Most ancient languages had no word for blue

Neon Knight Sat 18 Sep - 15:06

Daily Mail, 3rd September 2022:

Why didn’t ancient languages have a word for blue?

One theory is that this colour is rare in nature and most ancient civilisations were unable to make a blue dye. In his book Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, four-time Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone noticed that despite the intricate details of clothing, armour, weaponry and facial features, the poet’s colour palette was unusually limited. In his statistical analysis of the Iliad and the Odyssey, he noted colour is mostly limited to shades of black (200 mentions) and white (100). Red is mentioned 15 times, with yellow and green fewer than 10. Homer used poetic terms to describe colour, famously ‘wine-looking’ to refer to the sea. He used the adjective porphyreos, which means dark red, to describe blood, a dark cloud, a wave and a rainbow.

Given the fact Greece has the bluest of skies and seas, it seems odd there is no reference to this colour. Gladstone suggested the Ancient Greeks may not have developed the ability to distinguish blue and recorded colours only in terms of contrasts. Lazarus Geiger, a German philosopher and language expert, highlighted this phenomenon in other ancient cultures including Icelandic sagas, the Koran, Chinese mythology and Hebrew. ‘Hindu Vedic hymns, of more than 10,000 lines, are brimming with descriptions of the heavens,’ he wrote. ‘Scarcely any subject is evoked more frequently. The sun and reddening dawn’s play of colour, day and night, cloud and lightning, the air and ether, all these are unfolded before us again and again . . . but there is one thing no one would ever learn from these ancient songs . . . and that is the sky is blue.’

Black and white are evolutionarily useful, helping to distinguish between night and day. Then comes red, a sign of danger, blood and angry faces. Green and yellow indicate ripe or unripe food. Only the Ancient Egyptians had a word for blue, and they were the first to produce a blue dye.

Dr Ian Smith, Cambridge.