How to make sense of ancient Greek colours (2020)
kiwihellenist.blogspot.com
kiwihellenist.blogspot.com
So when Homer said "wine dark sea", I worth bearing in mind we've no reason to believe the colours of the sea across time have shifted, and there isn't one sea colour, it depends on season, time of day, local conditions. Nonetheless the chances are, in the Mediterranean we're looking at Homer's wine dark sea.
Question is, is it diluted wine, or boiled wine must? I believe the Greeks diluted wine with seawater sometimes.
> Outlined are the controls for three parameters which define the physical parameters of any colour uniquely. ‘Hue’ for the part of the spectrum the colour falls on; ‘saturation’ for the range from grey to vivid; and ‘value’ for lightness-darkness.
> Hue, saturation, and value represent only the physical characteristics of coloured light.
I don't think this is right. Hue, saturation, and value are statements about human perception, not about the physical characteristics of light. A description of the physical characteristics of some light would look like a histogram plotting the wavelength of the light against the amount of light present at each wavelength. How do you interpret HSV from that?
Well, value is pretty straightforward: the greater the area plotted in your histogram, the higher the value, I guess. More light -> more value. This falls apart if we're considering light of a single wavelength, where increasing the amount of light doesn't cause the color to get more washed out.
Saturation is less straightforward, but the idea is there: a color with low saturation (greyish) should have a histogram that looks more or less flat, and a color with high saturation should have a histogram characterized by a lot of zeroes and spikes. The number of spikes in the histogram is... completely arbitrary.
Then we come to hue and our model completely falls apart. Hue is purely subjective and there's no way to systematically relate it to light wavelengths.
The article comes close to suggesting that hue is objectively significant:
> In the colour circle at the left, the direction from the centre represents hue
> Most English speakers would be comfortable using ‘blue’ to refer to all of the top left quarter of the circle. But we wouldn’t feel nearly as comfortable grouping all of the bottom right quarter under a single term.
This is true, but it's an artifact of an arbitrary definition of hue. You could change how much angular space is assigned to each color without causing any problems in the HSV model.
There's another interesting claim in the piece:
> Gladstone does make a starkly racist declaration that ancient colour systems are ‘less mature’ than contemporary English.
It seems pretty likely that Gladstone would have been happy to claim that he and the ancient Greeks belonged to the same race. Why is this a starkly racist declaration?
Well, he did write a book titled The Ethnology of the Greek Races. Victorians had a fairly different, more granular notion of 'race' but most of them took racial determinism as a given, they were fundamentally racist in the most literal sense. They came up with stuff like this, for instance:
That's particularly eyeroll-inducing since most contemporary English terminology and culture is to some degree descended from the ancient Greeks (either directly or via the Romans), so whatever the alleged merits of "maturity", the English stuff clearly has about two extra millennia of it.
Color in general is a statement about human perception, not physical characteristics of light. As Newton said, “the rays are not colored”.
Hue, chroma, and value are human-perceptual color attributes. They vary based on spatial and temporal context, and vary from observer to observer.
But people should not use the HSV color model (or your favorite image editor’s color picker) for this kind of analysis. It is a garbage tool for just about every purpose, but especially for this one. Munsell’s model, which is much more perceptually uniform, or e.g. the World Color Survey chart based on it https://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/images/jrus-20100531/wcs-... are much clearer.
The color is fully and solely determined by the wavelength of the light, and the wavelength is an objective physical phenomenon; it is not crazy to talk about the objective realities of color. But yes, it's full of pitfalls.
The incorrectness of this assertion is pretty much the first (and most fundamental) thing you will find in any book about color science. Then the rest of the book is spent elaborating about why this statement is false and explaining the technical details.
If you want a definitive definition of color, you can find one in the CIE’s International Lighting Vocabulary. But here is Mark Fairchild of the Munsell Color Science Laboratory at RIT, one of the world’s leading color scientists:
http://markfairchild.org/WhyIsColor/Questions/1-1.html
> Our eyes sense the light from the world around us and start the process of seeing color. You might think the light on these eyes is colored, but really it is your very own eyes and brain that are creating that color from the light coming from this picture.
> Color is a human perception.
> We see color because our eyes and brains respond to light present in the world around us. That light comes from light sources such as the sun, light bulbs, or even televisions. Sometimes that light interacts with objects before reaching our eyes and the objects allow more or less of the different types of light to reach our eyes. This makes different things look different colors.
> Color is part of our sense of vision. It is similar to how we respond to other aspects of the world with our other senses such as taste, hearing, touch, and smell.
Anyone who has multiple common languages with a friend knows this well. It’s quite common to drop a word from a different language into the middle of a sentence even when the sentence’s language has a word for it, just because there can be meaningful nuance or partition that the speaker wants to convey.
Strangely, doctrine in the US seems to be that one shouldn’t mix languages in a sentence when speaking to children. Somehow it will confuse them. Yet I’ve never seen anyone manage that in a polyglot household with kids.
Whose “doctrine” is this?
Our daughter’s speech development seemed delayed. A speech therapist with experience with bilingual parents with different mother tongues gave us great advice: I was to speak to her exclusively in English, her mother in French, so that she could tell the difference. What we spoke between us was irrelevant.
Within a very short time she was speaking both equally well and it wasn’t long before she was switching mid sentence as well.
So the “doctrine” could be a more rigid, simplified statement of that advice.
It is very common for kids to acquire multiple languages simultaneously, but it seems to require clearly distinct user groups, e.g., think immigrant kids who speak one language at home and another with their friends or at school.
But if the user groups are less distinct, it may be harder for the child to puzzle the languages apart and learn how either works.
But this is like for a 1–3 year old, maybe 5 or 6 at the outside. After the kids are reasonably fluent in at least their native language, I can’t imagine throwing occasional foreign words is going to give them unreasonable difficulty. I was thrown by the word “children” in the top-level comment.
> seems to require clearly distinct user groups
I’d be interested to see the research on this. I am skeptical that this is required.
Side note: pretty well every language learner goes through a phase where they quickly jump from very limited ability to produce speech to impressive levels of fluency, in a relatively short stretch of time (weeks to months). Those leaps of improvement are not necessarily related to any specific external stimulus.
Like I said I’ve never seen anyone practice this, though I have heard some parents in the US apologies for not doing so. My own kid went to non-US bilingual school and there was none of that.
So you're dropping words from other languages in English all the time.
Avatar, mantra, juggernaut, kindergarten, zeitgeist, and many, many others.