ameliacareful:

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onion-souls:

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tilthat:

TIL that Homer referred to the sea as “wine-dark” six times in his works and nobody’s really sure why (whether wine was blue, the sea was red, or Greeks were colorblind)

via reddit.com

It’s a poetic contrast you overly-literal fucks. As dark as wine is red, so the sea is blue.

Counterpoint: Homer was fucking blind

homer was several people through the ages. one of them had to be able to see.

I thought this was about Homer Simpson and the poetic language and metaphors used in the early seasons of the show.

Cultures start with some basic colors (red is apparently early) but in Homer’s time there may not have been a concept of ‘blue’. (A contemporary hunter gatherer culture which has no written language and apparently no concept ‘blue’, when asked what color the sky was said, ‘White.’)

The color ‘orange’ wasn’t described as a specific color until after the English saw the fruit. Before that, something we would describe as orange was probably called red.

We don’t have any idea what was evoked for the listeners of The Odessey in the phrase ‘wine dark sea’ but we know they described color differently.

Guess I’m gonna be full of all kinds of fun facts this morning, but, here goes.

Like so many things, color exists as a continuum in the real world, in this case of wave length, saturation, and hue.  Different cultures chop it up into distinct categories in different ways.  Western societies chop it up based on wave length and pretty much ignore saturation and hue until we’re in gray, white, and black territory.  Not all cultures do.  

For example, take a gander at this piece of research from 2005, in which the researchers examined the interplay of language and the development of color categorization in children:  Hues and views A cross-cultural study reveals how language shapes color perception. By RACHEL ADELSON February 2005, Vol 36, No. 2

Across cultures, the children acquired color terms the same way: They gradually and with some effort moved from an uncategorized organization of color, based on a continuum of perceptual similarity, to structured categories that varied across languages and cultures. Over time, language wielded increasing influence on how children categorized and remembered colors.

In short, the range of stimuli that for Himba speakers comes to be categorized as “serandu” would be categorized in English as red, orange or pink. As another example, Himba children come to use one word, “zoozu,” to embrace a variety of dark colors that English speakers would call dark blue, dark green, dark brown, dark purple, dark red or black.

So, in short, most accurately, it is a zoozu sea.