Tyrian Purple | Hacker News Reader

Tyrian Purple

believermag.com

45 pointsbookofjoe13 comments

This as a fascinating article. It mentions Tyrian purple, in fact the word purple is derived from the ancient greek word, πορφύρα (porphura), for the Tyrian dye (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple#Etymology_and_definitio...) which was adopted into Latin and from there many European languages (https://www.omniglot.com/language/colours/multilingual.htm). It's interesting that the modern Greek word for purple is μωβ (mov), which comes from μόρον (moron), the blackberry (https://lsj.gr/wiki/%CE%BC%CF%8C%CF%81%CE%BF%CE%BD) and is also adopted into Turkish as mor. Since it's estimated that the sound denoted by β changed from classical Greek /b/ to modern Greek /v/ in the first century AD one might venture a guess that the switch from porphura to mov may be from that time (caution: armchair historical linguistics hunch that I just made up, may be totally off).

Another interesting fact I just found out: According to Wikipedia the Chinese glyph for purple, 紫, is from Old Japanese むらさき (murasaki), the word for red-root gromwell, the roots of which were used for the purple dye and medicine. This, of course, is the pen name of the Japanese author, whose actual name has been lost, and has been named "Murasaki Shikibu" (Lady Murasaki), after the heroine she invented.

Down the rabbit whole with one word!

Etymology is fascinating. When I read your Greek "mov" for purple, I immediately thought of the French word for light purple, "mauve". (I don't speak French but my toddler son is bilingual and has started using this word recently so I had to find out what it means.)

Sadly it seems there is no link as it comes from the Latin name of a flower, "malva", which has a different ancient Greek cognate "malakhē" according to wikipedia.

I also learned that "mauve" is an English word. It's somewhat embarrassing that a 2.5 year old is helping improve my mother tongue vocabulary.

Mov to Mor makes sense. Murasaki and Mor was fascinating.

Turkish and Japanese has a lot of unexpected similarities. When it comes to conjugation even. As a native Turkish speaker, watching Japanese with subtitles leads to me picking up conjugation rules and they map identically.

Another strange etymological association that was unexpected to me is the phrase "my stomach is hungry". It is present in both Turkish and Japanese.

onaka ga suiteimasu

I'd translate the Japanese to English as my "stomach is empty". Same word for example as an empty room.

I was basing that example off of this answer on Quora: https://www.quora.com/I-speak-Japanese-and-am-learning-Turki...

Yes. I see now where you got it from.

Nevertheless, I stick to my previous translation. Of course, I have no Turkish, so I cannot comment on the similarity.

The Chinese glyph for purple (along with so much else commonly misattributed to Japan such as Ramen, various mushrooms, etc.) is most certainly not from Japanese, a language whose written form only dates from ~800AD.

Reviewing the Wiktionary page should clarify https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%B4%AB ... but failing that, https://ctext.org/pre-qin-and-han?searchu=%E7%B4%AB is a list of pre Qin (221BCE–206BCE) and Han (202BCE-220CE) texts using the character in China, which had writing for more than a thousand years before Japan.

This site is somewhat annoying on mobile, the sign up pop up, the nominated banner that you have to close, the large vote for us icon in the corner, the blue box that cuts into the content as you scroll up and down.

Here's a readable version: https://outline.com/XadkNU

I hate that "make websites usable" is a key service someone has to provide, but that's where we are.

Though I rarely read articles on my phone or tablet, instead preferring my laptop, I realize that most people do the opposite. Even crap sites like the Believer are far easier to navigate on a computer. Sometimes it helps to be a Luddite.

Websites ought to be at least as readable as books. But books don't repeatedly throw advertisements in my face, ask me to sign up for mailing lists, and put permanent immovable obstacles to reading in front of the text.

If your website cannot be bothered to make itself readable, then I cannot be bothered to read it. Bye.

This is one of the most annoying web sites I have visited, with multiple pop up interruptions and overlays, close buttons visually disconnected from the dialogs that they close, etc. I gave up on the article because of the horrible reading experience. I have no idea why this site is nominated for a webby; they must not have evaluated the mobile experience.

Warning: site has modal sign up dialog box without close button - the close button is in the far top right of the screen instead

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