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WonderLanguage fact

Homer's epics rarely, if ever, call the sea blue. In the Iliad and the Odyssey it is 'wine-dark' (oinops pontos), a phrase used 17 times across the two poems.

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In 1858 the British statesman William Gladstone, a keen classical scholar, pointed out that Homer's colour words rarely describe hue at all; they mostly contrast light with dark. Some readers took this to mean the ancient Greeks could not see blue, and in the 1860s the German philologist Lazarus Geiger found blue missing from many other ancient texts too. Gladstone later rejected the colour-blind reading, and modern scholars agree: the difference lies in language, not eyesight. In 1969 the linguists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay showed that languages tend to gain colour words in a common order, beginning with dark and light, then red, then green and yellow, with blue usually arriving late.

Türkçe oku
Homeros'un destanlarında deniz neredeyse hiç “mavi” diye anılmaz. İlyada ve Odysseia'da deniz “şarap rengi”dir; bu ifade iki destanda toplam 17 kez geçer.

İngiliz devlet adamı ve tutkulu bir klasik edebiyat okuru olan William Gladstone, 1858'de Homeros'un renk sözcüklerinin tonu pek anlatmadığını, daha çok açık ile koyuyu karşılaştırdığını fark etti. Bazıları bundan Antik Yunanların maviyi göremediği sonucunu çıkardı; 1860'larda Alman filolog Lazarus Geiger da mavinin başka birçok eski metinde de geçmediğini gösterdi. Gladstone sonradan renk körlüğü yorumunu reddetti; bugünkü araştırmacılar da aynı görüşte: fark gözde değil, dildedir. Dilbilimciler Brent Berlin ve Paul Kay, 1969'da dillerin renk adlarını çoğunlukla aynı sırayla kazandığını gösterdi: önce koyu ve açık, sonra kırmızı, ardından yeşil ve sarı; mavi genellikle en sona kalır.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Wine-dark sea
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