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Fwd: Re: Krimmel on a color question
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Mary, I'm going to briefly answer what I can here:
The question of why Homer called the wine-dark is a vexed one
and there is no definitive answer. The word in Greek is oinops
-- purpureum is a Latin word and just confuses the issue. Oinops
really means "looks like wine" although the traditional
translation is "wine-dark." It is important too to remember that
it is a poetic epithet and such epithets became, for reasons of
meter, more or less welded to their noun and will often appear
whether they are appropriate to the context or not. "Wine-dark
sea" is one of a number of phrases, like "rosy-fingered dawn,"
that have been used for so long in Homeric translations that
they've passed into English as sort of catchphrases -- everyone
knows them and they are often quoted, sometimes in a humorous
context, without having any direct connection to Homer or epic.
Other considerations:
--Greek wine may not have been the burgundy color that we
associate with red wine; it may have been more toward the
purple-blue. However oinops is also use to describe the color of
oxen, a dark brown, so that again muddies the issue.
--many people who have seen the Aegean or Ionian seas report
that at certain times they do seem to be the color of wine,
similar in both hue and saturation.
-the theory that the Greeks lacked words for certain colors and
indeeed did not consciously distinguish them (propounded first I
believe by Julian Jaynes) is considered to be pretty
far-fetched. The classical Greeks, as opposed to those of
Homer's time, certainly had a word for blue, kuanous, the same
as our word cyan, but of course it is nothing like our cyan
color because the Greeks only knew the colors of nature -- try
to imagine what your color sense would be if you had never seen
anything colored, dyed, printed, etc with chemical-based hues.
The whole spectrum of Greek colors is by no means a congruent
match with our conceptions of what is meant by the same color-words.
--as for glaukos, sometimes thought to be a grey-blue or grey,
it is generally thought that it originally meant "gleaming" or
even "glaring," without any notion of color. As it applies to
Athena, there is probably some contamination with the word
glaux, the owl, Athena's emblem; translators like Lang may have
made a mental connection between the two and thought of the gray
feathers (eyes?) of some owls. In general of course these old
"poetic" translators like Lang just make things more confusing.
--there is an interesting book by Eleanor Irwin, Colour Terms in
Greek Poetry (Toronto:Hakkert, 1974), and I believe there has
also been some more recent work on the topic, but I can't call
the titles to mind. E-mail me if you want more specific info--
Best,
Mary Bellino
iambe@rcn.com
.
> Was there no word for blue when Homer wrote? I have heard that blue is the
last color to be named in every language, but have heard no definite reason
why this is so. What about Athena's glaucous eyes, which Andrew
Lang translated as gray eyes and which somebody interpreted, in
a program about Ulysses, as eyes of the most brilliant blue that
television could produce?
> Was the sea wine-red because there was no word for blue? (I've not seen the
> Mediterranean, but I've seen red wine and it's hard to imagine any sea that
> color or any shade of "wine-dark". Maybe unfermented juice of purple or
> black grapes? Or maybe on rare occasions, as during an unusual sunset? Or
> maybe I don't party often enough.)
>
> Mary Krimmel
>
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