of foreign languages, quizzing them with standard color chips, not unlike those used as samples for paint. Their object was to establish the meanings of basic color terms--that is, those that could not be analyzed into simpler terms (such as "blue-green") and were not defined as characteristic of a given object (such as "salmon"). Later Berlin and Kay collaborated with other researchers to expand their sample to 110 languages.
Color lexicons vary, first of all, in sheer size: English has 11 basic terms, Russian and Hungarian have 12, yet the New Guinean language Dani has just two. One of the two encompasses black, green, blue and other "cool" colors; the other encompasses white, red, yellow and other "warm" colors. Those languages with only three terms almost always have "black-cool," "white-light" and "red-yellow-warm." Those having a fourth usually carve out "grue" from the "black-cool" term.
The tree of possibilities turned out to have branching points, some of them rather rare. Still, the manner in which languages can build up their color words is tightly constrained, suggesting the existence of universal constraints on semantic variation.
I still don't know what the Greeks were seeing. But I think the case with the Anglo-Saxons is that, like the New Guineans, they saw color with different values than we do.
Many surviving color words from Old English -- dun, wan, sallow, bleak, dusky, swarthy, bright, murky, dark -- refer to colors which are not hues. These words have more to do with chroma (reflectivity, brightness, quality of light) than with hue (wavelength). We tend to think of color only as hue.
Old English brun and hwit both meant "bright, shining," though now both are used to mean hues -- "brown" and "white" (although we still speak of "burnished" wood or metal). One of the knottiest linguistic problems in Old English is blæc, which is the common ancestor of the seemingly irreconcilable modern words "black" and "bleach." The Old English word seems to have been used to refer to a type of colorlessness.
Out of all this you can get an insight into that world. Look around you and subtract all the artificial, man-made pigments from your world. Then look at what is left, and you may see why glitter and dark mattered more than pink and purple in naming what you see. Northern Europe through most of the seasons is a landscape of brown, gray, and dull green. The eruptions of color in spring and fall must have been brief and amazing, with an almost hallucinogenic intensity.
Labels: language
